Thirty years on, the 1984 Super Bowl best is remembered for Apple’s iconic “1984” commercial. It included references to Big Brother and Orwell’s “1984” novel, the repressive Soviet Union during a tense part of the Cold War and the approaching 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

But it mainly took aim at IBM, whose PC in 1981 had eclipsed the Apple II as the most popular personal computer. The commercial announced the Macintosh, the graphics-oriented PC that revolutionized computing, then and since.

The Mac ripped off technology developed by Xerox PARC. But Xerox by then was a lumbering, gigantic copier company that didn’t know what it had. And IBM was the global computing giant that seemed like a monolith.

IBM in the end itself couldn’t compete with such “IBM clone” competitors as Compaq and HP (since merged), Dell and others. IBM eventually sold its PC division to Lenovo, a company ironically in the land formerly run by top commie Mao Zedong, himself one of the biggest of the Big Brothers.

Big Big Brother

It also turned today the ultimate, Big Big Brother, with its “garden of pure ideology” and “information purification,” to quote the ad, ended up being the U.S. government.

And as in the novel “1984” and the “1984” Apple commercial, the U.S. government, as we learned last summer with the revelations about the NSA, spies on absolutely everything done by everybody. Ironically, its major snooping apparat is the very Internet that has done so much to free people’s thinking. The Fourth Amendment and privacy have been completely obliterated.

It’s also a little more than ironic that this occurred under the regime of President Obama, formerly a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago. In his 2007 book, “The Audacity of Hope,” which I read, he even pledged to restore our civil rights after the depredations of the then regnant Bush administration.

Fortunately, unlike in “1984” the novel, the Internet now is so vast that Big Brother’s functionaries can’t keep track of every subversive thought. And it works both ways. The Internet lets us look back at Big Brother. To reuse a phrase I coined the other day:

“If the Government Abyss gazes long at you, you will gaze back at the Government Abyss.”

Our current politicians were youngsters before the age of social media. But that will change. We’ll be able to read Candidate X’s un-politically correct rantings in high school. And remember, what is P.C., by definition, changes by the year. So Candidate X, will discover that 15 years later he really was anti-P.C., and therefore will not be allowed to advance up the apparat ziggurat of Big Brother.

Won’t that be fun?

That’s why there’s great hope for the future. It’s why 2014 really didn’t turn out like “1984.”

“We shall prevail,” Big Brother proclaims in the TV ad. No they won’t.

Enjoy the Super Bowl.

By John Seiler

George Orwell’s nightmare of an “Orwellian” totalitarian regime taking over his native United Kingdom — Airstrip One — has come true. As he wrote in the appendix to “1984”:

“Newspeak was the official language of Oceania, and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism….

“The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression  to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever.

“To give a single example — The word free still existed in Newspeak, but could only be used in such statements as ‘The dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds.’ It could not be used in its old sense of ‘politically free’ or ‘intellectually free,’ since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless.”

That obviously is the situation in today’s UK, where Big Brother imposes Newspeak and intellectual freedom no longer exists. Consider this story:

“An American evangelist said he was arrested and interrogated about his Christian faith after he was caught on a London sidewalk preaching that homosexuality is a sin.

“Tony Miano, a retired deputy sheriff and former chaplain with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Dept., was charged with ‘using homophobic speech that could cause people anxiety, distress, alarm or insult.’

“Miano had been preaching on a London street corner during the Wimbledon Tennis Championships with a ministry group called Sports Fan Outreach International.

“He was preaching about immoral living — and cited homosexuality as an example of lifestyle choices that are contrary to biblical teaching.

“ ‘I never used any gay slurs,’ he said. ‘You would never hear me using slang or discriminatory language against homosexuals or any other group. That would be contrary to my faith.’

“At some point, the evangelist quoted I Thessalonians 4:1-2 — a passage of scripture that mentions sexual immorality.

“ ‘I talked about women addicted to romance novels, men addicted to pornography, people with lustful thoughts, heterosexual fornication and homosexuality,’ Miano told Fox News. ‘When I mentioned that the Bible was clear that homosexuality is a sin, a lady walked by and she glared at me and hurled the f-bomb.’

“Miano said the woman came back a short time later and began to videotape his sidewalk sermon. Then, she called the police.

“ ‘They were concerned about homophobic speech,’ he said. ‘But I told them I don’t fear homosexuals. The language I used was not homophobic, as I was not promoting fear or hatred of homosexuals.’

“Miano said he did not limit his remarks to homosexual acts.

“ ‘I did not speak solely about homosexuality as a form of sexual immorality but also about any kind of sex outside marriage between one man and one woman, as well as lustful thoughts,’ he said. ‘All of these are considered mainstream Christian positions and have been taught and believed by Christians for thousands of years.’”

Notice how the woman, brainwashed by Big Brother, ratted out the preacher’s thoughtcrime to the Thought Police?

At least Chaplain Miano won’t have his free speech suppressed when he returns to California. The First Amendment still protects him. For now, anyway.

Just in time for the government’s favorite day of the year: April 15. When they gouge us down to the bone.

Now the IRS is spying on our Twitter and Facebook accounts:

“It says the effort is to catch people trying to beat the system, but some say it goes too far.

“Attorney Kristen Mathews warns to be careful with what you say on social media platforms.

“She has concerns the government is pushing the limits of what has historically been considered private.

“‘There are laws that regulate the government’s ability to get a hold of things like credit card transaction history. But those laws have become more permissive in the last several years, particularly after 9-11, and so some might say those laws are no longer in line with the average expectation of privacy,’ says Mathews.

“The government has said it would only check a Facebook page or twitter account if there is already red flag in a tax form.”

They only would check “if there is already a red flag.” Riggggggggght.

Anyone doubt we live in an Orwellian police state?

That’s why the government riles us up with a “two-minutes’ hate” against the “1 percent” who supposedly had to “pay their fair share.” When the government — Democrats and Republicans — really raised the taxes of 77 percent of Americans.

It’s all a diversion to divert our attention from the government’s real mission of enslaving us.

1984 = 2013

Double-plus good!