BIG BROTHERISM AGAIN...

ORWELL REVISITED

A Commentary often made…

By Izzy Ess of Wilderness

If there’s somebody out there who hasn’t seen any of Orwell’s writings, I’d be very surprised.  I wouldn’t be surprised that folks in my age bracket, I’m 75, have already forgotten how accurate he was in predicting the future of societies and the new sets of controls used by governments and police forces that are now in evidence.  The recent stories of the extensive spying by many, perhaps all, governments, on each other by simply listening to foreign internet and telephone messages, cannot be denied.  The fact that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer despite the tremendous advances in technical support for food production, is a groaning reality for most of us.  The fact that a bell-ringer is being accused of treason to bring him under control for spilling the beans about the American government, is as much a part of DOUBLESPEAK, as one could find.  Everyone with any sense of his social and political environment knows about the spying that’s going on, all the time, and in greater and greater areas.  This BIG BROTHERISM, is become so common it is mostly ignored, a form of DOUBLETHOUGHT.  Most of us have thrown up our hands and expect our mail to be read, our phones to be taped and our credit card information to be abused.  Many are aware that the PC’s are programmed with cookies specifically so that Bill Gates and his fellow BIG BROTHERS, may easily tap into your personal computer to tell what money you have, how you spend it and what areas you are wont to buy.  Bill Gates was able to corner the market on computer information and control such huge companies as IBM and others to insist on his Windows operating systems.  Apple enthusiasts are aghast when they are forced to use PC’s by their employers who are practically forced to use Windows, a form of control that can control the world economies in a very specific way.

The very fact that this email is basically international, makes it a target for espionage.  I have one friend who is involved with the CIA that requested I not write her, because every time I sent her an email, she was interrogated as if she were involved in spying.  I am naturally paranoid to some degree.  Like many, I was born that way and it is a survival instinct for me and others who are either by nature paranoid or by experience.  In my case, I believe it is a genetic family trait that makes suspicion very much a part of all our members, sometimes in severe disabling ways.  The gene I have inherited is apparently the one that Paranoid Schizophrenics and Bipolar folks share and it explains why when the mood is depression, hypervigilence and out-and-out paranoia is rampant.  I don’t believe I have a single relative who is not affected.  After years of some personal and professional enlightenment, I’m proud to say I share my genetic codes with some very intelligent, talented and famous people, mostly European, but also worldwide, like Beethoven, Tchaikovski, da Vinci, Moses, Ramses II, God, Allah, Jesus, Kafka, DeGalle, Picasso, Hitler, Stalin, Bush, Clinton, Larry King, Sid Caesar, Vincent van Gogh, Galway, Solti, Bernstein, most lawyers, most doctors and most CEOs, just to mention a few.  We are feared and loved.  We induce anger against those that have OCPD, mainly because we are hard to control, are unpredictable and likely to make fun of man-made rules and regulations that go against the natural order of things in nature.  As a group, we are entertaining, most of the time, musical, literate, intelligent and very creative.  As an odd example of stifling of the natural order of things, a Swiss politician, bent on perfection, passed a law that all cows should have their swayback fixed by breeding techniques.  The law was forcefully rescinded when it turned out that straight-back cows could not deliver calves because of pelvic bone misalignment and it affected the Swiss economy of milk and cheese and chocolate very adversely.  Swiss cows are still scrubbed clean, daily, to make them look presentable to the Swiss and the tourists, who may also be satisfied with such Obsessive Compulsive, anti-natural, behaviour and thinking.  George Orwell would have turned over in his grave…

