'War is peace'

Orwellian theories are being acted out in Israel - as persecution against Palestinians begins to echo 1984.

May 8, 2007 5:00 PM

Nimer Sultany

It is one thing to read George Orwell and Franz Kafka, it is quite another to live their texts. For us - Palestinians - Orwell and Kafka are not works of fiction but concrete reality.

Israel's persecution of Azmi Bishara, the prominent Palestinian scholar, head of the National Democratic Assembly and - until recently - member of the Israeli Knesset, is only the recent articulation of this reality. After all, this is not the first Israeli attempt to criminalise Bishara or other Palestinian political leaders. The state hopes that by reframing his political agenda as treason, incitement to violence and support of terrorism, his ideas will lose legitimacy, his community will be intimidated and the establishment will not need to deal with the challenge that the Palestinian citizens of Israel present to the ideology of the state through their demands for equality.

Bishara rightly claims that he will not have a fair trial. Indeed, we know from the history of the General Security Service (GSS) of a culture of lies and fabricated files (even against their own men as in the Bus 300 affair, which was hijacked by Palestinian militants in 1984). We also know that even in cases unrelated to "security", the Arab citizen is twice as likely to be indicted, convicted and imprisoned compared to his fellow Jewish citizen. Professors Aryeh Rattner and Gideon Fishman of Haifa University write: "Being an Arab may lead to a presumption of guilt without facts and the rules of evidence."

We also know that security is the sacred cow to which Israeli judges bow. Security has always been an important tool for the maintenance of the Jewish and Zionist character of the Israeli state. It was a major pretext for the confiscation of Palestinian citizens' lands. Israel's persecution of Bishara is part and parcel of this security mindset of the Israeli state vis-á-vis its Palestinian citizens. Those citizens were denied their basic rights and were subjected to a military administration for 18 years (1948-1966). Since then, the GSS has been the main state organ in charge of viewing us as a "fifth column." Bishara has already had his trial(s) without knowing. The justices of the Israeli Supreme Court have authorised more than once the wiretapping of his private conversations. "parliamentary immunity", "freedom of expression" and "democracy" are all tricks through which Big Brother comes to haunt you in the end.

Not only does the GSS closely monitor and control the Arab education system inside Israel, but it has publicly declared that the Palestinian citizens of Israel are a "strategic and demographic threat" to the state. In fact, it can be said that Big Brother is not only patrolling "thoughtcrimes" but has "telescreens" in the bedrooms of the Palestinian citizens, penetrating our private realms and controlling some of the most intimate aspects of our family and love lives. The Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law forbids family unification and effectively prohibits Arab citizens from marrying citizens of more than half of the countries in the Middle East. In this dehumanising context, the law declares that marriage and children are not humanitarian affairs.

Had Israel been a democratic state, one would have expected the legal apparatus to criminalise and outlaw anti-democratic movements. Israel, however, persecutes Bishara for his democratic agenda. "State of all its citizens" and "universal equality" would be considered a trivial and possibly conservative agenda in any normal democratic state. Strangely, in Israel, such an agenda has been labelled as dangerous, subversive and extremist. The Knesset rejected several times an "equal protection" clause that Bishara had proposed. Equality remains outside Israeli legislation.

After all, these are unorthodox ideas in Israel. The Zionist "Newspeak" is supposed to turn them into unthinkable ideas. The fact that three groups of Palestinian elites inside Israel - National Committee of the Heads of the Arab Local Municipalities, Adalah and Mada al-Carmel - have recently issued "vision documents" articulating our demands for equality, expressing our grievances and presenting an alternative historical narrative meant that Bishara had risen in prominence and influence.

On the other hand, anti-democrats and racists who openly propagate violence against as well as the expulsion of Palestinians (including those who are citizens) serve in the Knesset and the government, and cabinet ministers who routinely issue racist statements against the Palestinian citizens are not held accountable. In fact, they become more popular in the Jewish community after such statements.

It is thus hard to escape understanding the Israeli irony without the Orwellian backdrop. Bishara, vocal in his opposition to Israel's brutal assault on Lebanon last summer, is accused by the Thought Police (the GSS) of helping the enemy in times of war through contact with a foreign agent. The "enemy" here stands for the Arab world to which the Palestinian citizens belong and the "foreign agent" is defined retroactively as such by the Thought Police. These alleged crimes are punishable according to Israeli law by life imprisonment or death penalty. "Thoughtcrime is death."

