Listening to the rhetoric of Bush hatred coming from the Democrats has started to sound oddly familiar – then I noticed a well-worn volume on my bookshelf that had a passage that described the level of hysteria and hyperbole that has inundated the airwaves, the bookstores, and the Internet of late. As always, Orwell is a prescient voice warning against the excesses of fascism. Those wishing to understand more of the man behind the works, Christopher Hitchen’s Why Orwell Matters is an engaging and important work on the life and times of Orwell and his crusade against fascism, Stalinism, and totalitarianism.
It was nearly eleven hundred, and in the Records Department, they were dragging the chairs out of the cubicles and grouping them in the centre of the hall opposite the big telescreen, in preparation for the Two Minutes Hate.
The next moment a hideous, grinding speech, as of some monstrous machine running without oil, burst from the big telescreen at the end of the room. It was a noise that set one’s teeth on edge and bristled the hair at the back of one’s neck. The Hate had started. As usual, the face of Emmanuel GoldsteinGeorge W. Bush, the Enemy of the People, had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among the audience.
The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which GoldsteinBush was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor. All crimes, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, sprang directly out of his teaching.
Winston’s diaphragm was constricted. He could never see the face of GoldsteinBush without a painful mixture of emotions. It was a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a kind of senile silliness. It resembled the face of a sheep, and the voice, too, had a sheep-like quality. GoldsteinBush was delivering his usual venemous attack upon the doctrines of the Party – an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it. He was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought. And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to the reality which Goldstein’sBush’s specious clap trap covered, behind his head on the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the army – row after row of solid-looking men with expressionless faces, who swam up to the surface of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others exactly similar. The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers’ boots formed the background to Goldstein’sBush’s bleating voice.
Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the room.
The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the terrifying power of the army behind it, were too much to be borne: besides the sight or even the thought of GoldsteinBush produced fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant than anything else.
In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen. In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic…
The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of GoldsteinBush had become an actual sheep’s bleat, and for an instant the face changed into that of a sheep. Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a soldier who seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen. But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the face of BIG BROTHER…
Winston had heard the whispered story of a terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, which circulated clandestinely here and there. It was a book without title. People referred to it, if at all, simply as the book. But one knew of such things only through vague rumours. Neither the Brotherhood nor the book was a subject that any ordinary Party member would mention if there was a way of avoiding it.
From "1984" by George Orwell. Also, I noticed that The Politburo Diktat did a similar piece a while back. Great minds must think alike…
You know, there’s something really, really ironic when both sides of the political divide in an affluent country with unprecidented freedoms are using Orwell to critique each other…
Thankfully you’re correct, and we still are the most free country on Earth. However, Orwell’s message is that no matter how affluent a country is, if this kind of reckless rhetoric is not countered, we could very well end up like 1984.
The rhetoric of absolute hatred that comes from left is unexcusable and poisonous to political civil society in this country.
Except that I see just as much absolute hatred out of the right, which is the point I was trying to make…
Jay, you have it backwards, the media has not been relentlessly criticizing Bush, just the opposite, making excuses for all of the problems in the war and the economy. The Emmanuel Goldstein figure is the distraction from the real problems, and it has gone from Osama to Saddam, and Dean (or Kerry) is next. Dubya is the Big Brother figure, he will probably not do another unstaged appearance like on meet the press.
The other parallel is the shifting excuses for the war in Iraq, very much like the rewriting of history in 1984 (“…we have always been at war with Eastasia…”).
And what media do you watch? Bush has been getting hammered in the press lately over the WMD issue and the economy. Part of it is his fault, but much of it has to do with the media smelling blood.
Certainly there was some, however it wasn’t nearly this prevalent or virulent, and even if it was, that doesn’t justify that kind of behavior now.
so in your mind people should impeach a president for a blowjob, and let it go for a war without reasons?
Both Bush and Blair are trying to rewrite history everyday. I don’t care that Saddam may finally have the intention to create WMDs!!! It’s not what was said at the time. The fact are that the US pushed for a war for fake reasons. As P.Wolfowitz stated it, WMDs was the only issue on which the world could agree on. Maybe they forgot a bit fast that the US don’t possess the only intelligence service in the world, and that we too have satellites.
Powell made a presentation with pictures and “evidences” at the UN. This was bullshit. It was no “intent”, it was “already there and imminent”.
I even believe that they made up stuff ( like the nigerian nuclear link), they made it more sexy (the only vector Irak possessed wasn’t ballistic missile, but “ground munition” such as rockets, and they knew it).
BTW, if you’re wondering who is who regarding the “Orwell parallel” just ask yourself who turned the names to “propaganda-like” names……french-fries becomes: liberty fries (it’s just in the book!!!)
so sad Bush doesn’t read, it would have prevented such a mistake!!
