The return of '1984'

By H.D.S. Greenway

IF YOU TAKE something to read at the beach this summer make sure it is
not one of George Orwell's books. The comparison with current events
will ruin your day.

In what was then the futuristic, nightmare world of ''1984," written
in 1949, Orwell introduced the concepts of ''newspeak,"
''doublethink," and ''the mutability of the past," all concepts that
seem to be alive and well in 2005, half a century after Orwell's
death. In the ever-changing rationale of why we went to war in Iraq,
we can imagine ourselves working in Orwell's ''Ministry of Truth," in
which ''reality control" is used to ensure that ''the lie passed into
history and became the truth."

And what about the Bush administration's insistence that all is going
well in Iraq? In the Ministry of Truth, statistics are adjustable to
suit politics -- ''merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense
for another," Orwell wrote. ''Most of the material that you were
dealing with had no connection to anything in the real world, not even
the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics
were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in the
rectified version." Welcome to the Iraq war, Mr. Orwell.

What of Donald Rumsfeld's newspeak, or was it doublethink, saying that
''no detention facility in the history of warfare has been more
transparent" than Guantanamo? We have the FBI's word for it that
prisoners were chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor,
left for 18 to 24 hours with no food and no water, left to defecate
and urinate on themselves.

The deaths by torture in Abu Ghraib and Afghanistan sound very much
like what happens in Orwell's fictional torture chamber: Room 101.

He might as well have been writing about the Bush administration's
redefinition of torture when he wrote about using ''logic against
logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it."

In Orwell's profoundly pessimistic view: ''Political language . . . is
designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to
give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

                                 [...]

Full article at Raiders News Updates
http://www.raidersnewsupdate.com/lead-story158.htm


Cheers, Steve..

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