On the contrary, cabinet ministers who urged the Israeli military - still ironically called the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) - to wipe out dozens of Lebanese villages and not feel morally restricted during the war were heralded as patriots. Those who perpetrate war crimes are considered "men of peace". The Big Brother is persecuting Bishara because "war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength."

What might be bewildering in recent developments is Israel's disregard for the impact that these policies might have on its future. Israel has always discriminated against the Palestinian minority, isolated it from its larger Arab milieu and employed a multi-layered control system. Since October 2000, however, Israel has been moving rapidly towards a collision by continuously pushing this minority further into the corner. Most of the minority's leaders were incessantly interrogated and at times physically assaulted by the police; Ra'ed Salah, a prominent religious and political leader, was imprisoned; several laws further restricted political speech and participation; Bishara faced two political trials; and more Arab houses have been demolished. More persecution of Bishara and his party will take Israel one step closer toward collision with its Palestinian citizens.

Israel is in effect presenting Azmi Bishara with two similar "options": to end up as either a Kafkaesque or an Orwellian protagonist. The former was executed, the latter was brainwashed and forced to betray his world waiting for an impending execution.

Meanwhile Bishara, as a genuine civil rights leader, is resisting the attempt to drag him into Kafka's Trial by Big Brother and his Thought Police. He courageously holds his ground: "We will not be intimidated. We will not bow to permanent servitude in the land of our ancestors or to being severed from our natural connections to the Arab world."

Nimer Sultany is a Palestinian citizen of Israel and currently a doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School.

He has worked as a human rights lawyer in the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and as the head of the political monitoring project
at Mada al-Carmel (the Arab centre for applied social research).

Talking surveillance - What would Orwell say today?

Related

Big Brother: CCTV cameras chastize anti-social Brits

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Thursday, April 05, 2007

What would Orwell say today?

It is truly staggering, I think, the manner in which creeping surveillance and the infrastructure for a genuine Orwellian nightmare is so casually implemented by the Government. The news that the experiment of CCTV systems which have operators that can talk to you through speaker systems is coming to London from Middlesborough is such an example.

We are told by the politicians and Home Secretary that our fears about civil liberties are unfounded. That it is only people who have done things wrongs that should fear the move. This fallacy is now the standard line in fact from anyone in Government. Nothing to fear, nothing to hide.

The problem, as I have said before, is that the argument misrepresents the matter of civil liberties. The issue against these systems is actually about autonomy over ourselves. Where we are, and where we go, is something that we decide as individuals. Crucially though the state exists because of us, not despite of us. The widespread use of CCTV - which has made us the most watched country in the world - has shifted that relationship in a fundamental way.

The increase now of CCTV systems in which operators can talk to those they are watching with a booming voice on loud speakers, introduces another shift in our relationship with the state. More importantly it is another piece of technology pitched in the isolation of its supposed benefits without consideration of the total infrastructure we are building.

Democracy is a delicate thing, simply because we have managed to maintain it here does not mean that we cannot possibly become something else which is much darker in a moment. A piece of bad legislation, like the Regulatory Powers Act which was proposed a year or so ago could still be introduced which would provide some future - yet to be determined tyrant - with the ability to take over.

John Reid may say that these CCTV systems will help fight crime, but before we mess with our liberties we should make them always subject to the Stalin test. Would Stalin have liked the technology we are implementing? Would he have found it useful? If the answer is yes then to proceed anyway whilst saying "it could never happen here" is simply folly.

How long is it before we find ourselves being told that in order to tackle obesity we must all take part in physical exercise organised by those in CCTV control centres watching and counting our aerobics? When the reality starts to imitate the dystopian world of literature we should start to worry and be very vocal about it.

Orwell at Guantanamo

By Eugene Robinson

Tuesday, April 3, 2007; A23

Here's what the Bush administration has done to the values, traditions and honor of the United States of America: An accused terrorist claims he confessed to heinous crimes so that agents of the U.S. government would stop torturing him, and no one is shocked or even surprised. There's reason to believe, in fact, that what the suspect says about torture is probably true.

