Tuesday, September 11, 2007

George Was A Little Ahead Of His Time


Orwell Would Say “I Told You So!”
On this sixth anniversary of that horrible day that has come to be known in media shorthand as "9/11" – September 11, 2001 – it is not overreaching to say that many Americans still live their lives with a latent undercurrent of fear of what may happen next.
Even as I write this, America’s top counterterrorism officials are warning today that the United States will face a persistent threat from Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups for years to come.
But they plan to offer no specific evidence of any imminent plots against targets on American soil. They are probably correct, but yet engendering fear has been a persistent theme of government officials since 9/11.
Evidence of History Stuttering
In many respects, in their misguided efforts to defend and protect us, our government has curtailed our rights and made us all suspects. Therefore, because history not only repeats, but at times stutters, it shouldn’t surprise you that England's Special Branch, the police intelligence unit, was watching George Orwell during most of his adult life.It is certainly what Orwell, a student of political paranoia, would have expected. The file on Orwell was released last week by Britain’s National Archives. According to one police sergeant, Orwell’s habit of dressing “in Bohemian fashion,” revealed that the writer was a Communist. That’s a conclusion that will seem strange to anyone who has read Orwell’s beloved story, Animal Farm.In my writings as a political conservative, I often use the phrase "Big Brother" as shorthand for any oppressive government. This “Orwellism” is also used to describe specific government absurdities and depredations. All of these have multiplied exponentially under the Bush maladministration and its, too often, lawless conduct in its self-proclaimed "war of terrorism." For that pungent Big Brother phrase, and many others (unperson, thought crime, doublethink, newspeak, Ministry of Truth) we are in debt to Orwell. He achieved so much in so little time, (he died at age 46 in 1950), that he's become the subject of an intellectual parlor game: "What would Orwell say?"
Timing is Everything

It’s appropriate that Orwell's police file should emerge in the same week that it was reported that the FBI also has been exercising their own “Big Brother” powers.Apparently, the FBI has far exceeded its considerable PATRIOT Act powers, and used secret demands to obtain records with data not only on individuals the FBI saw as targets, but also details on their “community of interest.” A target’s “community of interest” could include hundreds of people that he or she was in contact with.The FBI stopped the practice early this year in part because of questions about the legality of its aggressive use of the records demands, known as national security letters.Indeed, President Bush's resigned U.S. assistant attorney general, Jack Goldsmith, has just published a revealing book. In this new release, he explains the faulty legal basis for the President's massive wiretapping of communications without obtaining a court order as the law requires.Commenting on the surveillance of Orwell The New York Times said: "This is such an old and forbidding dance, the one between the watchers and the watched. The political life of the past century has been punctuated by one revelation after another, as secret files have been made public, either by legislative fiat or by the accidents of history. The files are nearly always perspicacious – not about the subjects being watched but about the fears of the watchers. This is something Orwell understood perfectly well, how fear enhances perception, but also corrupts it."
Big Brother’s Birth

The concept of “Big Brother” was born in 1984, Orwell's 1949 vision of a totalitarian society where people are kept in line with the warning: "Big Brother is watching you." Not only is Big Brother watching, but he’s also demanding that every citizen accept that 2 + 2 = 5 and that "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength."
Earlier in August 1945, Orwell's little book called Animal Farm appeared. It was perhaps his greatest work, depicting a Communist society where the animals take over, with some few far more equal than others.Why should it matter what Orwell might have thought more than half a century after he died, and more than a decade after the Soviet Union – the obvious target of his two most famous books, Animal Farm and 1984 – fell apart? One reason is that the kind of folly, cowardice and corruption he fought against is still with us.Orwell himself said: "Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn out and useless phrase into the dustbin, where it belongs." Keep that in mind this week as the debate over the Iraq war "surge" rages.
The 20th Century Charles Dickens

Orwell resembles his own picture of Charles Dickens: "... a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry."That kind of character, scarce as it will always be, is why The Economist said Orwell's voice "speaks as urgently to our times as it did to his."The Times concludes: "There is an obvious irony in Orwell’s being spied on in a way that can only be called ‘Orwellian.’ That is nearly a universal adjective in these Orwellian days. It’s tempting to say there’s something almost nostalgic about seeing Orwell’s file – a reminder of a less electronic time. Except, of course, that there was nothing nostalgic about the politics of his era. Every age, his as well as ours, seems to live up to its sinister potential." That’s the Way It Looks from Here.

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