In 1969, I was living and doing research and teaching at the University of Bern’s famous Physiology Institute.  My boss, the head of the scientific activity there, was a perfectionist and paid for his personality by severe migraines which were disabling and painful.  In fact, the suicide rate for Switzerland used to be amongst the highest in the world, second only to the Swedes who spent half of their life in the dark.  Apparently, if perfection was impossible, which it is, a lot of Swiss, many of whom are Catholic and have to deal with Original Sin, a lot, a lot of Swiss look for a way to exit their lives.  Because Switzerland is neutral, politically, and has been since the middle of the 19^th century, they are the hotbed and centre for international espionage.  American, Chinese and Russian embassies in Bern, the capital, where I lived in an apartment full of spies, are side-by-side and back-to-back.  Agents on all sides are able to speak with each other, so-to-speak, over a fence.  I discovered that the German couple in my building were actively trying to re-unite the Germanys.  The Russian couple there were the head of KGB for Western Europe and a paediatrician, respectively.  My son played daily with their daughter and I learned how to say “Spassibo,” and “daz vee dan yeh.”  An American and I frequently played chess at his place, always with Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos played at high volume.  An Argentinian pilot who fly for Al Italia, was the nephew of da Ilia, the erstwhile President of Argentina, his father having been displaced as the Ambassador to Switzerland when the Peron’s took over Argentina in a military coup.  His wife worked at the Peruvian Embassy.  They were definitely spies able to gather information from many places and transmit their stuff to many eager spies who made an excellent living selling information in Bern.

Some of this information was given to me, free, by a man who called himself, originally, a minor official of the American Embassy.  He and his wife were very friendly to my wife and I, inviting us over to watch American TV, loaning me a bicycle, carpooling our kids to the English-speaking school in Worb and suggesting tours and restaurants we might enjoy.  After about 18 months in Bern, I had learned four languages fairly well plus some local and distant dialects of German, including Bern Doitsch, the local dialect which foreigners never learned, I was told initially.  I was even able to understand Bern humour and lore and tell jokes in the dialect, with fair facility.  I succeeded in surprising most Bernese by speaking in their tongue, so-to-speak.  I used this with great advantage while playing Chess at the venerable, Schachklub Bern, established 1850, or so, where I could understand the discussion amongst the locals who figured I would not understand.  I won many games that way and almost won one at a public chess board at the University when two Klub members joined up to challenge me.  I achieved a winning pawn position but was unable to win the game with it.  During the game, the two chess players discussed their strategy openly and the crowd made comments out loud, in the dialect, without seeing that I understood what they were saying.  Of course, I didn’t tell them…

My minor official friend invited me to lunch at a very famous restaurant in Kreuz am Wohlen, in the woods near Bern, on the Wohlen River.  The chauffeur who was a large man already was bulked up by too guns, under his suit jacket and stood guard outside the empty restaurant while the two of us had lunch.  The host disappeared after serving a delicious six course lunch with different wines and liqueurs for each.  My “friend” then pulled out of his briefcase 3 huge scrapbooks full of pictures of me and my family, in interesting poses including me peeing into a rose bush and trying to cross a mountain via a logging trough.  I became angry at what appeared to me as a gross invasion of my privacy, especially when I found the copied letters received and sent and transcribed phone calls.  He asked me to calm down and not take it personally because all “foreigners” in Switzerland are treated the same way.  He said the photos were taken mainly by my apartment neighbours, street neighbours, KGB, CIA and Interpol.  He said he traded pictures he had taken with those other agencies at frequent intervals.  He smiled and said they were usually passed over the fence, to and from Russians, Chinese and others.  He said he and the others received and sent many photographs, letters and transcribed phone calls over secret, secured telephone and telegraph lines.  I expressed my anger in no uncertain terms.  I said he had put my family and I in a very vulnerable position.  He smiled and re-assured me that I was being actively protected.  I asked if he and the Russians in my building carried guns and he replied in the affirmative.  I asked if there really was a Shmersh, as described in the James Bond stories by Fleming and he said, yes.  I expressed alarm that the Russian could kill me at any time, if he found out I was a spy.  Again, the American asked me to calm down.  He then asked me if I would sign up for the CIA.  He explained I was known to be intelligent, athletic, linguistically facile, had a perfect “cover,” and that I was otherwise, “perfect” spy material.  Moreover, my American predecessors for the academic position I held had joined and were undercover spies for the CIA in Chicago, where my career was headed.  And, the surveillance will get more intense, if I agree to work for him.  And it would include a stipend, though not a big one.  The returns would depend on what I found and could “sell” to the agency.

