Yes, we are indeed, Lizzie. I have seen with my own eyes the accomplishment of much of what is in George Orwell's novel "1984" during my own lifetime.

The novel described a future society which appeared to be an alliance of the Anglo countries...the UK and the USA (and probably Canada and Australia) which had turned into a surveillance-controlled society with a centralized command and a controlled media and a common ruling purpose.

The primary purposes of the media were to establish rigid conformity and obedience in the public, to suppress truth, to entertain and distract people, and to whip up extreme paranoia about "foreign enemies" and extreme patriotism so that the public would support an eternal state of war in distant places.

The war was never supposed to end, therefore it was based on fighting an ill-defined enemy in many places, and on never reaching any final conclusion. It would flare up in one place for awhile, then shift to another place.

The controlled mass media could fake anything they wanted to through their total management of what the public was exposed to in "the news"...the news being mainly just propaganda.

We're not yet as badly off as the people in "1984", though, so the process has not completed itself. We still have a free interchange of ideas on the Internet and through commercially available books by many authors. We still have political columnists who dare to step outside the conventional boundaries of opinion.

It's not easy to pull off something like the dictatorship in "1984", but it can be done. The easiest way to do it is through supposedly protecting "national security" against an outside threat.

That has been the means of achieving domestic enslavement. It took huge steps forward under the Bush administration. I haven't seen much yet to give me confidence that the Obama administration will not follow along the same lines...notwithstanding the fact that Obama sounds much more agreeable than Bush.

Our political system is far more subtle and clever than the one Orwell wrote about in 1984, because it uses multi-party politics to throw up the illusion of a healthy democracy in front of people.

The political parties are used in the old "good cop - bad cop" game to keep the public bouncing back and forth between one and the other. This gives people the feeling that they have a genuine democracy and repeatedly stires their hopes for change. That could be seen dramatically in the gigantic wave of hope and excitement that fueled Obama's successful campaign and election.

People thought it would turn everything around.

That's the way the system is designed. One party takes away your rights and makes things worse until people get so disgusted that they throw it out of office. Then the other pary takes over, and advances basically the same domestic and international policy, with some minor differences in style, and your rights are soon further eroded and things continue to get worse. So then people get furious, and they kick THAT party out, and the first one comes back in, and......

On and on. If both parties are really run by the same interests, you see, then the public is kept off balance by playing one against the other over and over again.

That's clever. It's much more clever than a single monolithic rule by a centralize command (like in 1984 or in the Soviet Union).

The best way to enslave people is to do it while convincing them they are "free"...because they have multi-party elections...but if both or all parties secretly serve the same interests...then the people are not free. They are under an oligarchic dictatorship which holds elections merely for show.

Note how the British public got exactly the opposite of what they expected and hoped for when they enthusiastically elected Tony Blair. That's how the game works. I suspect something similar is going to happen with Barack Obama...actually it's already well under way.