Four years ago next week I took to my bed for several days with a terrible 'flu. An ill-considered choice of reading matter compounded my malaise: instead of an entertaining thriller, I chose to work my way painfully through No Logo, Naomi Klein's brilliant but bleak indictment of our market-manipulated and sweatshop-dependent consumer culture. Worse yet, like a trifecta of depression, was the dark cloud hanging over all this feverish greyness, the imminent inauguration of George W. Bush as president of my native land.
It's not all déjà vu this January, however. I've no 'flu for one thing, and I've just revisited another book which goes some ways, I think, to suggesting how Bush, running both from, and on, his risible first-term record, secured himself a second term. In fact, my only quibble with 1984 is that George Orwell was 20 years adrift in titling it, given how adroitly the Bush administration practised the politics of doublespeak and fear in 2004.
Take, for openers, that slogan of the totalitarian Party in Orwell's novel: WAR IS PEACE. A nonsense, you many say, but the very nonsense repeated daily on the campaign stump and nightly on the TV news, when President Bush, in a true Orwellian "denial of objective reality", repeatedly hailed the new-found democracy and freedom in Iraq. Yes, the same Iraq whose airport road, never mind its Sunni heartland, cannot be secured, where infant malnutrition has doubled since 2003 and electricity remains in short supply, where suicide bombers assassinate police recruits, government officials and other non-combatants, where elections will proceed this month without security for half the electorate, and where a mounting toll of more than 1,000 US soldiers killed and 10,000 wounded testifies to how Texas Air National Guard pilot Bush had a far better plan for getting himself out of Vietnam than Iraq.
Nonetheless, his shirtsleeves rolled, Bush sold himself as America's protector, projecting himself , like Orwell's Big Brother, as "the rock on which the hordes of Asia dashed themselves in vain", and successfully pitching the débâcle in Iraq as a critical part of the so-called "war on terror". "All that is needed," as Orwell explains, "is that a state of war should exist" - war and a climate of fear for those in power to manipulate: be it with the outsized posters of enemy Eurasian soldiers in 1984, or the yellow and orange colour-coded terror alerts the Department of Homeland Security issued like weather advisories. "At the same time the consciousness of being at war," Orwell wrote, "and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival." The encroachment on civil liberties within the USA Patriot Act, enacted shortly after 9/11, a tragic day of atrocities on which Bush has since banged like a drum, seems precisely that kind of disenfranchisement - in this case for the benefit of a small caste of neo-cons.
Orwell wrote also how "the enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil", much as the master absolutist Bush portrayed the decidedly evil Saddam Hussein prior to the invasion of Iraq - the same Saddam with whom Donald Rumsfeld had been happy to do business back when the enemy of the moment had been the absolutely evil Ayatollah Khomeni. Orwellian doublethink, saying something you know to be false, yet simultaneously believe to be true, also allows you to forget a fact (or face) when convenient; which explains why the true architect of terror, Bin Laden, had such a short run as enemy of the moment, never mind never making it into that absolutist Axis of Evil.
Another Party slogan in 1984, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH, seems tailor-made for a know-nothing President who, like the Party members in Orwell's novel, appears "unwilling and unable to think too deeply on any subject whatever". As for the non-Party poor, Orwell noted: "All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working-hours or shorter rations."
His observation jives sadly with what an American friend wrote to me last autumn about the under-waged and unemployed who called to her office hoping for work, food stamps, childcare or fuel allowances, yet left in cars covered with "Support Our Troops" decals and Bush/Cheney stickers.
Elsewhere, Orwell describes long-abandoned practices, such as imprisonment without trial and the use of torture to extract confessions, "which not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive" - lines that correspond, sickeningly, with all we now know about Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and Alberto Gonsalves, a prospective attorney general who finds the Geneva Conventions definition of torture quaint and outdated.
Orwell doesn't reveal whether the secret Brotherhood opposed to the totalitarian regime in 1984 actually existed, but its name evokes what we once called "the brotherhood of man" - that community of spirit among women and men everywhere which responded so generously to last month's Asian tsunamis, a devastation that instructs us what tragedy - and terror - look like on a planetary scale. Whatever about Orwell's Brotherhood, here's to a brother/sisterhood which might yet inaugurate, in the novelist's simple words, "a world of sanity".