I was dumb-founded!  My paranoia was out of control, now that it was confirmed that I was being watched and monitored.  I learned the phrase, “a person of interest.”  I declined to join the CIA and was smilingly chauffeured home where I explained to my wife, and later to my friends, some of whom had taken some of the pictures I had seen.  I told my wife that this might have been a “loyalty test,” and that I had failed, making my application for an American Green Card and a position at Michael Reese Hospital and the University of Chicago, out of the question.  I was wrong.  Having filled out everything for a Green Card, as a Canadian in a foreign country, applying for “alien residency in the USA” and permission to travel to the USA with my family for purposes of living and working in the USA, I went to the embassy in Bern and submitted my papers and supportive information.  The clerk introduced me with a straight face to my “friend,” who turned out to be the immigration official who could say “yay or nay.”  He took my folder full of applications completed and valid supportive documents, and looked through it.  I knew that he knew exactly what was in that folder, but he played the game and asked me to come to his office while he examined my application for a Green Card.  He read everything and smiled and said, “everything seems to be in order.”  He then asked me for money to pay for a cablegram to Secretary of State Rogers, which he helped me compose.  It asked simply that he consider my completed application and the evidence that a paying job was being offered to me by Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago at a salary of US$16,000 annually.  The cablegram was sent July 2, 1969.  A return cablegram from Rogers said, “Please admit Dr. Izzy Sommers and his family to the USA, immediately.”  The next day was Independence Day, and the USA Government would have been closed for a week or two, thereafter.  The interchange saved me 6 months or more of waiting, the usual time between application and admission to the USA.  So, my friend, who tried to recruit me to his undercover agency actually expedited my Green Card by 6 months.  It was so unexpected that I still needed to book flights, etc.  I and my family were in Chicago by July 12, and I started my academic job soon after at a salary of $20,000 annually set by a completely new administration at the Hospital and not the one that made the offer two years before.  Our good friends picked us up at the airport and put us up for a couple of days until we could move into the apartment that had been booked some time before by the hospital.

I told my story of espionage and intrigue to many people who attributed it to my paranoid personality and my tendency to tell tall tales, the Histrionic part of my genetic personality.  Big Brotherism was still not an accepted fact, despite the fact that Nixon was coming into power and was known for his “Tricky Dicky” side and his “dirty tricks.”  The Watergate and Daniel Ellsberg Scandals tended to show more monitoring of private citizens by the government making some of my friends and associates believers of my tall tales.  Of course, I read with interest the Bond stories and the John Le Carre stories of espionage and it’s wonderful technologies, so I knew first hand the “truth” about Smersh, the Circle and the CIA.  Even I recognized that the truth is what one says it is, but Nixon’s widely known statement that he was not a crook and his cabinet conspirators’ statements were glaringly misleading, at times.  At the time, the man who revealed the tapings in the oval office facts was my hero.  The tapes with the buzzes and omissions were a laugh.  Impeachment and further investigation should have led to further revelations about White House and other espionage.  I did learn that Hoover, as the head of the CIA was a master at using his ill-begotten personal information about all Washington politicians, was the master at manipulation and power-mongering using blackmail.  Nixon must have learned a great deal from Hoover.  In essence, to some degree, all presidents have been spying on the American and other populaces.  Now that the incredibly innocent appearing Obama has been caught with his pants down, spying on everybody, throughout the world, matching efforts of the Chinese, Russians and Israelis to gather information universally, he has no choice but to cry, “foul,” and try to stifle the spy who betrayed him.  The news stories have been great.  As Ayn Rand once suggested, to gleen the truth from the newspapers always read the huge print headlines which DENY the truth.  Orwell was implying the same by his concept of doublespeak.  If the headlines say, NO GOVERNMENT SPYING HAS EVER BEEN USED IN THE USA! It’s a cinch that the truth is GOVERNMENT SPYING HAS ALWAYS BEEN USED.

