The TRUTH about the NYT "Bush and certainty" article

[troublemaker]

(There is no copyright violation in this lengthy citation. Some readers will know right away that this collidees two different documents, but if you hadn’t read them before could you separate the two using only logic? To me they form a seamless argument.)

" Aren’t you concerned that in the end they will beat you. Sooner or later they will see you for what you are, and then they will tear you to pieces."

" Do you see any evidence that that is happening ? Or any reason why it should ? "

" No. I believe it. I know that you will fail. There is something in the universe - I don't know, some spirit, some principle - that you will never overcome."

" Do you believe in God, Ron ? "

" No."

" Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us ? "

" I don't know. The spirit of Man."

" And do you consider yourself a man ?."

" Yes."

" If you are a man, Ron, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors. Do you understand that you are alone ? You are outside history, you are non-existent. Guys like you are in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

“Surely you have seen results already, Ron. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before 9/11. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm…There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of the President. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always - do not forget this - always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler.

Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever. And remember that it is for ever. The face will always be there to be stamped upon. The heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again. The espionage, the betrayals, the arrests, the tortures, the executions, the disappearances will never cease. It will be a world of terror as much as a world of triumph. The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant : the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism. Islamic terrorism and decadent liberals and the treacherous French will be defeated, discredited, ridiculed, spat upon and yet they will always survive. This drama that we have played out with you during four years will be played out over and over again generation after generation, always in subtler forms. Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible - and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord. That is the world that we are preparing, Ron. A world of victory after victory, triumph after triumph after triumph: an endless pressing, pressing, pressing upon the nerve of power. You are beginning, I can see, to realize what that world will be like. But in the end you will do more than understand it. You will accept it, welcome it, become part of it."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html?pagewanted=7&oref=login

http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-21.html#twentyone

[devinsgram]

1. Great article. A definite must read

I read it a printed out for others to read.

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. Very good

I hadn't thought of the similarities (though I know the 1984 excerpt well enough to recognise it by the time I got to 'you are the last man').

The "reality-based community" remark is the most chilling I've heard this week (I can't go back further than that - the Bush regime comes out with so many Orwellian moments that they blend into a nightmare - which perhaps is what they want).