Monday, June 29, 2020

Winston's Latest

The New York Times has another piece by Winston Smith that the evil Russians are proven to have created the Taliban and provided them ample resources to kill Americans, and it is time for daily Hate Minutes and Hate Week against the Russians.
Airstrip 1 wanted to maintain its Oceanic Hegemony. When the French were a challenge, they'd team with the Russian Empire, AKA Eastasia, against Eurasia. When the Russians seemed to a threat to the Raj, as when they asked the Ottomans if they could represent the Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire, Airstrip 1 joined the French and the Ottomans, AKA Eurasia, against Eastasia.
Oceania didn't get into the picture until after WWII.
Basically, in 1929, Herbert Hoover became president of Oceania and promised there could never be another stock market crash or another depression. So banks would loan just about anyone 90% of the cost of buying a stock. An investor put up $100 to buy $1,000 worth of stock, typically, 100 shares at $10 a share. If the shares went up to $11, the investor had a profit of 100%, but if the shares went down to $9, the investor got a margin call and lost everything (but the entire loss was the investor's, the bank didn't lose anything). Then, one day, stocks dropped 20% and banks no longer had enough money to cover their liabilities, and most American banks were insolvent, so large depositors lost a lot, and small depositors lost everything. Unemployment went to 25%. Hoover did nothing, and got booted out of office in the '32 election, and FDR took over, and gave comforting Fireside Chats and created some Workfare like the CCC and the WPA that provided some work and a little money to a small percentage of the unemployed, but large numbers were just going door to door begging for food. This started to turn around when Adolph Schickelgruber was elected Chancellor of Germany and the UK and France began placing orders for US military equipment (as did Adolph) and that put some of the unemployed back to work. Tojo also got the top political job in Japan. Between them, Adolph and Tojo, two brilliant applied economists, got the US unemployment rate down from more than 25% to less than 2%. Sadly, Adolph died in '45, and Tojo shortly thereafter, and all the top economists said the Great Depression would return, but much worse: people would long for the days when 75% of the workforce had jobs and only 25% were unemployed. What to do?
President Truman said, 'The leaders of the Axis dead? Wrong! Completely wrong from beginning to end. The real leader was always Uncle Joe, and he's still alive and still a mortal threat, so the war effort must not only continue, but increase! A lot!' And unemployment remained low. No postwar depression, since there was no real 'post' to the war. The shooting stopped for 5 years, until Oceania went to war with Eurasia against Eastasia in the Korean Peninsula.
Oceania, allied with Eurasia, has been fighting Eastasia with Cold War interspersed with shooting wars ever since 1945.
And then the jihadists stepped up to provide excuses for shooting wars after Eastasia collapsed in 1990.
Some thought the jihadists hated not just our own freedom, but also the Eastasians and their different brand of brutal dictatorship.
A couple of days ago, and again today, Winston wrote that Eastasia was always in control of the jihadists, arming them and funding them. And to make matters worse, Eastasia armed the jihadists with Oceania weapons and funded them with Oceania money. Some might wonder about that, but Winston assures us that Big Brother has irrefutable proof (classified Top Secret so no one who isn't a traitor would ever want to see any of it) that it was Eastasia that was really responsible for all the jihadist attacks, and Oceania must step up and do something about it.
Biden has said he'll do just that as soon as he takes office, and Trump has said he knows Biden will be the next president of Oceania, since the voters don't love Trump enough.

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