Book Review: 1984

It is not hard to imagine what life at Oceania might have been like with the ever watchful eye of “Big Brother”. Allow yourself for a moment to suspend your disbelief and think of our Cheney-Bush junta as our very own “Big Brother”. With careful, critical observation one finds an overwhelming comparison between our governing few and that of Orwell’s Inner Party. “Big Brother’s” role in the novel was a symbolic one, a representation of the party, disguised in a name that hints of kinship, an affirmation of the peoples will, and an ever present open threat. Yet, despite the omnipotent presence of “Big Brother”, he has never been seen, nor does anyone actually remember how he fell into power. I, like hundreds of thousands of Americans, remain baffled has to how our own George Bush climbed into his high chair of power because neither I nor the voters gave him a silver spoon. And there he sits, George Bush, our great American figure, the face of the people, our ambassador to the world, throwing temper tantrums and making a mess of world relations.

Winston’s and Julia’s Inner party is not too different from ours. I am curious as to how despite the obvious conflicts of interest, has the Bush administration come to hold the positions that they do. It seems that the web spun by the Cheney-Bush junta, has only benefited them and the companies that stroke their egos and fatten their wallets. Cheney was CEO of oil dealing Halliburton Industries. Halliburton has already been awarded a potentially lucrative contract to resurrect the Iraqi oilfields after the war. Luckily, when he was nominated for the vice-presidency, Cheney choose to keep his Halliburton Stock. (Moore, 2001, p. 17) Our Secretary of State, Mr. Collin Powell’s son, who pushed for the AOL/Time Warner merger that made his father four million dollars, has been named chairman for the FCC. (Moore, 2001, p. 17) Kenneth L. Lay is our shadow advisor to the President and head of Enron, a one hundred million dollar electricity trader, who has close ties to the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. (Moore, 2001, p. 24) It is not difficult to continue to provide a list of the questionable profits and financial ties of the administration nor is it to see that they are the ones drinking wine as we wince and try to swallow our Victory Gin with a chaser of lies.

The USA Patriot Act allows surveillance of U.S. citizens with hardly any judicial supervision. American phones can now be tapped, list of numbers called are no longer private information held by the provider, and the route we choose to take on the Information superhighway might be one with a C.I.A. agent in the passenger seat. The Homeland Security Act contains provisions that also build on law enforcement's ability to peek at e-mail, monitor credit card purchases, bank transactions and travel patterns and shield its own activities from scrutiny. The “home of the free” slowly transforms into an Orwellian police state of constant vigilance. It seems that every where one now turns, Big Brother is watching as our civil liberties come in question and executive powers continue to expand.

“The Horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in.” (Orwell, 1949, pg 16) That was Winston Smith’s sentiment regarding the popular opinion of the misinformed; the blind being guided by the money blinded, reminiscent of lemmings. The America that has caused the fall of Leninism has in turn developed its own movement, Lemmingism. It works in the following manner. First the people are subjected to mass hysteria due to a constant flow of lies and propaganda. Then we declare an “unavoidable” war on the “enemy”. In the book Oceania switched enemies, Eastasia for Eurasia; America switched Afghanistan for Iraq. Now that the war, or rather the bombing, is over perhaps they will give the “enemy” a new face in a different region and begin all over again. I remember my mother’s metamorphic transition into a Lemminist.

We were talking over the phone and I was sharing my stand on Operation Iraqi Freedom. That’s when my mother interrupted me and said, “Saddam Hussein has to pay for what he did to us on nine-eleven”. A sense of disbelief took hold of me as it dawned that this was in fact the feeling of many people world wide, which like the citizens of Oceania had just undergone a processes of doublethink. Had they all forgotten that it was Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban, not the peoples of Iraq who had ownership of that original sin and even then the facts were unclear? It was all on the televisions stations across the country, was it not? Surely, I must be mistaken because if we were after Saddam’s regimen due to terrorist threats, why would the name of the operation by implication have dealt more with the citizens of Iraq’s well being and not U.S. endeavors?

Is our nation as a collective being manipulated into a group of Doublethinkers? Are we being coerced into a “War is Peace” mentality? There seems to be confusion regarding what freedom actually entails by those who seek to bring it in the form of bombardments with depleted Uranium ammunition. There also exists an ongoing process of doublespeak in relation to reconstruction in the obvious form of destruction. Is the reality of “Operation Iraqi Freedom” not a form of doublespeak, considering what it actually means to the Iraqi peoples? As the rich continue to make assurances that they will get richer by protecting the avenues of American over-consumption, people world wide seem needier of freedom from corporate dictatorship facilitated and enabled by military occupation and war.

George Orwell

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