There's also reason to doubt that the suspect -- Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, held in U.S. custody without charges for more than four years -- is the Zelig-like innocent bystander he claims to be. But we can't be sure, because George W. Bush disgraced himself and his country by ordering extrajudicial kidnappings of suspects in the war on terror, indefinite secret detention and interrogation by "alternative" methods that the civilized world calls torture.

On Friday, the Defense Department released a heavily redacted transcript of a March 14 hearing, held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to determine whether Nashiri should be classified as an "enemy combatant." I apologize for resorting to cliche, but the only way to describe this amazing, infuriating document is to call it Orwellian. Reading it gives you the chills.

None of the members of the military tribunal sitting in judgment is named. The officer serving as Nashiri's "personal representative" likewise is not named. Unclassified evidence is presented in summary -- an unnamed "recorder" reads a document quoting statements by witnesses that attest to Nashiri's involvement in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, in which 224 people died, and the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, which killed 17 U.S. sailors. The witnesses are not present, so, of course, there is no opportunity to challenge their statements.

Nashiri's representative, a lieutenant commander in the Navy, presents a stunning response: "The Detainee states that he was tortured into confession and once he made a confession his captors were happy and they stopped torturing him. Also, the Detainee states that he made up stories during the torture in order to get it to stop."

The response states that Nashiri confessed under torture not only to the East Africa and USS Cole bombings but also to the 2002 bombing of the French oil tanker Limburg, some bombings and rocket attacks in Saudi Arabia, a plan to bomb American ships in the Persian Gulf, and "a plan to hijack a plane and crash it into a ship." Oh, and he also told investigators that Osama bin Laden had acquired a nuclear bomb.

"I just said those things to make the people happy," Nashiri tells the tribunal. "They were very happy when I told them those things."

One gets the sense that he would have confessed to the murders of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls if that would have made his interrogators happy.

Nashiri denies having anything to do with terrorism, although he acknowledges taking money from bin Laden. He paints himself -- unconvincingly, in my view -- as a simple merchant who makes poor choices in friends and has a habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Navy captain serving as president of the tribunal gets around to asking Nashiri about the alleged torture. Who did it? They were Americans, Nashiri says. When did it happen? "From the time I was arrested five years ago, they have been torturing me."

Only George Orwell could have written what comes next in the transcript. The following is what we are allowed to know of Nashiri's response when asked how he was tortured:

"What else do I want to say? [REDACTED]. Many things happened. There were doing so many things. What else did they did? [REDACTED]. They do so many things. So so many things. What else did they did? [REDACTED]. After that another method of torture began. [REDACTED]. They used to ask me questions and the investigator after that used to laugh. And, I used to answer the answer that I knew. And, if I didn't reply what I heard, he used to [REDACTED]. So many things happened. I don't in summary, that's basically what happened."

I guess that's how the U.S. government extracts information from detainees: [REDACTED].

The Pentagon told reporters that Nashiri's claims were censored because of "national security concerns" about disclosing where detainees were held and how they were treated. But that would be unnecessary if Nashiri were lying, since no harm could come from disclosing a bunch of made-up stories. The censorship makes sense only if some or all of what Nashiri alleges is true.

But we're not permitted to know what he alleges.

Orwell had it figured out: "Ignorance is Strength."

Beyond Orwell and Kafka

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

By Gabriele Zamparini

Former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet died this week. He won’t be missed.

Now imagine Augusto Pinochet visiting the United States while he was carrying out torture and mass murdering in Chile. Imagine the “largest coalition of peace and justice organizations in the U.S.” welcoming the ruthless murderer, “it is our pleasure to welcome you in the United States”.

This is what indeed happened this past summer when United for Peace and Justice’s National Coordinator Leslie Cagan wrote an open letter to puppet Iraqi Prime Minister Al-Maliki.

Dear Prime Minister Al-Maliki,

On behalf of United for Peace and Justice, the largest coalition of peace and justice organizations in the U.S., which includes more than 1,400 national and local groups united in opposition to the U.S. war in Iraq, it is our pleasure to welcome you in the United States.

Of course it would be wrong and ungenerous the comparison; next to Al-Maliki and his sectarian death squads government, Pinochet would seem a boy scout.

Intellectuals and activists of the Imperial anti-war movement started immediately after the invasion to legitimize the “supreme international crime” by supporting the so-called “political process”, a Trojan horse studied to destroy Iraq and force its people into a civil war. Those notorious sectarian Iraqi elections, based on religion and ethnicity, far from being forced on the US by the non-violent resistance of some clerics, were part of the plan to install a quisling government, getting the approval of the vultures and hyenas of the international community and preparing the bases for the eventual partition of the country.

