If you don’t subscribe to Prospect you won’t be able to read Timothy Snyder’s brilliant article about the similarities between America under Bush and Oceanea, the country depicted in George Orwell’s 1984. You will be able to see the article free once the current issue becomes the previous issue but until then here is a little précis, or rather a selective collection of quotations from the article.
The US of today is obviously not the totalitarian society that Orwell describes. Yet Orwell wrote the novel for citizens of democratic societies as a warning about possible futures, and some of his concerns seem rather timely. Take the three slogans of Oceania’s rulers: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. The current US president constantly defines the Americans as a peaceful people. Yet the only foreign policy innovation of his administration has been the doctrine of pre-emptive war. The president constantly speaks of freedom; it has become a kind of verbal tic. Yet his administration is the only one since the 1940s substantially to reduce the civil rights of Americans. The word “strong” appears incessantly in official pronouncements of all kinds. The president, it appears, maintains his own strength by purposefully ignoring the world around him. In so far as this makes him more likeable, it is indeed his political strength.
To live in such contradictions is to engage in what Orwell called “doublethink”: “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind and accepting both of them.” Without some notion of this kind, it is impossible to follow the American debate on terrorism. For years now, high officials of the US government have accepted that there is no evidence of any connection between Saddam Hussein and the attacks of 11th September, while nevertheless arguing that there was such a connection. As we now know, the president demanded that his intelligence officers produce a report demonstrating such a link, even as he was informed that there was no factual basis for his claim. Administration officials praise the findings of the congressional inquiry that denies any such connection, and then claim that these reports actually support their own position. These opposing views are expressed by different members of the same administration; more interestingly, they are also expressed by the same person, at different moments. Evidence about the world is not entirely denied, but it seems to be held apart from some deeper truth, accessible only by faith. Some American leaders, the president and the vice-president in particular, may simply have a different conception of truth: it is what they feel to be true at the moment when they are asked. They really do feel it, when they say it, although at some level they know it to be false. This is the essence of doublethink, and it is also perhaps the secret of Bush’s popularity.
In Orwell’s novel, the state manages reality by altering public memory of the very recent past. In today’s US, Fox News and talk radio - both closely associated with the Republican party and the present administration - engage in practices redolent of those Orwell describes. One of these is the obliteration of the immediate past when it contradicts the message of the rulers of today. In Oceania, this is the task of the Ministry of Truth. In the US, it is the task of Fox News. When Al Gore recently gave an important speech criticising President Bush, Fox News presented its own “analysis” of the speech rather than the speech itself. Although Gore received more votes in the last presidential election than Bush, he has in effect no mass media voice in the US. The event was re-created, as it were, before it even reached the consciousness of the typical television viewer. It never “happened.” Only the criticism, which was in fact mockery, happened.
In Orwell’s Oceania, falsehood and war bring impoverishment. The state impoverishes society by devoting its resources to fighting a useless war. In the atmosphere of perpetual war, Orwell suggests, people will accept not only abridgements of their freedom, but also reductions in living standards. This appears at first to be a fundamental difference between the Oceania of the novel and the America of reality. Who could accuse President Bush of opposing consumption? Yet on a deeper level, the correspondence between calculated war, calculated falsehood and calculated impoverishment holds true. It appears that the leading figures of the Bush administration had two main preoccupations before September 2001: tax cuts for the rich, and war in Iraq. The attacks of 11th September allowed them to carry out both policies. Strange as it may seem, tax cuts for the rich were presented as necessary in a time of war, and criticism of them was presented as unpatriotic. As a result, the less privileged classes of American society pay for the war in Iraq in two ways: with their lives, because the US army is drawn mainly from the poor, but also in the long run with their livelihoods. The result of big tax cuts during an expensive war has been the creation of a truly frightening national debt. The national debt, about $7.4 trillion, is currently increasing by about $1.69bn a day. President Bush’s last budget included an annual deficit of more than $500bn - a record.
The fundamental similarity between Oceania and America is the disabling of political discussion by the rhetoric of war. As one realises by the end of 1984, Oceania’s continuous wars in Eurasia and Eastasia serve no particular purpose, aside from providing the stimuli that allow the population to be confused, manipulated and ruled. The struggle against international terrorism by military and other means need not have been defined as a perpetual war of good against evil. We are a country “at war,” as Bush likes to say, and he is a “war president.” This is not a description of a particular action or mood, but of a permanent existential state. The hero of 1984 “could not remember a time when his country had not been at war.” Should Bush win the presidential election in November, the youngest generation of Americans will soon be able to say the same. As a society, we are less peaceful, less free and less informed than we were a few years ago. War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.
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