Dear Nine American Justices, I’ve been told that you have before you a very modest case in which the Petitioner/Defendant, who was entitled to have a jury trial, now asks for your help. All that is required is that you send it back to the lower court for a trial.
We want to thank Mary Maxwell for this Op-Ed Please direct yours to Editor@GraniteGrok.com.
The case involves a conspiracy theory, but that need not play any part in your judgment. Not at all. The case is about a simple matter of procedural justice, to which each of us Americans is entitled at all times.
What this man is asking is that he be given a chance to fight for recognition of reality. The alternative is that he be forced to cave in to the 21st Century trend of treating reality as unimportant. I believe we are all under great pressure to cave in to that trend these days. Therefore, your decision on this case could be wonderfully historic. Or, it could be devastating.
This afternoon (September 30, 2022), I pulled out my old copy of the ‘novel’ 1984, written by George Orwell in 1949. I was reminded that a main plot of that book is Winston Smith’s desire to re-discover a hidden past, the real past. In Winston’s society in London, set in the 1980s, a totalitarian government, led by “the Inner Party,” deleted the past from the record.
As everyone knows, many of Orwell’s predictions are coming true in the United States. To name just five: 1. The government pushes propaganda more overtly than it used to. 2. Many people consider the government tyrannical. 3. A variety of techniques of mind control have come into use.4. Dissidents get bumped off. 5. There are surveillance cameras everywhere. And Orwell’s concepts such as the Two Minute Hate, and “Room 101” (Gitmo) are visible to us.
The book 1984 starts with Winston Smith, age 39, working for the Ministry of Truth. His job is to receive old publications, such as from The Times, in order to make a correction if the content no longer accords with officialdom’s current truth. When he writes the new version, it gets printed and made to pass for the original. He dutifully sends the original down the memory hole (which goes to a furnace).
Until Winston acquires a girlfriend (Julia), which acquiring is criminal itself, he is very alone. There’s no one he dares speak to. So we, the readers, get to listen to his private battling with questions, which can be roughly paraphrased as “What was the real past like?”, “If the current reality (the Party’s lies) are not true, must I make my emotions conform to them?”, and “Is life worth living if we’re all forced to be fakers?”
I will quote verbatim, to give the flavor. This is from Orwell’s 1984, copyright Harcourt 1949, copyright renewed by Sonia Brownell Orwell, 1977. Page numbers are from Penguin’s Signet Classics edition. The headings were inserted by me.
Making “Truth” (The Party announces that we are at war, against Eurasia.) pp 34-35:
“The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth…. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it….
“[Winston’s] mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, … to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, … to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed…. [ultimately] to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.”
The Defamation Lawsuit
I [Mary Maxwell] interrupt Orwell here to describe the case — Fetzer v Pozner — that is before you, O Great Nine. I mean it’s in a pile of cases waiting to see if four of you will agree that it move to the much smaller pile of those that will be ruled on this term. It was initiated as a lawsuit by Leonard Pozner, and went before Wisconsin Judge Frank Remington, who made a summary judgement in Pozner’s favor. It fits into Orwell’s theme about reality.
In short, Prof Fetzer published a book in which he said that the death certificate of Pozner’s little boy Noah is phony. Fetzer believes that the Sandy Hook school massacre never actually occurred (he thinks it was a drill). Fetzer hired two top forensic examiners of documents to look at the death certificate. He submitted their affidavits but was not allowed the normal ‘Discovery’ process. The judge closed the case.
To many people, including myself, the reality of the child’s death certificate sort of stands for the reality of the massacre. But the authenticity of the document itself is all that’s in the case submitted to you. Pozner sued for defamation on the grounds that Fetzer had in effect called him a liar. Fetzer is now required to pay $450,000 to Pozner. Justice has not been done.
Here is the conclusion of one of the forensic experts, Larry Wickstrom:
“From my examination of the documents which were presented to me electronically and by US Mail, I make these determinations.
1. That the 132KB, JPEG imaged Certificate of Death, for Noah Samuel Pozner age 6, (CoD1) as examined is an altered and unreliable document image. No determination of
originality, or intentional act of forgery, can be supported due to the multi generational
copy degradation of printed image and the low resolution of the captured image.
