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from
TheFreeThoughtProject Website
Though other fictional dystopias could
similarly elicit comparisons to the dark turn taken by American
empire, aspects of 1984's creepy authoritarian nightmare ring
all-too-true.
Though it analogizes Russia's mercurial relationship with Nazi Germany, the same volatility aptly fits U.S. involvement in the Middle East - where, though propaganda would purport a decisive enemy, the truth remains far murkier.
A constant state of undeclared but
active war rules foreign policy - driven almost exclusively by the
war machine's profiteering from plundering of foreign lands' natural
resources.
But all of this war requires the U.S.
government maintain support from the public - and what better way to
win them over than appeal to fear of the Other? When John Brady Kiesling, a career diplomat, tendered his letter of resignation to Secretary of State Colin Powell, he piercingly criticized the warped factors driving both American domestic and foreign policy surrounding the needless war in Iraq - with barbs unfortunately equally applicable today:
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, it became immediately evident American government had its jackpot ticket for war in perpetuity - the only necessary condition being wool sufficiently ambiguous to cover the public's eyes in fear.
Since that time, under the guise of national security, Big Brother-like domestic surveillance has become so thoroughly entrenched in our lives as to be virtually ignored by the general populace.
As a necessary and insidious outgrowth of massive spying, the government attempts to cultivate fearful citizen-spies, by employing the not-at-all ominous If You See Something, Say Something catchphrase-titled program.
Of course, the government arm responsible for this and other programs - the overarching Department of Homeland Security - seems ripped directly from the pages of 1984.
This observation aptly summarizes U.S. war propaganda in its entirety - with a constant government-backed corporate media blitz surrounding the war on terror shaping public perception of what constitutes terrorism, and who, a terrorist.
Betting on Americans' cognitive dissonance, historical amnesia, and tacit acceptance of spoon-fed, baseless patriotism, the government doesn't often find barriers to inculcating a blanket support for obtuse military missions.
War so saturates every aspect of life, when the Pentagon announced last week forces had already been on the ground in Yemen for two weeks, the public instead trained its focus to the latest installation of Captain America.
And never mind the detail that ground support of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in Yemen would be allocated for fighting al-Qaeda - a different faction of the same group the U.S. currently employs as somehow less dangerous terrorists to assist deposing Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.
'Moderate rebels' is thus the Newspeak term for terrorists the American empire finds usable - making terrorist and terrorism utterly conditional terms.
Of course, the government failed to explain how a war on the concept of terrorism should play out if that terrorism depends on circumstance - or, more accurately, whim - but once instituted, paranoia surrounding the word opened the floodgates for battling terrorism inside the United States.
Exactly as Orwell cautioned in 1984 - and precisely as Kiesling's foreboding resignation letter predicted it would.
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
How does a government persuade its citizens their enslavement would be desirable and beneficial?
Frame it as necessary protection against any threat to their fundamental security - and implement more contentious aspects of said servitude in palatable microsteps.
Fear of terrorism - or, more directly, xenophobia - constitutes sufficient reason for many to cast off basic human rights through increasingly invasive laws and governance.
Legislation, however, isn't by far the sole vehicle available to the government. In a culture so utterly imbued in paranoia, neighbors aren't only willing to spy on neighbors - or complete strangers, to that end - they're willing to alert law enforcement should they observe... Something.
One perfect example of the absurdity of the 'If You See Something, Say Something' citizen spy program occurred this week when a woman, suspicious of cryptic notes penned by the person seated next to her on an American Airlines flight, decided to Say Something.
The flight was delayed for over two hours, the FBI was called, and an egregious commentary on paranoia and xenophobic profiling in the U.S. became one of an unfortunate many for the history books.
This unbelievably unaware woman told on acclaimed University of Pennsylvania economics professor, Guido Menzio - who had been scribbling a complex math formula in a notebook.
Menzio posted his experience on Facebook, describing his encounter with the FBI after being briefly pulled from the plane, writing:
Menzio, to the unnamed woman, was guilty of terrorism because his Italian ancestry gifted him with darker complexion and hair, and because her lack of education and state conditioning caused her to see dark terrorist plots in mathematical formulae - possibly, and disturbingly, because she mistook it for Arabic.
Restrictions on travel aren't limited to fearful passengers, either, as the notoriously invasive Transportation Security Administration has made air travel an almost unbearably onerous task.
A recent report predicts grueling airport delays due to the combination of a 10 percent reduction in TSA staff and a 15 percent increase in the number of expected travelers.
Though a PreCheck program is offered by the TSA, people simply aren't signing on - likely because they're forced to submit to an even more invasive background check. And it isn't as if the TSA has a stunning success rate in thwarting terror attacks, either - though it does have a successful track record for restricting freedom of travel.
While the government would like you to believe TSA safety measures protect the country from terrorism, evidence lies with a far more laughable reality - like the time a CNN journalist once had her container of pimento cheese confiscated by agents.
Another report indicated the underpaid and understaffed TSA is largely incompetent.
