From George Orwell to George W. Bush: It's not for doubters any more.

[seafan]

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently.

We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal.

We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.

Power is not a means, it is an end.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?'

----George Orwell, 1984, Chapter 3

'How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?'

Winston thought. 'By making him suffer,' he said.

'Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery is torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain.

The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy everything.

Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. 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. Our neurologists are at work upon it now.

There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. 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, Winston -- 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.'

----George Orwell, 1984, Chapter 3

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''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.''


Kevin LaMarque/Reuters

----Ron Suskind, October 17, 2004, Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush

I am the commander, see?"

"I do not need to explain why I say things. — That's the interesting thing about being the President. — Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."

----George W. Bush, to Bob Woodward, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/11/17/60minutes/main529657.shtml">November 17, 2002

After the terrorist commanders had achieved their goals, the consequences were reviewed at a conference in San Salvador of Jesuits and lay associates, who had more than enough personal experience to draw on, quite apart from what they had observed through the grisly decade of the 1980's.

The conference concluded that it does not suffice to focus on the terror alone. It is no less important "to explore... what weight the culture of terror has had in domesticating the expectations of the majority," preventing them from considering "alternatives to the demands of the powerful."

Not only in Central America.


Destroying hope is a critically important project. And when it is achieved, formal democracy is allowed--even preferred, if only for public-relations purposes. In more honest circles, much of this is conceded. Of course, it's understood much more profoundly by the beasts in men's shapes who endure the consequences of challenging the imperatives of stability and order.

These are all matters that the second superpower, world public opinion, should make every effort to understand if it hopes to escape the containment to which it is subjected and to take seriously the ideals of justice and freedom that come easily to the lips but are harder to defend and advance.

----Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival, p. 10.

[ginnyinWI]

1. When he said he'd never said "Cut and Run"...

...bells immediately went off for me, reminding me about how in "1984" they'd switch sides every once in a while and deny that they'd ever been at war with the other enemy, who was now their ally. "We've never been at war with Oceanna..." All previous historical records would be deleted, and history revised to show the current policy had always been the policy.

How scary is that?

[Zodiak]

2. It is only scary if it works

So far, it is not working.

The American people are not without hope, yet. The Emperor's lies were exposed as such immediately after exiting his lips, and no one I know is buying it at all.

[kestrel91316]

3. Sort of like this: "We've never been about 'Stay The Course'"??

1984 is Bush's playbook.

[BlueEyedSon]

4. ditto