Who best predicted what the world of today would be like… George Orwell or Aldous Huxley?
Both did according to former Pink Floyd front man Roger Waters.
“Orwell and Huxley were always arguing about who had the closest view of what dystopia might look like in the future,….I think we got a lot of both.”
Discussing how the mainstream media and public at large are content to largely ignore the the plight of Julian Assange ,Waters told RT :
“We have the ‘Big Brother’ Orwellian dystopian nightmare, it happened two days ago in that magistrate’s court,” he explained, referring to a UK judge’s decision on Monday to deny the WikiLeaks founder a delay in US extradition proceedings. Assange’s lawyers have argued that they need more time to prepare a defense, and some of Assange’s supporters have made the case that British law forbids extradition in the first place, if the charges can be seen as political.
The world described by George Orwell in ‘1984’ was one of mass surveillance and paranoia, where anyone could be snatched off the street by the state and made disappear for ‘wrongthink’. In ‘Brave New World’ Aldous Huxley, on the other hand, described a future where mass entertainment and the easy availability of pleasure-giving drugs made dissent virtually impossible.
“You only have to look out in the street and see the people, the walking dead going by… and taking absolutely no notice of the fact that this journalist is being murdered by our government,” Waters said, referring to the treatment of Assange in Belmarsh Prison, said by the UN to amount to torture.
Together with veteran journalist John Pilger, the Pink Floyd frontman hosted a rally for Assange in front of the British Home Office in September, that went unreported by every single British newspaper.
“And we walk by with our earbuds in… clicking away on our iPhones as we walk unthinking, unfeeling, uncaring through our lives, and allow this bullshit to take place in our names, in our courts,” Waters concluded.
Niamh Harris