Like, 1984, or whatever

The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. … In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia, but to keep the very structure of society intact.

--George Orwell

The only critic to date of this, my new blog, has urged me to write something "profound." Immediate stage fright was the predictable result. Profundity on demand has never been my strong point. But then I began thinking, as I’m wont to do, about Bush, Cheney & Co., and their heroic efforts to create an Imperial Presidency. Perhaps, I thought, some startling epiphany from Orwell’s 1984 might be an appropriate starting point.

Well, I didn’t find the quotation I was looking for, but I did come up with the interesting insight quoted above.

George Orwell had the Soviet Union of Stalin’s day in mind when he wrote 1984, back in the 1940's, but his observations aren’t merely a criticism of that Communist regime, or of Communism in general. His book provides a handy dandy manual, in the form of parody, wide open to any person or group hoping to gain total control over a society. "Big Brother," and the leaders of the world’s other two, supposedly competing empires, realized fully that a nation mobilized to fight an enemy is a nation willing to sacrifice much to avoid defeat, just as a fox with his foot snared in a trap will, in desperation, bite off its foot to escape. They then concluded – correctly -- that continuous war would result in continuous sacrifice. The enemy might change from time to time, to prevent any slackening of interest among the citizenry, but war itself always went on. Sacrifices from the masses would always be required, and would always be given by their frightened subjects.

The war in Iraq serves the same function. Democrats, disturbed by the “business as usual” money-making on the home front, complain that the Bush administration demands no sacrifice in time of war from anyone other than our soldiers overseas. But Bush, in fact, has sought and won far greater sacrifices from us than food rationing or higher taxes. He has asked us to surrender our Constitution and our Bill of Rights. And out of fear and political timidity, we have handed them over.

From 9/11 to the present, Bush has used the war to justify one increase in executive power after another, at the expense of both Congress (simply ignoring Congress’s right to declare war and participate in war planning) and the Judiciary (depriving the federal courts of jurisdiction over claims from all persons designated by the Administration as “enemy combatants”; permitting surveillance of our mail and our phone conversations without court warrant).

“I am the decider,” President Bush reminds us.

Precedents do exist for significant increases in executive power in times of war. President Lincoln famously suspended habeas corpus (a suspension, it should be noted, that is explicitly permitted by the Constitution), and President Roosevelt ordered evacuation from the West Coast of all persons, citizen and non-citizen alike, of Japanese ancestry. These events did not represent our proudest moments as a nation, but they arguably could be justified as extraordinary actions at a time of extraordinary peril.

But, as President Bush fondly reminds us, we are now protagonists in a war that may never end. War is now continuous, to hearken back to Orwell, and extraordinary peril exists now and will continue to exist , tomorrow, and every day for the rest of our lives, and every day of our children’s lives. If we “win” in Afghanistan (which we certainly haven’t yet), we still confront massive bloodshed in Iraq. If we finally subjugate Iraq, we will face nuclear threats from Iran. If we nuke Iran into oblivion, we can only assume that China, India, other developing powers that we call allies today will be enemies, understandably, threatening us tomorrow.

When extraordinary peril exists every day, justifying extraordinary dictatorial measures as a matter of routine, then the extraordinary is no longer extraordinary. It is ordinary. And we then live under a government possessing attributes of dictatorship. Perhaps we can view it as a benign dictatorship today. President Bush himself, feckless frat boy that he is, probably enjoys a jolly weekend clearing brush on his Texas ranch more than he would signing orders for the torture of dissidents. But the power gained today by a bumbling fool can be used far more shrewdly by a “commander in chief” of a malign administration tomorrow, a President who will be neither bumbling nor a fool. And when that happens, we will no longer laugh at funny cartoons in the newspapers, or jokes on late night television, at the expense of those who control the executive branch of our government.

Because one does not laugh at Big Brother. As Orwell wrote, it is not enough that Big Brother's subjects consent to obey him. They must be compelled to love him. And we will not laugh at the leader who, finally, we have been taught to love and obey.