No, we went to war not only for WMDs. We went to war because Iraq was harboring terrorists such as Abu Nidal, he was funding Hamas, Hizb’Allah, and other terrorist groups, he was oppressing the people of Iraq, and he was making the spread of democracy in the region all but impossible. None of these facts are in dispute. The only issue in dispute is his WMD capability, and it is still possible that Saddam did have stocks of weapons and they were destroyed or moved before the war.
As long as there is any doubt about a country that has already used such weapons in the past any leader has the obligation to assume the worst. It would be prima facie idiotic to simply assume that Hussein was not a threat unless it could be conclusively known that he did not have weapons.
Unless Bush magically had psychic powers, it is clear he did not know the state of Saddam’s WMD programs and stocks before the war. The whole point is that no one did.
There was always the risk that the intelligence could be wrong. However, even so, liberating the Iraqi people from absolute tyranny and ending Saddam’s support of terrorism would be more than enough to justify removing his regime. Even the highest estimate of Iraqi casualties (10,000) is less than would have died under the sanctions regime or at the hands of Saddam’s rapists and torturers.
The arguments for the war still stand, even without WMDs.
It was already known that Iraq had sought uranium from Africa before 1998, and there’s no reason why they wouldn’t have tried again. MI6 (British foreign intelligence) continues to believe that Hussein did have contacts in Africa. Secondly, Iraq had been working on banned missile technology in violation of UN sanctions. Furthermore, even if Saddam couldn’t natively produced a missile, eventually the sanctions regime would have ended, and Saddam would have been easily been able to buy one from North Korea or Pakistan or Iran.
Either the world could have chosen to continue the punishing or ineffective sanctions that were hurting the Iraqi people more than the Ba’athists or eventually the sanctions regime would have fallen apart anyway, meaning that it would be a certainty that Iraq would have significant WMDs in a short time.
Given the matrix of available choices, regime change in Iraq remained the best possible option.
The Bush Administration didn’t have anything to do with that, it was a member of Congress who did it as a symbolic action. Furthermore, no one was obligated to change the name, and most people treated it as one big joke.
Jay, we went to war to stop stop Saddam Hussein from trying to acquire nuclear materials from Niger, stockpiling hundreds of tons of biological agents, manufacturing and storing tons of chemical agents, trying to acquire centrifuge parts for refining nuclear materials and conspiring with al Qaeda through Answar al-Islam. We went to war to stop there from being a mushroom cloud over a major American city. We went to war to stop an imminent threat (the Press Secretary speaks for the President). We went to war because UN weapons inspections obviously weren’t working since we didn’t find any weapons.
Or maybe you missed those speeches before Congress?
Oops.
He did attempt to get uranium from Africa according to MI6. The UN said that he was stockpiling chemical weapons in Richard Butler’s UNSCOM report. We did find centrifuge technology in Iraq, although it had been buried for some time and Iraq’s nuclear program had essentially stalled after the first war. Finally, we know that Ansar i Islam is now working with the Ba’athists and thet Hussein certainly did have ties to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. So, except for the finding of WMDs, all these charges are accurate (and leave out the fact that Hussein was well-connected to Hamas, Hizb’Allah, and several other terrorist groups as well.)
So far we know that Iraq tried to kill George H.W. Bush, was hiding Abu Nidal, and was involved (through Zarqawi) in the death of US diplomat Laurence Foley in Jordan. I would think that such actions would show a clear threat from Iraq.
That would be all well and good except for the fact that’s not what was actually said in context. McClellan was referring to NATO’s decision to not give Turkey military aid in case the war spilled over to them.
No, we went to war because Iraq violated the terms of the Gulf War cease-fire. We did not have the obligations to find weapons in Iraq. Iraq had the obligation to tell us where their weapons had gone. If they had none, all they could have done is proven it. They didn’t, thus not meeting the timeline set by Resolution 1441. At that point Iraq was in material breech meaning that military force could be authorized.
And you missed Bush’s Feb. 26, 2003 speech at the AEI that outlined the humanitarian reasons for the war in great detail.
It’s more proof of Berg’s Law that anti-war partisans cannot understand the concept that there was more than one justification for this war…
You didn’t go to war – you sent hispanics and blacks to war. Who sold saddam the chemical war material – the US and West. Washington and London were happy bunnies when saddam was using such weapons against nasty Iran during the 80’s. Britain was training Iraqui air force soldiers in the 70’s Why not cut the righteous crap and admit that let your leaders declare war to control the oil and fatten up the US armament industry.
Bush is a wacko of a dried up alcoholic… with rethorics stolen from lousy cowboy movies. He has made irreversible damage to the relationship with Europe… and I hope and pray he doesn’t win another election. (Ooops… bummer… he didn’t win the last election either.)