Living in Orwellian times, no doubt

Apparently, I'm not the only one who sees the connection between the events of today and George Orwell's 1984 (see previous posts). A recent op-ed piece in the Boston Globe by H.D.S. Greenway, titled The Return of '1984', also makes this comparison. Here's the first several paragraphs:

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, sayingthat ''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."

Perhaps, the mainstream is beginning to wake up, Dorothy? The question now becomes whether or not we will wake and rise up in enough force to stop the Proletariat from completely subjugating the population, as they had in Orwell's 1984. I don't know, though, I think we're still a long way from moving, from acting on our collective conscience.

I heard on Democracy Now's War and Peace Report, according to a recent poll, that some 37% of Americans now believe that George Bush should be impeached, if it was determined that he lied to the American public about the reasons for invading Iraq. [my italics] My first response to that was "the Bush Administration has already admitted that they lied about weapons of mass destruction. Now, the Downing Street memos clearly show that they fixed intelligence to suit their plan to go to war." What the heck are we waiting for, Alice? The cheshire cat to morph into a full blown fascist dictator?

We brought impeachment proceedings against Nixon for spying on his opponents, we actually impeached and tried Clinton for lying about a sexual tryst, and we can't seem to draw more than 37% support for impeaching a president who is now responsible for murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent people -- our own soldiers, Iraquis and Afghanis -- to suit the neo-con geo-political agenda. What's wrong with this picture, Neo?

Now, here's the key. We can't just impeach Bush; we must also impeach Dick Cheney. What I fear more than leaving Bush in power is Cheney coming to power. I believe that Cheney is truly the brains behind this whole endeavor, and to give him full power of the presidency would be like putting a fox in the hen house. Things will get worse, not better, and the agenda will continue.