Finally democracy has landed on Iraq; too bad for those 655,000 deaths who didn’t wait to enjoy the apocalypse. The slaughtering is going on with hundreds of people killed every day, ethnic cleansing, tortures, collective punishment, millions of Iraqis displaced and a country waiting to be wiped off the map. God bless America.

The Imperial Democrats got back the Imperial Congress. On Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 Michael Moore published on his website LANDSLIDE! ...a big thanks from Michael Moore

Friends,

You did it! We did it! The impossible has happened: A majority of Americans have soundly and forcefully removed Bush's party from control of the House of Representatives and the Republicans have also, miraculously, been tossed out of running our United States Senate. This was done because the American people wanted to make two things crystal clear: End this war, and stop Mr. Bush from doing any more damage to this country we love. That is what this election was about. Nothing else. Just that. And it's a message that has sent shock waves throughout Washington -- and a note of hope around this troubled world. (…)

The Washington Post clearly illustrated the “note of hope” a few days later. Democratic Senator Harry M. Reid, who was just elected Senate majority leader, “said, one of the first acts of the new Democratic Congress will be a $75 billion boost to the military budget to try to get the Army's diminished units back into combat shape.”

Michael Moore goes on:

“But let's take a day to rejoice and revel in a rare victory for our side -- the side that doesn't believe in unprovoked invasions of other countries. This is your day, my friends. You have worked hard for it. I can't tell you how proud I am to count all of you as part of the greater American mainstream we now occupy.”

The “side that doesn't believe in unprovoked invasions of other countries” would be the Democratic Party? History, from Vietnam to Yugoslavia and Iraq, really didn’t teach anything to the United States of Amnesia. “A woman, for the first time in our history, will be Speaker of the House”, the hero of the Imperial anti-war movement continues. One wonders if that should be read as good news. The woman is Nancy Pelosi, a liberal Democrat from the liberal San Francisco. Back in 2005 Joshua Frank gave a fair portrait of the “Granite Lady”, as her website describes Pelosi

"There are those who contend that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is all about Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza," Pelosi said as she rallied AIPAC loyalists. "This is absolute nonsense. In truth, the history of the conflict is not over occupation, and never has been: it is over the fundamental right of Israel to exist." (…) "One thing, however is unchanged," Pelosi added. "America's commitment to the safety and security of the state of Israel is unwavering. America and Israel share an unbreakable bond: in peace and war; and in prosperity and in hardship."

In spite of an Imperial anti-war movement in denial (at best, when not actively cooperating or even part of the Jewish Lobby) on the reasons that brought the American troops to invade and occupy Iraq, the winners of this shameful scandal have always been before our eyes, only could we look at the Middle East geopolitical panorama with an honest open mind. Remember what happened on 7 June 1981?

On November 20, 2006, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported:

On his way home from Los Angeles, the prime minister [Israeli PM Ehud Olmert] "calmed" the reporters - and perhaps even himself - by saying there is no danger of U.S. President George W. Bush accepting the expected recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton panel, and attempting to move Syria out of the axis of evil and into a coalition to extricate America from Iraq. The prime minister hopes the Jewish lobby can rally a Democratic majority in the new Congress to counter any diversion from the status quo on the Palestinians.

“No blood for oil” doesn’t tell the whole story; how much more blood for the old Zionist project of Greater Israel?

While its two neighbors have been invaded and occupied by the Empire, Iran’s regime is holding an international conference questioning the Holocaust of Jews during WWII.

Using an unspeakable tragedy like the genocide of Jews (when will we also remember the others? Roma People, homosexuals, etc?) by the Nazi and their collaborators for political ends is always abominable, both when it comes from Israel and the Jewish lobby around the world and when it comes - like in this case - from Iran, a country that claims to fight the Israeli influence in the Middle East.

The Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been using inflammatory language against Israel and the United States to win over the Arab public opinion and the international left. In reality, Iran – a non-Arab country – has been spreading its influence in the Middle East for years. But both the Arab public opinion and the international left should take a closer look at Iran’s regime, both at home and its role in the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq.

