Quantum Note
January 28, 2005

Creating an Orwellian America

The remaking of America began on January 20, 2005 with a gala event orchestrated in a setting lifted out of Orwell’s novels: a crowd of 100,000 locked in fenced-off streets where anti-aircraft missiles had been deployed and manhole covers had been welded shut; combat jets patrolled overhead, snipers scanned the vast crowd from rooftops, more than 10,000 men and women from various security agencies stood along the route of the parade, hi-tech chemical, nuclear and biological weapons sensors were being used to analyze the air, bomb sniffing dogs, and gunboats patrolled the Potomac River.

George W. Bush, the maker of this new America, had spent the last day of his first term in office in preparation for the ceremony that would cost US $120 million and inaugurate his second term in office as well as the beginning of a process that would inevitably lead America to a point of no return in the course of its self-destruction. Those who could see the horrors of the coming four years, watched the jamboree with dismay and turned their backs on Bush as he passed by, but most of the crowd consisted of his staunch supporters: born-again Christians, representatives of big businesses and a multitude of Islam haters who cheered and stood awe-struck by the continence of their president turned emperor.

When he read out his speech, which had been rehearsed more than twenty times during the course of the week before the inauguration, it was as if he were reading a script out of Orwell’s works. Just like Winston Smith, Orwell’s protagonist, Bush’s speech was full of cognitive dissonance. He rewrote history, he called war peace, freedom slavery and occupation liberation. He expressed belief in his own reconstructions with the same power and force that are usually associated with procedures of treatments prescribed for psychological maladies and his cognitive distortions reminded one of Winston Smith’s work at the Ministry of Truth where he deleted uncomfortable facts from public records.

As his wife Laura, 23-year-old twins daughters Jenna and Barbara, and his father, George Bush senior, watched him speak to a record audience, Bush rolled out his 2,000 word speech littered with sound bites and religious references, just as his media team had suggested: each and every word was chosen to transform America’s barbaric actions in Iraq and Afghanistan into heroic deeds.

Those who had written the script were a mixed lot, ranging from Marxists to fanatics from the Bible belt, and this showed in the bizarre allusions to their respective intellectual and emotional affinities. For example, addressing the oppressed in words reminiscent of Karl Marx, Bush said: "When you stand for liberty, we will stand with you.” The next moment, he called on the "force of human freedom" to "break the reign of hatred" and "expose the pretensions of tyrants" and then went on to warn the tyrants around the world: “We're coming after you.”

But who are these tyrants? What force of human freedom is he talking about? And when he threatened "the rulers of outlaw regimes" that "we will defend ourselves and our friends by force of arms when necessary," to whom is he really talking?

No one knows what produced this outrageous verbal diarthrosis in front of more than 100,000 people who had gathered in freezing weather, but one thing is certain: if his speech means anything, it inaugurates the second four-year term of a president who would most certainly push America and the rest of the world into an unprecedented era of violence, hatred and bloodshed.

In his speech, Bush did not even utter a single word about what his soldiers were doing in Iraq. He showed no concern about the terrible traumas of American soldiers who are committing suicide upon returning from Iraq, like the 19-year-old Andres Raya, a US marine who killed one police officer and seriously wounded another before being shot dead in his hometown of Ceres, California, on January 8. Raya did this because he did not want to return to duty in Iraq where had fought in Fallujah last spring.

But the doubletalk and the cognitive disorders can neither alter history nor take away the responsibility of crimes committed. As Noam Chomsky has said in a recent interview, the President of the United States is directly responsible for the American war crimes in Fallujah and elsewhere in Iraq. “What was dramatic about Fallujah,” Chomsky said, “was that it was not kept secret. So you could see on the front page of the New York Times a big picture of the first major step in the offensive, namely the capture of the Fallujah general hospital. And there's a picture of people lying on the ground, soldiers guarding them, and then there's a story that tells that patients and doctors were taken from their beds, patients and doctors were forced to lie on the floor and manacled, under guard, and the picture described it. The president of the United States is subject to death penalty under US law for that crime alone. I mean that's a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, Geneva Conventions say explicitly and unambiguously that hospitals must be protected, hospitals and medical staff and patients must be protected by all combatants in any conflict. You couldn't have a more grave breach of the Geneva Conventions than that. There's a War Crimes Act in the United States passed by a Republican Congress in 1996, which says that grave breaches of the Geneva Convention are subject to the death penalty. And that doesn't mean the soldier that committed them, that means the commanders. They weren't thinking about the United States of course, but take it literally, that's what it means.”

Back to the 2005 Contents                                                           Back to the Main Page