2. That the obviously altered in shape and content, 1.7MB, JPEG imaged Certificate of
Death, for Noah Samuel Pozner age 6, (CoD 2) is a forgery.
3. That the State of Connecticut, Registrar of Vital Statistics, has issued two different and
certified as true versions (CoD 3 & 8) of state file number 2012-07- 078033, a Certificate
of Death, for Noah Samuel Pozner age 6.
4. That for reasons disclosed and undisclosed, the content of state file number 2012-07-
Case 2018CV003122 Document 178 Filed 06-07-2019 Page 7 of 22 Page 8 078033 has been digitally and physically altered.
5. That until such time as the State of Connecticut addresses and rectifies the conditions that
allow this kind of record manipulation, any ‘true copy of a record filed’, certified by the
Seal of State of Connecticut, Department of Public Health, should be considered suspect
and treated as unreliable.”
[Now I will get back to Orwell, to discuss Newspeak, thought control, and lying about statistics.]
The Limiting of Language (This is Syme, a co-worker, lecturing to Winston.) pp 52-5:
“You haven’t a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston… In your heart you’d prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. … Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”
“Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc [English socialism] and Ingsoc is Newspeak… Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?”
p 41: “Statistics … a great deal the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at a hundred and forty-five million pairs. … Winston, however… marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfilled… Very likely no boots had been produced at all. … And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain.”
Emotions and Humanness
I [MM] will now move to Orwell’s tie-in of the Party’s mind-control policy with the control over one’s humanity. Winston kept puzzling over the way that the government wanted to take away our natural emotions by, say, eliminating love and family loyalty.
(My point in bringing this up, in connection with Sandy Hook, is that the Wisconsin court may have been under pressure from “the Party” to cancel out the reality of what happened in Newtown CT on December 14, 2012. A summary judgment blocking inquiry would have the ‘desired effect’ of sparing any fraudsters from exposure. And — I argue — if there is a tie-in, as Orwell claims, between reality control and the curtailing of love, we ought to blow this open. Giving up our humanness is ridiculous.)
Marriage and Sex. p 65
“The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control. Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. Not love so much as eroticism was the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it. All marriages between Party members had to be approved by a committee… permission was always refused if the couple concerned gave the impression of being physically attracted to one another. … There were even organizations such as the Junior, Anti-Sex League, which advocated complete celibacy for both sexes.
Love and Privacy, pp 166-167 (Conversation between Winston and Julia):
“[Julia]: ‘Everybody always confesses. You can’t help it. They torture you.
[Winston]: ‘Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn’t matter: only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you — that would be the real betrayal.’
She thought it over. ‘They can’t do that,’ she said finally. ‘It’s the one thing they can’t do. They can make you say anything — anything — but they can’t make you believe it. They can’t get inside you.’
‘No,’ he said a little more hopefully, ‘no; that’s quite true. They can’t get inside you. If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them’.”
Remembering his Mother and Tragedy, p. 30
The thing that now suddenly struck Winston was that his mother’s death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. His mother … had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he saw, could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.”
Comment
Orwell’s very widely-read 1984, has in it a great concern for the role of truth as against an arrogant, and plainly insane, set of bosses. That book should have been the nail in the coffin for totalitarianism, but instead we see an ever-growing police state in America. No one seems to know how to stop this.
Oh really? Yes we do know — by applying the law. In regard to the Sandy Hook controversy, a proper trial in which the authenticity of the Pozner death certificate (and thus the financial liability of James Fetzer) can be resolved, is simply the basic requirement. The Seventh Amendment (“In suits at common law… the right of trial by jury shall be preserved”) is not mocked.
If we don’t interpose now, things can only get worse; the problem of reality control can’t just fade away. As Orwell said, on pages 80-81:
“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later…. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. ”
There are various Orwellian examples running rampant through our society, but Professor James Fetzer’s plight is the only one that I know to be before you, O Justices. A decision for the Petitioner that you will take this case would send a message to the Party (and its complicitous media) that you are willing to confront them when you are called upon to do so.
Thank you for considering this.
Yours very respectfully,
Mary Maxwell
Concord NH 03301 USA
