THE GHOST OF ORWELL HAUNTS OUR WORLD

Empires rise and fall.

The empire George Orwell wrote of in '1984' was very real. He had seen its roots lie in the extremism of men and women who believed their ideal world was so important to humanity that inhuman acts, censorship and propaganda were justified to bring it about.

The ignorant herd had to be driven in the “right” direction by whatever means were necessary. The ends would justify the means.

In 'Animal Farm' he depicted what happens when the above activities are carried out to their logical conclusion as an elite proceeds to assume the role of shepherd while initially at least, speaking of being simply one of the herd with its best interests at heart.

But of course, to paraphrase a well known saying, some become so much more equal than others. The mask of pretence falls quite quickly after a sniff of power permeates elite nostrils. Suddenly items and areas of differentiation appear. Some merit better this and better that. The size of homes and their locations change, access to all manner of privileges appear and before you know it we are back at an ‘Us and Them’ scenario just as we were before the "revolution". True idealists do not last long in such an environment. The hero of '1984' Winston Smith represents the rare alternative thinker who bucks the trend and dares to question the prevailing narratives of the time.

The society Orwell took his inspiration for '1984' and ‘Animal Farm’ from was that of the Stalinist Soviet Union. Orwell was a socialist himself but he was not of the extremist mentality that he wrote of. The empire he wrote of using his fictional empire of fear and lies based in Britain eventually fell and was replaced. But now we see the signs of a new and very similar empire rising, this time not in the east but in the west.

Once again an elite conceives itself as knowing best, considering the goals it has set as so important that almost any means are justified in reaching it. A ‘Pearl Harbor’ event, 9/11 created the impetus that boosted their hopes of achieving complete international control. Indeed the protocols put in place after 9/11 demanded that their goals be achieved, the chief among them being ‘Full Spectrum Dominance Worldwide’.

To achieve this goal would require setting aside all obligations to moral or ethical behaviour as the existential threat inherent in not achieving the goal was simply too awful to contemplate. Nothing could be left off the table, all means necessary had to be employed and without any exception due to qualms of a moral or ethical nature.

Some of these means were brutal indeed. Others required dishonesty but no recourse to violence.

On the brutal side of the equation are of course the illegal and indiscriminate bombing of and invasion of Iraq which killed, by official estimate, 184,677 civilians which total is undoubtedly lower than in reality. During the sanctions on Iraq alone the lack of medicines is estimated to have cost the lives of around half a million children. Deaths of children continue due to the effects of depleted uranium used in U.S. munitions as well as fatalities caused by unexploded cluster bombs.

The recent wars engaged in are of course "justified" in advance by repeated lies told by the political and media elites of the West and their allies.

More brutality arose with the new techniques that were ultimately described as ‘Enhanced Interrogation’. These covered a variety of methods having the aim of breaking someone’s resistance and forcing them to answer questions to the satisfaction of his or her interrogators.

A few examples:

Beatings
Binding in contorted stress positions
Hooding
Subjection to deafening noise
Sleep disruption to the point of hallucination
Deprivation of food and drink
Withholding medical care for wounds
Waterboarding
Rectal fluid resuscitation
Rectal feeding
Sexual humiliation
Subjection to extreme heat or cold
Confinement in coffin-like boxes
Threats to families
Threats to harm children
Threats to sexually abuse detainees’ mothers
Threats to cut the throat of detainees' mothers.

Those treated in this way were not convicted criminals, they had never faced trial. They may well have been offered up to U.S. military forces by the roaming bands of criminals who kidnapped random victims and were rewarded for bringing in a "terrorist" in the aftermath of the initial war in Afghanistan and that of the second Iraq War. As far as detainees at Guantanamo only 5% were detained by U.S. military forces, 85% were detained as a result of payment of a bounty. The number of children held at Guantanamo is twenty-one, the youngest being thirteen years old.

The above areas of brutality in the name of gaining safety for the USA through a ‘War on Terror’ designed to eliminate all U.S. enemies do not come close to describing the extent of the effort. Even harsher modes of terror than those described above have taken place in CIA black sites around the world where prisoners are rendered without any recourse to anything approaching a human right whatsoever.

What was the other side of the coin to that of unconscionable brutality?

This could be called the intelligence agency art form, ‘Believable Lies & Enforced Conformity’.

Western politicians, their intelligence and military helpers, compliant media elites and a variety of analysts, NGOs and think tanks provide the permanent and all-pervasive system to keep certain fake realities at the forefront of non-elite minds. This effort is enhanced by work done within CIA psychological operations teams and the journalists they run. In recent years the social media moguls running Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other outlets for public expression have also come on board to silence voices spreading inconvenient truths. The goal is conformity to state-required needs in forwarding the overarching goal of full spectrum dominance worldwide.

In Orwell’s '1984' thousands labour in 'The Ministry of Truth' correcting past documents to reflect the “correct" narratives all must now obey and erase the faces in images of those who have been made 'non-humans’ through some perceived non-alignment with those narratives. Social media moguls obey the strictures handed down from above to cancel those deemed “disloyal” to expected memes. Orwell’s fiction is fast becoming reality.

The ends justify the means to all of the above. The safety and security of the USA has no price upon it. No human right can come before it, no moral or ethical law, no philosophical or religious tenet of any kind, no human agency charged with dispensing justice, no lofty entity such as the International Criminal Court or United Nations. Anyone or anything standing in the way of the goal of full spectrum dominance worldwide by the USA will be circumvented or removed.

Thus we move inexorably toward the very world George Orwell warned us of. That world was built by an elite justifying every step along the way by telling us, and no doubt themselves, that it is all for the best and for the benefit of all humankind.

Look out your window. Watch your TV. Read your newspaper. What is that hazy shape you see gradually taking form in your mind and even out there on your streets?

Is it the ghost of George Orwell that is now increasingly haunting our world?