Recently, my paranoia was rekindled in a humourous incident at the border.  I’m an early riser.  I find the morning quiet and good for thinking and creating.  One morning, at 3 am, I was inspired to take care of a bothersome problem with a Niagara Falls bank who had taken over for a bigger bank, in which I had a small account to better handle American payments from a retirement fund in Wisconsin when I reached the age of 65.  Canadian banks only reluctantly handled USA checks, especially in large amounts, even if the checks were written by as wealthy a company as Fidelity Investments.  Canadian banks have the right to hold up payment until it clears.  In the first instance, a rather large check was held for 6 weeks despite all my efforts to take the check back and go elsewhere.  The Niagara Falls bank had no problem with the cheques, cashing them immediately.  Incidentally, the banks’ policies on both sides of the border required that they were duly reported to both the USA’s Internal Revenue and the Canadian’s Revenue Canadienne Departments.  It should have had a direct effect on my eventual retirement income from both the US Social Security and the Canadian OAS and CPP.  At 3 am, about a month ago, I was just trying to clean up my business dealings by closing the account and a small balance remaining after the dust settled with regard to my fixed retirement income.  The big incomes were already long gone due to my mismanagement of funds and others who had their claws in it.  When I finally gave up and declared bankruptcy, at the time of my retirement at age 65, the funds I should have received were eaten up.  Most of the time, I blamed my own naivety concerning former loved ones who didn’t hesitate to take most of it, and continue to do so, despite my lawyers saying, “they aren’t allowed to touch your social security.”  Despite everything, with some help from my sister and her husband and some emergency disability funding, I made it to 75, a surprise to me and the others.  In fact, if you’re good at reading mood from my writing, you would see that I’m feeling better than I’ve ever felt in my lifetime.   My mood swings have subsided and are more reasonable and my energy levels are very high.  I can still ride a bicycle, play chess, play with my kitten and attend Synagogues and churches on the weekends.  And, my writing and painting have been the best ever, I think, though that’s not the opinion of most of my kith and kin…  That’s another story altogether.

At 3 am, in the middle of the Peace Bridge, on the American side, I couldn’t find my passport.  It was buried beneath a pile of stuff on my front seat.  I stopped the car about 50 yards from the border guard’s booth and got out of the car to go around the car and look from the other side.  Three American Police cruiser’s approached at high speed, sirens going and roof lights flashing.  One of them had a cop with a bull-horn.  He yelled, “What are you doing?”  I admit I was frightened.  I looked as if I was going to cry and I already knew that I looked like a sad Santa Claus.  I explained with a stutter, that I was looking for my passport.  “Get back in your car!” was the command and I complied.  “Drive over to the booth and look, there!” was the next command and I complied.  I was escorted by the cruisers still with their lights rotating and flashing.  The cruising cops remained, one in front and one behind, when the border guard screamed at me, “What are you doing?!”  I actually had a flash from childhood about what my mother had advised when under pressure, “Look like you’re going to cry and act stupid.”  There was a Hebrew/Jewish colourful expression for this.  So, I did.  I explained while stuttering and stating to sob, that I couldn’t find my passport, which was somewhere under a pile of my stuff.  He replied, “Keep looking!”  I complied and looked studiously for about 10 long minutes.  I said I needed to get out of the car and try to look from the other door.  “OK,” he said sternly and motioned with his hand to make it so.  I found the passport after about 10 minutes and showed him.  He said, sternly, “Get back into your car!”  I complied, trying to look feeble.  He waited, like a father with his arms crossed, until I was sitting behind the steering wheel, and put out his hand.  I handed him the passport.  He looked at it and looked at me several times to ensure that I really did look like the Santa Claus in my passport.  He reached for a clipboard and started checking the answers to about 30 questions he asked me.  I recognized the profiling questionaire immediately.  It was the list of characteristics that I was supposed to have had in Switzerland when being recruited by my friend, the chief of the CIA for Western Europe.  The ones I remember were:

Where do you live?

Have you ever lived in a foreign country?

Do you speak other languages?

Where was your mother born?

Did she speak more than one language?

Where was your father born?

Did he speak other languages?

