Out of view of the telescreen, Winston pulls out his hidden diary from a drawer and wrote: Thoughtcrime does not entail death; thoughtcrime IS death. In time, he knew the diary “would be reduced to ashes and himself vapor.” But he wrote, To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is freedom…

Perhaps naivety carried away before the illusion of collapsing walls. Perhaps we trusted our troops, comrades, fellow fighters to stay the course and under estimated the determination of those in power. The field of history, writes Jean Amery, is blanketed with two groups of people, “the overpowered and those who overpowered them” (At the Mind’s Limits). All power to the people, we said, while we marched through murky waters just ahead of what appeared to be falling apartheid signposts. All power to the people! Perhaps we should have said - All power is with the people.

The rise of a Big Brother State has already been told in stories already dismissed as fictional. Yet, the story begins, again, this time in the “middle Sixties, the period of the great purges…”

[T]he original leaders of the Revolution were wiped out once and for all. By 1970 none of them was left, except Big Brother himself. All the rest had by that time been exposed as traitors and counterrevolutionaries.

And we know that the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) eliminated the warriors the State identified as terrorists then. The State’s history books rarely mentions this era of counter intelligence action against Black, Red, and Brown citizens in the U.S. and when it does, the State is keen to speak of the suspended program as a mistake. The corpses were intended, but perhaps the tactic was too much like the Soviet Union.

The history of COINTELPRO has been relegated to the Party’s Fiction Department and to television programs like Cops. “If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened - that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.” The lie passes into history and becomes truth, Winston observed. For “the past, Winston knew, “had not merely been altered, it had been actually destroyed.” Any fabrication could substitute truth.

Investigative reporters Dana Priest and William M. Arkin (Washington Post), releasing the results of their two-year study of what they call “top secret America,” date the rise of counterterrorism agencies (or the restructuring of COINTELPRO) to September 11, 2001. Eight hundred and four citizens hold secret clearance. Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies are scattered across the U.S. in 10,000 locations.

The above numbers in all categories seem low to me.

Only last week did I hear a Black history teacher in the New York Public School system inform a WBAI host and radio listeners about the results of a questionnaire completed by Black children. In short, the children consider themselves ugly.

They are ugly - naturally - naturally ugly children of an ugly race. Our children desire to be lighter if darker and darker skinned classmates should be forewarned - forget marriage! Others will not select you for the task of producing light skinned children.

Forget teaching if you are Black. Our children prefer white teachers who know more than any Black teacher. White classmates are far more intelligent than Black classmates.

We are just not as civilized as much or accomplished enough as white Americans. White Americans are not violent! They do not kill one another!

What mechanism could be created, more powerful and extensive than COINTEPRO, to undermine our ability to wage war against the powerful? In top secret America, it is not just the dumbed-down education in the schools but a ceaseless parade of television commercials and pop-up adds, films, newsprint, cable news broadcasts aiding the State in waging war against terrorists. Only 10,000 locations? No.

Even the so-called terrorists aid the State.

Look closely and listen carefully to how the powerful have been able to recruit our troops. Media stations like NPR (that soft side of the State’s corporate propaganda machine masquerading as public radio) loves to feature young Black adults grateful to those in power who saved them from the streets and life as “thugs” and or “prison inmates.” The lost tribe in the wilderness of the American urban landscape escapes to tell his or her story. Tell us your story, young man, young woman. And invariably it - the story - begins in the “hood” with a single mother and an imprisoned father and an “angel” or State program designed to “take Black children off the streets.” The utter uselessness of Black Americans in the larger society is internalized to create in each young person a state of frustration and helplessness. “And even when they became discontent, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice.”

Tell us your story, young man, young woman.

Nauseating is the repetition of sameness from hollowed vessels. Recently, released victims of U.S. torture speak of being saved by decree of the State only after years of torture - with only the guarantee of re-living those years in fear of their return?

What world is this?

The subject of “race” is off the table by order of the elected Head of State. Our young are shot down by the police state, who can never be found guilty of the crime of murder. More pervasive than any collection of over 80, 000 secret clearance agents - “top secret America” has steadily pursued its tasks of wiping clean from the minds of our children any trace of their humanity. While we are dismissed as credible recruiters, and our cause and warnings increasing considered out dated, heresy even liable to treason, the State is willing to absorb our children for what the State considers the real war, the only war permissible.

It could very well be that “Oceania,” this State and its top secret agencies, is not at war with terrorists in any specific location called “Eurasia.” Maybe there are allies among an allegiance of States under the control of the corporations!

It is a death mechanism, plain and simple!

Winston recognized the death mechanism in operation. But, he knew, too, that comprehension of this mechanism resided in his consciousness - “which in any case must soon be annihilated.” Already trapped, interrogated, and eliminated, Winston is allowed to remain a little while with the freedom to think: DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, he writes at night in his hidden diary. During the day, Winston receives his “written instructions,” which, in turn, he must destroy, but not before contributing to the annihilation of history - correcting “slips, errors, misprints, or misquotations” in the “interests of accuracy…”

Winston, after all, never existed. But, so far, we do and we are left with a State transforming from racist to fascist.

For the singular Winston, it was too late. But for us witnessing up close the disappearance of our troops, our children, our youth, is it too late?

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer for over thirty years of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.