Congressman Stephen Lynch explained,
Essentially, terrorist paranoia is working exactly per the Dept. of Homeland Security's design - otherwise ordinary Americans are now guilty, simply by being present.
But most of all, guilty under the system that would rather pit neighbor against neighbor - lest those neighbors realize they have more in common with one another than with the powers claiming to have their security in mind - because that realization might bring anger, dissent, and potentially action to topple those powers-that-be.
And entirely different dystopic restrictions on travel - harkening almost exactly to the 1930s Nazi Germany that so influenced Orwell - can be found in police checkpoints.
Of dubious legality, law enforcement checkpoints for everything from drunk driving to heroin - to seatbelts - have become commonplace around the U.S.
In the name of safety, police bottleneck traffic, test sobriety, search cars, write revenue-generating tickets, and even arrest those found 'guilty' or who try to avoid the trap.
And this lack of the ability to travel freely - the basic right to mobility without restriction - is only one highly specific example of coercion as the new norm.
Entire books could be justifiably penned to discuss the ridiculousness of licensing requirements - summarized briefly as the state taking a right away from you in order to give it back to you at an often red-tape-heavy price.
In the dystopic new millennium, the State requires children to seek permitting for such traditional activities as shoveling snow or setting up their own lemonade stands - and alarmingly have been shut down for failing to do so.
You don't even have to be accused, much less charged, with a crime to have your own property and cash seized - or more accurately, stolen - by the State, which it then may use for whatever shady purpose it chooses.
This unchecked policing-for-profit scheme has created a freakishly telling figure, as described by The Free Thought Project,
Freedom to simply live one's life, without harming another, has been co-opted by a State hell bent on maintaining slavish control of its people.
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
Considering at least one of the aforementioned examples would be sufficiently blood-boiling to even those who consider themselves 'law-abiding' or 'patriotic,' the State also has in place multiple strategies to thwart the dissemination of accurate, truthful information - thus preemptively quashing dissent.
State indoctrination begins early with compulsory schooling beating the victor's history into impressionable, young minds.
William Blum, journalist, author, and CIA and U.S. foreign policy critic, describes in his book, America's Deadliest Export: Democracy - The Truth About US Foreign Policy and Everything Else, how indoctrination has so insidiously usurped education as to be imperceptible to the unaware:
Indoctrination stands as perhaps the most powerful tool a State could wield without imposing actual, physical violence.
Patriotism often acts as a means of self-policing - whereby a populace relentlessly criticizes any segment not wholly on board with devotion to that State.
Orwell also keenly understood this, as is clear in 1984's protagonist, Winston Smith's description of the youngest citizens of Ingsoc (an abbreviation for English Socialism - the governmental ideology firmly entrenched in that 'fictional' time period).
When the State manages to hoodwink millions of people, facilitating an imperialist empire isn't a cumbersome task.
Blum analogizes the American people to,
Endlessly frustrating those who have taken advantage of self-education in the age of information, arguments proffered by government propaganda - such as waging wars to bring about peace, or that the U.S. aggressively and violently invades other countries for democracy and freedom - take root with no basis in reality.
Belief other nations will steal our (already nonexistent) Democracy if we don't invade them first insidiously infiltrates even learned segments of the population.
Though such inexplicable reasoning readily evidences justifications necessary for popular support when the U.S. spontaneously violates international law concerning war, the people still believe the lie - in great part, thanks to corporate media's incessant confirmation of 'American exceptionalism.'
Ignorance of the breadth of American imperialism - the reality of its plundering resources around the planet, its actions as an enforcement arm of the plutocratic corporatocracy, and the violence it employs on innocent civilians wherever it chooses - remain unknown to the majority in this country.
With essentially all information available a click away, this ignorance amounts to little more than a flat denial of reality.
Saying 'my government would never do that' might be one thing, but refusing to investigate whether or not the statement holds weight is essentially admitting the government takes precedence over truth.
But the American indoctrination of ignorance most chillingly corresponds with a particular passage from 1984 - one marking the self-imposed homogeneity of a people scrambling over one another to exemplify patriotism.
Much of what Orwell proffered as dystopic fiction has since manifested - perhaps not so much, as is popularly believed, because the government took the novel as an instruction manual.
But because 1984's dire warning seems so inconceivable, perhaps most people have yet to realize its darker portents have already come to pass.
Protagonist Winston Smith ultimately succumbs to the lure of Big Brother and the State - but it remains up for debate whether the authoritarian nightmare will take as firm a chokehold on the United States.
To resist such a reality is the work of a true protagonist - not through violence or destruction, but through seeking a lesser ignorance. The lynchpin to Orwell's dystopia, and to the current one, is the perception of ignorance as strength.
War is most certainly not Peace to a well-informed populace, nor is Freedom Slavery.
It is up to us to plant the seeds of knowledge which will inevitably grow into that well-informed populace who will then see the reality of the horrid path we've since embarked.
This is the nature of humanity to err, but we've managed to be resilient nonetheless - sometimes the hardest path is the only way there...
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