Do you know how to handle firearms?

Do you possess firearms or explosive materials?

Is this your car?

Can you run and jump over a fence?

I’m 75, these days.  I can hardly walk, though I do ok with a bicycle.  I was a marksman at age 15 for the cadets of the Scottish Highlanders and the Order of the Black Watch.  The agent in Switzerland had that recorded in my profile.  I do speak several languages and dialects, something I’m very proud of because I work hard at imitating foreigners when I meet them.  My mother was a Soviet in the Eukraine when it was occupied by the USSR.  She and most of my maternal relatives were very sympathetic to socialists and communists.  My mother liked to warn us kids when we misbehaved, “Just you wait!  The revolution is coming.”  My father was from Hungary and lived in the Northeast corner which was Austrian one day, Hungarian, another, Polish the next, and Russian on good days.  In WWI, his father fought with the Kaiser, who lined up with Germany and Italy against Russia, Serbia, France and England.  He was a staunch conservative and anti-communist.  In a Nazi-built slave and death camp, he was made supervisor of a factory which made ammunition and guns for the Germans who were powering up for WWII.  Rumour has it that he was killed by a communist sympathizer in a political argument at the factory.  About 50 kith and kin disappeared during WWII, presumed dead.  On my mother’s side there were 50 kith and kin from her Ukrainian village that disappeared.  I was sent to a Jewish-Communist leaning camp, near Parry Sound, Ontario, for the summer when I was 10.  Our biggest threats were giant mosquitoes and blood suckers.

Back at the Rainbow Bridge, the border cop considered all my positive responses and figured I was not threat to the USA or the Rainbow Bridge, though I thought for sure I was about to be arrested for possible terrorist threats, based on my behaviour and my profiling.  Finally, he looked again at my passport and finally at me and waved me through.  I was accompanied by two cops to the next barrier and then left on my own to turn onto Main Street, on which my bank was.  Within 2 blocks, I discovered that I didn’t have my bank card which would have been necessary to do my business at the bank’s ATM.  So, I turned around and headed back to Canada.  Then I discovered that that I had expected to have a few dollars to pay for the toll on the bridge, but I had no money, whatsoever.  The toll person was angry and made me fill out a form that promised I would remit the $3.25, US or CDN, asap.  The border guard on the Canadian side checked his computer and asked why I’d only spent 10 minutes in the USA?  I told him the story and he started laughing.  He checked the Santa picture in my passport and said, “Get outta here!”

In Chicago, I knew that I was a person of interest to the USA government and was monitored with regard to all my calls and letters.  Cell phones were not yet a commonplace item.  Internet was not yet an entity.  One morning, I called my psychiatrist to change an appointment and I heard a familiar beep every 15 seconds.  I knew this to be old equipment.  I knew that listening devices were already quite silent and undetectable without very special equipment.  I told this to my psychiatrist who responded, “You’re paranoid!”  I laughed and said that coming from him, it was acceptable because it was true.  When I repeated my explanation and asked him to listen for the beeps, he suggested, “Perhaps, we should hang up.”  We did.  The next day, he phoned me and said, “I checked with the telephone company.  There is a tap on this line ordered by the Secret Service.  I checked with the Secret Service and they said they had a court order allowing them to listen based on the fact that he had a patient who was sending letters to the White House, threatening to kill the president.  That patient is harmless, he said he told them and they said, sorry but we have to check out all threats as serious until proven otherwise.  He asked about listening to the conversations with all the other patients and he was told that they don’t listen to those.  Ha! he said and we rang off.  So, it was confirmed about the wire tapping, but it wasn’t me, for a change.  I presumed I was being tapped but with more sophisticated equipment.

