Caught In The Web

George Bush's Ideology Is Downright Orwellian

By verne mcdonald
Publish Date: 17-Jun-2004
http://www.straight.com/content.cfm?id=3368

Some 55 years ago, George Orwell was near death and his novel Nineteen 
Eighty-Four was being prepared for publication in the U.S. On being 
informed of plans to present his book in North America as an attack on 
socialism, Orwell dictated a statement to his English publisher, Fredric 
Warburg.

"The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasize that the 
English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else, and 
that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere," 
Orwell rasped to Warburg from fluid-filled lungs through a throat that 
had been damaged by a bullet in the Spanish Civil War more than a decade 
before, when Orwell was fighting alongside anarchists.

"Specifically the danger lies in the structure imposed on Socialist and 
on Liberal capitalist countries by the necessity to prepare for total 
war....But danger lies also in the acceptance of a totalitarian outlook 
by intellectuals of all colours." Orwell predicted the coming 
totalitarian ideologies of our age would be careful to avoid association 
with those that had just caused so much destruction in the Second World 
War and would come up with new names for themselves.

"The name suggested in Nineteen Eighty-Four is of course Ingsoc [English 
Socialism, in the 'newspeak' of the novel], but in practice a wide range 
of choices is open. In the U.S.A. the phrase 'Americanism' or 'hundred 
per cent Americanism' is suitable and the adjective is as totalitarian 
as anyone could wish."

It really is too bad that Orwell never had the opportunity to alter his 
novel in order to make it more understandable to the people of the U.S. 
by changing "Ingsoc" to "Amercorp", but his provisional designation of 
"hundred per cent Americanism" still resonates after more than half a 
century and likely would have no trouble getting an endorsement from 
U.S. President George Bush. There is plenty of evidence that the U.S. 
government conforms to the philosophy of Orwell's Ingsoc and sees the 
purpose of power as being to perpetuate, increase, and exercise power 
for its own sake.

That is not exactly the way Bush sees it, of course. He is trying to 
create economic opportunities for the world's people under the 
misapprehension that the same economic smoke and mirrors that subsidized 
his privileged way through Yale University and a rather disastrous 
high-level business career can also provide clean water and medical care 
for the shanty dwellers on the fringes of cities in Asia and Africa. The 
rationalization behind such nonsense comes from the intellectual demon 
that laid waste to a quarter of a billion human lives in the 20th 
century: ideology, which is the belief that there is a single, 
indivisible, and final answer to all questions.

Ideology is hard to distinguish from religion, and it is no surprise 
that the ideology of "hundred per cent Americanism"--usually termed 
these days as "free enterprise" or "the market system"--has (after some 
groping following the fall of the complementary ideology of Stalinism) 
found an enemy among the Islamists. Without enemies, ideologies always 
look a bit silly. Islamist extremism is a fine example.

So we are either with Bush or against him, and we are all supposed to 
ignore the simple facts that exclusive ideologies have never been 
long-lasting nor just, that things change, life goes on, and that the 
U.S.--with 10,000 or so gun-related deaths per year--is hardly the acme 
and culmination of human progress so far. We are supposed to believe 
this is an action movie, or a World Wrestling Entertainment match, that 
will be over soon. Here is good, there is evil, and when the evil 
villains are properly pounded and disposed of, the world will be a happy 
place, with plenty of guns for all. And the widely available weapons 
will only be used on irretrievable criminals, never by them. Oh, yeah.

I hesitate to charge that the U.S. government has become so influenced 
by its country's entertainment industry that it thinks it can solve all 
terrorism problems forever before the final reel rolls. But it certainly 
did not anticipate Iraq becoming such a source of difficulty after 
Saddam Hussein was overthrown. It also was surprised to encounter a lot 
of trouble with free, democratic people saying they don't think their 
principles are being upheld when thousands of their civilians are killed 
or maimed.

The U.S. has declared war on poverty, and on drugs, and lost both times 
because it was fighting aspects of human existence without addressing 
the roots of the human experiences it considered problems. It can win 
the war against terrorism only by preventing the birth of potential 
terrorists among the disadvantaged, the dispossessed, the dissatisfied, 
and the disenfranchised for a generation or two, and it is not likely 
the U.S. will stumble on the concept of granting advantage, possession, 
satisfaction, and meaningful democracy to those people it despises. We 
have to hope that the U.S. soon, rather than later, learns the limits of 
ideology. As Orwell pointed out, the English-speaking peoples are not 
innately better than anyone else.
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