The "Police State" comes in different forms--sales of "1984" soar over revelations

The Twentieth Century not only brought new kinds of state terror to the world, it also brought predictions of how, after the defeat of Fascism in World War II, we could all get subjugated and lose all our liberties through the increased State surveillance of all citizens.

What form will new "Police States" take? Especially in countries that now pride themselves on their freedom?

George Orwell's classic "1984" shows eerie similarities to the way the United States now, using the latest technology and secret court orders making it all legal, gathers incredible amounts of information on all communications of Americans, --supposedly to fight the very real threat of terrorism, but what is it paving the way for?

One website wrote this about the booming sales of Orwell's novel now:

"A complementary commercial winner-and-loser pair has emerged from the disclosure of the NSA's domestic data dragnet, one that would surely bring a thin-lipped smile to the face of Eric Arthur Blair, the English Democratic Socialist who wrote as George Orwell: While Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH), the defense contractor that employed leaker Edward Snowden, has seen its stock plummet since the revelation of its connection to the scandal, Amazon's (AMZN) sales of "1984," Orwell's classic dystopian novel of surveillance and control, have skyrocketed.

The LA Times reports that sales of the book, which concerns a discontented propagandist working for the Ministry of Truth in a time of endless war, are up 5,771 percent as of Tuesday morning. From a sales rank of 12,507 in the days before The Guardian published top-secret government documents provided by Snowden, "1984" has risen to crack Amazon's top 200.

As of this writing, both the Signet Classics paperback edition and a hardcover volume, "Animal Farm and 1984," appear on Amazon's list of "Movers & Shakers: The biggest gainers in Books sales rank over the past 24 hours," as numbers 16 (up 139 percent) and 11 (up 274 percent), respectively. "1984" has of course gotten a lot of free advertising over the last week, as NSA opponents have compared the government's methods to the nightmarish excesses of the totalitarian regime Orwell imagined."