While its propaganda has given ammunitions to Israel and the United States, Iran has been having a central role in the apocalypse inflicted to Iraq, supporting the American installed sectarian, quisling Iraqi government and its militias responsible for mass murdering and ethnic cleansing. And don’t let fool yourself on the “support” of the Palestinian cause by the Iranian regime. The Iranian supported sectarian militias operating in Iraq have been persecuting and killing many members of the Palestinian community in Iraq since the occupation started in 2003.

As I wrote somewhere else, four hyenas, the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel and Iran have destroyed a country that could have been a power in the region and a model for the Arab world. The vultures of the international community have been cooperating and watching the bloodbath waiting to share the rich carcass. The control of the energy resources is just part of the whole picture; Iraq had to be destroyed to allow the so-called reshaping of the Middle East. The notorious “political process” has been a formidable Trojan horse that forced the Iraqi People into a civil war. Far from being a failure, the main mission of this bloody project has been accomplished. Iraq as we knew it has gone, probably forever.

The supreme international crime, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, a defenseless country that had never attacked the United States, that did not have any weapons of mass destruction, that did not have any ties to al-Qaida, that had no connection to the September 11 attacks, is the major scandal of our times, a scandal that would need an epic poet to be told. But since we live beyond Orwell and Kafka’s times, let’s read what Philip Martin, a 21-year-old US marine who spent 7 months in the al-Anbar province of Iraq has to tell us:

Saddam was convicted and sentenced to death for killing 143 Shiites who conspired to assassinate him. (I know all you "patriotic" Americans would be calling for the heads of anyone who conspired to assassinate supreme leader Bush). And yet we spend upwards of 1 trillion dollars and nearing 3,000 lives to help these Iraqis when they don't even want us there. Not to mention we don't have the legal justification to be there. I guess we should wait around for the omnipotent W Bush to decide who we should use our superpowerdom to help next. It's about time to throw him and the rest of the fascists out. Moreover it's about time to start educating Americans about their past and history, and letting them know that imperialistic leaders are not what the founders of this great country wanted.

Political cuttlefish spew the ink of obfuscation: Surrender of language risks loss of destiny

-Orville Schell
Sunday, December 10, 2006

"Political language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind," wrote George Orwell in his prescient essay "Politics and the English Language."

Beset as we Americans are by a misguided war, errant governance, unaddressed environmental threats and growing social injustice, it is perhaps easy to downplay the importance of language in solving our problems in a rationale manner.

While Orwell became familiar with the manipulation and corruption of language through the fascist and communist movements of the 1930s, he would most certainly be discouraged by the degree to which mutant parlance has advanced since he wrote his celebrated essay 50 years ago. Borrowing from the commercial advertisers and PR "consultants," politicians now spin, distort and lie to sell themselves with ever greater impunity, creating deceptive virtual worlds of pseudo reality in the process.

In the last few years, the wanton corruption of the meaning of words in political discourse has reached a perilous point where it is difficult to take the utterance of any public figure at face value. The Bush administration's tortured defense of the Iraq war effort leading up to the congressional elections could serve as Exhibit A.

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity," Orwell continued. "When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were to long words or exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."

Orwell was not the first historical figure to point out how, when a people lose control of their language, they may also lose control of their destiny.

In observing the downfall of Athens during the Peloponnesian Wars, Thucydides described a similar decline: "To fit in with the change of events, words too had to change," he wrote as Athens launched the misbegotten Sicilian campaign that led to its downfall.

"What used to be described as thoughtless acts of aggression was now regarded as the courage that one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was taken to be just an attempt to disguise one's unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides was taken to mean that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was taken as the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was viewed perfectly legitimate self-defense. ... Indeed, most people were more willing to call villainy rather than cleverness simple-minded honesty. They are proud of the first quality and ashamed of the latter."

The avalanche of corrupted and abused language and sophistry that has been generated by the Bush administration and the Republican Party has become our contemporary "cuttlefish ink." Consider the following terms born out of the Iraq War:

Camp Victory: The name of the huge U.S. military base at Baghdad International Airport might now be more accurately described as Camp Defeat.

Extraordinary renditions: A banality that hides the repugnant reality that allows suspects to be kidnapped, spirited abroad, interrogated and even tortured in a foreign country without any due process.

Information extraction: A euphemism that has come to be synonymous with the torturing of suspects into giving confessions.

