Boots Stamping On Human Faces

David Benjamin re-reads Orwell's 1984 and cites 11 instances in which Orwell somehow anticipated White House jive in the first decade of the 21st century:

For instance, like Orwell's Oceania, Bush's America relies on a constant state of war to instill fear and passion in the masses, and -- in both regimes -- the enemy's identity is an afterthought. Big Brother shifted his enmity from Eurasia to Eastasia and back again. Bush began his bellicose ascendancy by targeting Al Qaeda, then switching to Saddam's Iraq, and now he’s screen-testing among Syria, Iran and Al Qaeda (again) for the role of supervillain. The key, said Orwell is this: "The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible."

Note Orwell's stipulation that the purity of the enemy's evil requires that "past" agreements, if they ever existed, must be either forgotten or expunged. Consider, for example, Donald Rumsfeld's visit to Baghdad during the Reagan era, when he was filmed hugging Saddam Hussein. But that never happened, right? We always hated Saddam, and we never sent him vast stockpiles of weapons to help him fight America's previous "enemy of the moment," Iran.

"History has stopped," explained Orwell. "Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right."

Indeed, this White House, as a matter of ideology, loathes even the suggestion that it ever erred. George Bush is pathologically reluctant to admit even the tiniest goof because, as Orwell says, "... by far the more important reason for the readjustment of the past is the need to safeguard the infallibility of the Party. It is not merely that speeches, statistics and records of every kind must be constantly brought up to date in order to show that the predictions of the Party were in all cases right. It is also that no change of doctrine or in political alignment can ever be admitted. For to change one's mind, or even one's policy, is a confession of weakness."

When you think about it, Orwell wrote the monograph for almost every utterance in the oratorical career of President Bush: "It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words."

Or what about this:

It's instructive to recall the definition of "doublethink" while reviewing, for example, Bush's insistence that Saddam Hussein was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, followed by Bush's later admission that there was no such link, followed by his recent revival of the Saddam-9/11 conspiracy. Orwell: "To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while take account of the reality which one denies..."