"Fascism, Terror, Pavlov's Dog, Fear and Security:

Bush and a Brave New Gilead of 1984"

A. Cascadian

In an Orwellian reality come true where Oceania is at war with
Eastasia one moment and Eurasia the next moment now the fascist
controlled United States continues a dystopian policy of perpetual
war. The father of fascism, Benito Mussolini, once said, "War is to
man what maternity is to a woman. From a philosophical and doctrinal
viewpoint, I do not believe in perpetual peace."

In Orwell's 1984 war was not for conquest of another nation-state or
territory, but was a means to control the society by means of fear and
a forced ignorance.Winston (Orwell's main character in 1984) relates
the use of perpetual war to keep the masses obedient and suppressed:

"The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars,
is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain
ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are
incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not
meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps
to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society
needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the
past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might
recognize their common interest and therefore limit the
destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor
always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting
against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group
against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or
prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society
intact. The very word 'war', therefore, has become misleading. It
would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has
ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings
between the Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has
disappeared and been replaced by something quite different. The effect
would be much the same if the three super-states, instead of fighting
one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace, each inviolate
within its own boundaries. For in that case each would still be a
self-contained universe, freed for ever from the sobering influence of
external danger. A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as
a permanent war. This — although the vast majority of Party members
understand it only in a shallower sense — is the inner meaning of the
Party slogan: War is Peace." (George Orwell, 1984, Chapter 17).

In 1984, Big Brother uses constant fear and hysteria to control the
minds of the masses. They use a character named "Emmanuel Goldstein"
as a boogyman. If you read the passeages below from 1984 think about
the news coverage of Osma bin Laden and how colored terror alerts were
used like we were Pavlov's dog, but with a false sense of security as
a reward for compliance seeing or hearing fear symbol. As you read
the passages below think of the Osma bin Laden's tape that was
released the weekend before the November 2 elections of 2004 or Dick
Cheney's pre-election threats of nuclear devastation of American
cities if he was not "elected" also think of the terror alerts or
threats from Al Qaeda during the daily news or "breaking news".

"As usual, the face of Emmanuel Goldstein, the Enemy of the People,
had flashed on to the screen. There were hisses here and there among
the audience. The little sandy-haired woman gave a squeak of mingled
fear and disgust. Goldstein was the renegade and backslider who once,
long ago (how long ago, nobody quite remembered), had been one of the
leading figures of the Party, almost on a level with Big Brother
himself, and then had engaged in counter-revolutionary activities, had
been condemned to death, and had mysteriously escaped and disappeared.
The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but
there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was
the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All
subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of
sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching.
Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies:
perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign
paymasters, perhaps even — so it was occasionally rumoured — in some
hiding-place in Oceania itself." (From chapter 1 of Orwell's 1984 here.)

"Winston's diaphragm was constricted. He could never see the face of
Goldstein without a painful mixture of emotions. It was a lean Jewish
face, with a great fuzzy aureole of white hair and a small goatee
beard — a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable, with a
kind of senile silliness in the long thin nose, near the end of which
a pair of spectacles was perched. It resembled the face of a sheep,
and the voice, too, had a sheep-like quality. Goldstein was delivering
his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party — an attack
so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see
through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed
feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be
taken in by it. He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing the
dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion
of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of
the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying
hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed — and all this in
rapid polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the habitual
style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak words:
more Newspeak words, indeed, than any Party member would normally use
in real life. And all the while, lest one should be in any doubt as to
the reality which Goldstein's specious claptrap covered, behind his
head on the telescreen there marched the endless columns of the
Eurasian army — row after row of solid-looking men with
expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam up to the surface of the screen
and vanished, to be replaced by others exactly similar. The dull
rhythmic tramp of the soldiers' boots formed the background to
Goldstein's bleating voice." (From Chapter 1 of Orwell's 1984
here.)

"Before the Hate had proceeded for thirty seconds, uncontrollable
exclamations of rage were breaking out from half the people in the
room. The self-satisfied sheep-like face on the screen, and the
terrifying power of the Eurasian army behind it, were too much to be
borne: besides, the sight or even the thought of Goldstein produced
fear and anger automatically. He was an object of hatred more constant
than either Eurasia or Eastasia, since when Oceania was at war with
one of these Powers it was generally at peace with the other. But what
was strange was that although Goldstein was hated and despised by
everybody, although every day and a thousand times a day, on
platforms, on the telescreen, in newspapers, in books, his theories
were refuted, smashed, ridiculed, held up to the general gaze for the
pitiful rubbish that they were in spite of all this, his influence
never seemed to grow less. Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be
seduced by him. A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting
under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He was
the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of
conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood,
its name was supposed to be. There were also whispered stories of a
terrible book, a compendium of all the heresies, of which Goldstein
was the author and which circulated clandestinely here and there. It
was a book without a title. People referred to it, if at all, simply
as the book. But one knew of such things only through vague rumours.
Neither the Brotherhood nor the book was a subject that any ordinary
Party member would mention if there was a way of avoiding it." (From
Chapter 1 of Orwell's 1984
here.)