Waterboarding: A term that while it seems to be describing some harmless recreation sport -- perhaps a cross between skateboarding and surfing -- is actually a cruel and unusual form of punishment.

The Healthy Forests Restoration Act: The name of a piece of legislation that was in large part an invitation for the wood products timber industry to exploit the nation's forestlands.

Clear Skies legislation: A law that was actually a watered-down substitute for a different piece of legislation that would have gone much further in limiting dangerous levels of acid and mercury emissions from power plants.

With regularity, such reassuringly positive-sounding names have often been deceptively used to make their darker purposes more palatable so that the real situation is obscured by a linguistic misnomer calculated to confuse the public.

And then, of course, there is the bait-and-switch ruse of renaming things in such high-speed, serial fashion that finally the public grows so utterly confused and bewildered that cynicism about language is the only plausible reaction. Recently, "benchmarks" for determining progress in Iraq have become "timetables" and "milestones," even as the Bush administration denies that any such measures -- or pressures -- were being imposed by the United States on the so-called Iraqi government.

Indeed, so far out of alignment with any reasonable interpretation of reality has Bush administration language become that it is almost as if we as citizens were now forced to live in two parallel universes, one real and one delusional.

As words have lost their descriptive power, we have suffered a break in the normative order. Our whole process of describing, thinking, discussing and acting has been corrupted at its source. Indeed, it is hard to know how to break out of this self-perpetuating feedback loop characterized by spin and deception so that political discourse actually conveys truth and meaning.

"If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought," Orwell continued. "To think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers."

So advanced is the degradation of language into artifice, and so confused have so many people become over the verbal deception heaped on them by political leaders, that if our republic is to survive, it is a truly urgent matter that an antidote be found.

When a disciple asked Confucius, an itinerant philosopher of the sixth century B.C., what he would do first if a king were to entrust him with a kingdom, he did not hesitate to say: "My first task would be to rectify the names." Explaining what he meant to his perplexed disciple, he said: "If the names are not correct and do not match realities, language has no object. If language has no object, action becomes impossible -- and therefore all human affairs disintegrate."

One perhaps hopes, doubtless in vain, that our leaders might consult the works of the great Chinese sage on the need for language and reality to be in sync, read Thucydidices about how Athenian democracy fell, or allow themselves to be reminded by George Orwell that the debasement of language is the equivalent of encouraging mutations in the basic building blocks of life to occur.

The warnings are there, if we care to heed them, that when a country's democratic leaders lose the ability to describe reality accurately and in a believable way, its people become handicapped in their quest to understand and solve their problems.

Orville Schell is dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.

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Masters of 'doublethink'

Monday, November 20, 2006

George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, about a thought-controlling totalitarian state, is built around a never-ending war involving the book's three superstates, with two allied powers fighting against the third. The allied states occasionally split with each other and new alliances are formed. Each time this happens, history is rewritten to convince the people that the new alliances were always there, using the principles of "doublethink". According to the novel, doublethink is: "The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. ... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth."

This description sounds remarkably like the leaders of the unfree world talking about their "war on terror" which, naturally, means precisely the opposite. That is not a problem for Bush or Blair because for them, just as Orwell wrote, the "lie is always one leap ahead of the truth". So, for example, in Afghanistan, where 20,000 NATO troops are destroying villages and mosques, as well as hearts and minds, in their fruitless war with the Taliban, Blair can claim: "Here in this extraordinary piece of desert is where the future of world security in the early 21st Century is going to be played out." Perhaps Bush and Blair are trying to outdo the 100 years war fought between France and England from 1337 until 1453. As things stand, their war of terror is certain to last at least 30 years, according to a security think tank. The Oxford Research Group report published today says recent political changes in the US would make "very little difference" to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan because both major parties were locked into the current strategy. Written by Professor Paul Rogers, ORG's global security consultant and professor of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford, the report analyses the past year of events in Iraq and the Middle East, looking at how, in a classic example of doublethink, the "war on terror" had transformed into what has been called the "Long War" by the Bush administration. ORG’s Executive Director, Dr. John Sloboda, added: "There is a growing consensus among those who have actually seen service in Iraq that the coalition presence is inflaming the problem, rather than being part of the solution. The carnage of the last six months has eroded any lingering doubt that the coalition must leave, and leave soon." Cue more doublethink, this time from priceless brain of George W. Bush. About Iraq, which has all but disintegrated in the wake of the US-led invasion of 2003, Bush said at the weekend: ''We tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task in Iraq is going to take awhile. We'll succeed unless we quit.'' A new film for The Guardian/BBC by war photographer Sean Smith shows how hollow this claim is. Bush was, by the way, speaking in Vietnam, where the United States suffered its greatest-ever military defeat. The obvious comparison with Iraq escaped him precisely because it is nearer the truth than his doublethink.