It’s hard for me to fathom why I’m still a person of interest, but the incident on the rainbow bridge recently fired up my paranoia again, at age 75.  The recent flurry of stories of presidents listening in on private and public citizens of other countries, the stories about how the other countries leaders are doing it to everyone, also, is disturbing, but not unexpected.  In a sense, it’s like the question and answer that goes with, “Why did you climb Mt. Everest?” wherein the answer is, “Because it’s there!”  The present international linkups with telephones and internet and the tremendous advances in technology in the past years, suggests that the Q & A couplet is operative: “Mr. President, why do you listen in on conversations within foreign countries and your own country?”  The answer is simple: “Because it can be done with not much strain on the technicians who can make it happen!”  Apparantly, all leaders of all countries feel that there’s power in knowing what the enemies, and the friends, are whispering amongst themselves.  It is the essence of Orwell’s Big Brotherism.  In our present kind of Global Village, it is essential, apparently, that the elected, appointed, anointed and selected leaders know what the rest of us peons are discussing in our bedrooms, kitchens, dens and backyards.  Bill Gates programmed Windows to do just that in order to pinpoint our commercial interests regarding how we spend our money.  It is, indeed, a small step from that technology to the really practical need for leaders to know what their own and the other country’s citizens are doing with their money and manufactured goods, and thereby have a chance to influence behaviour for an advantage.  “All pigs are equal, but some are more equal than the others!” a genius conceptualization from an author from the early 20^th century that would read well anytime.  I hope I quoted Animal Farm close to the original.  I recommend his other books, including my favourite, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, a socio-economic commentary about trying to turn back the clock and return “home” to the old simple values of neighbour helping neighbour without listening in on their inner thoughts and trying to manipulate their behaviours.  Some would say, it’s too late and Big Brotherism is here to stay.

I fantacize that it’s not too late to turn back the clock.  Perhaps we as individuals, with our own families and friends, can move back to the open country and establish small self-sustaining villages of less than 200 people, educate our own and expect everyone to pitch in.  It is said that all you need is one rotten apple to spoil the barrel and that is true in the Utopias of which I, and many others, dream.  Perhaps, the expression turning back the clock is too negative sounding.  It would be more optimistic to say we’re going forward with the recognition that people need other people in limited numbers, where each is an individual, man, woman and child, and the comfort comes from the day-to-day living and working co-operatively for peace and harmony.  I’m not the first to dream of this and I won’t be the last.  Perhaps I am being an optimistic fool, but I believe people like Orwell saw the deadly side of Big Brotherism and wrote excellent speculations on how it would be like.  That it came to pass, is mainly a product of passive acceptance of monitoring as a given circumstance.  Resistance to Big Brotherism can be costly in terms of loss of freedom and being labelled as crazy, antisocial, or worse, shot as a traitor.  However, I am presently optimistic that there must be a feeling away from the “general malaise” of the populace in which we live.  I don’t believe it needs the destruction of everything and a “Second Coming.”  I believe the spirit of Mankind can be rekindled without controlling devices which rob us of our freedom.  I don’t really believe that our freedom lies with acceptance of the imprisonment we all find ourselves in.  I believe freedom comes from within and is part of the life force that we all presumably started with.  Taoism and other Oriental ways of achieving inner peace and harmony may be the answer.  I think that the aboriginals amongst us have been doing it for centuries.  In general, they are at one with nature and spirits are seen in everything including trees and mountains, wild animals and pets, lakes and rivers and clouds and rain.  In my opinion, we still have a lot to learn from the ancients that tell the legends of the old people and how they survived with Peace and Harmony.  One can even find such learning on the internet via iPads and the like.  The future may not have an iPod in every ear canal, but it could be much more optimistic than the brilliant pronouncements of Orwell, Huxley and all the others who predict 100% control of individuals by a few people.  Music may hold the key.  Art and literature are important.  Drawings on cave walls are important.  Stonehenge and Machu Peachu may have led the way had they persisted and not defeated by viruses and other life-forms and natural disasters.  In the future, there may be singing minstrels who bring the news from the other villages.  In the future, we may again gather in the evening and listen to the stories of the elders, over and over again, with the beating of a drum and tambourines, and the smoking of peace pipes.  We just won’t need iPods and iPads and iPhones and the like.  We may again be small families of kith and kin, at one with Nature, with Peace and Happiness for all.

THE END

© izzy sommers, md., retired, Welland, Canada, July 6. 2013