Paul Feldman, communications editor

Bush's Only Real Victory

November 22, 2006

He vanquished American liberty

By Paul Craig Roberts


George Orwell warned us, but what American would have expected that in the opening years of the 21st century the United States would become a country in which lies and deception by the president and vice president were the basis for a foreign policy of war and aggression, and in which indefinite detention without charges, torture, and spying on citizens without warrants have displaced the Bill of Rights and the U.S. Constitution?

If anyone had predicted that the election of George W. Bush to the presidency would result in an American police state and illegal wars of aggression, he would have been dismissed as a lunatic.

What American ever would have thought that any U.S. president and attorney general would defend torture or that a Republican Congress would pass a bill legalizing torture by the executive branch and exempting the executive branch from the Geneva Conventions?

What American ever would have expected the U.S. Congress to accept the president's claim that he is above the law?

What American could have imagined that if such crimes and travesties occurred, nothing would be done about them and that the media and opposition party would be largely silent?

Except for a few columnists, who are denounced by "conservatives" as traitors for defending the Bill of Rights, the defense of U.S. civil liberty has been limited to the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch. The few federal judges who have refused to genuflect before the Bush police state are denounced by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as a "grave threat" to U.S. security. Vice President Richard Cheney called a federal judge's ruling against the Bush regime's illegal and unconstitutional warrantless surveillance program "an indefensible act of judicial overreaching."

Brainwashed "conservatives" are so accustomed to denouncing federal judges for "judicial activism" that Cheney's charge of overreach goes down smoothly. Vast percentages of the American public are simply unconcerned that their liberty can be revoked at the discretion of a police or military officer and that they can be held without evidence, trial, or access to an attorney and tortured until they confess to whatever charge their torturers wish to impose.

Americans believe that such things can only happen to "real terrorists," despite the overwhelming evidence that most of the Bush regime's detainees have no connections to terrorism.

When these points are made to fellow citizens, the reply is usually that "I'm doing nothing wrong. I have nothing to fear."

Why, then, did the Founding Fathers write the Constitution and the Bill of Rights?

American liberties are the result of an 800-year struggle by the English people to make law a shield of the people instead of a weapon in the hands of government. For centuries English-speaking peoples have understood that governments cannot be trusted with unaccountable power. If the Founding Fathers believed it was necessary to tie down a very weak and limited central government with the Constitution and Bill of Rights, these protections are certainly more necessary now that our government has grown in size, scope, and power beyond the imagination of the Founding Fathers.

But, alas, "law-and-order conservatives" have been brainwashed for decades that civil liberties are unnecessary interferences with the ability of police to protect us from criminals. Americans have forgot that we need protection from government more than we need protection from criminals. Once we cut down civil liberty so that police may better pursue criminals and terrorists, where do we stand when government turns on us?

This is the famous question asked by Sir Thomas More in the play A Man for All Seasons. The answer is that we stand naked, unprotected by law. It is an act of the utmost ignorance and stupidity to assume that only criminals and terrorists will stand unprotected.

Americans should be roused to fury that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Vice President Cheney have condemned the defense of American civil liberty as "a grave threat to U.S. security." This blatant use of an orchestrated and propagandistic fear to crate a "national security" wedge against the Bill of Rights is an impeachable offense.

Send Orwellian congresscritters a gift

http://ministryoflove.wordpress.com

The goal of this blog is to collect 315 copies of Orwell’s 1984 and send them to every member of Congress who voted for the Military Commissions Act of 2006.
We can be reached at unpersons@gmail.com

Big Brother is watching you.

Orwell's Amerika

Cops turn extremely violent on peaceful demonstrators

The story and ugly video evidence:

http://www.houstonjanitors.org/

I noticed the cops were mostly white and the demonstrators not. Maybe the headline should read, "Orwell's AmeriKKKa".