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CounterPunch
February
27, 2003
Orwell's Bastards
Lies and Shameless
Pretence
by PABLO MUKHERJEE
We ordinary earthlings, were informed by George
Bush Senior in his 1991 State of union Address, are living under
a new world order. Over the past decade, from the highway of
death between Kuwait and Iraq, in Kosovo, in Jallalabad and the
hills of Afghanistan, in the alleys of West bank and cafes of
Tel Aviv, and the ruins of the twin towers of New York, the face
of this new order has become more and more evident. We are caught
in a terrible and twisted Groundhog's day, standing on the eve
of yet another war in the Iraqi desert presided over by another
George Bush. Pentagon spokespeople assure us that they have
prepared a shower of missiles on Baghdad that will rival Hiroshima.
The U.N. estimates up to half a million Iraqi civilian casualties
will occur, and up to 1.5 million civilians will be rendered
refugees, in a war that will 'liberate' them. This is a war
that the majority of British, European, Arab, African, Asian
and Latin American people are opposed to. There is growing evidence
that a remarkable number of U.S. citizens are also opposed to
this war about to be fought allegedly for both their security
and the 'liberation' of Iraq. As governments take the lead in
spinning and counter spinning propaganda and lies with literally
mass murderous consequences, this is the hour we desperately
needed a clear, searching, analytical voice like that of George
Orwell (1903-1950). What we have instead are Orwell's bastards,
pretending to offer objective, 'no-bullshit' defence of democracy,
sullying instead their master's name with lies and half-truths
in feeble parodies of his voice.
How does one recognise Orwell's bastards?
Whereas Orwell himself was acutely aware of historical complexities
and constantly tested himself with searching criticism (perhaps
most painfully in Homage to Catalonia), our new Orwellians deliberately
twist facts, maintain selective silences, resort to outright
lies, and are generally marked by a shameless pretence of piety
and moral high-handedness. Take their chief, Christopher Hitchens's
recent rant in the British Daily Mirror against the historic
peace march in London (15.2.03) as an example. Lamenting the
fact that it did not rain on this parade, Hitchens sees two kinds
of people in the largest ever political rally in Britain
those belonging to the sinister Marxist-Muslim Fundamentalist
cabal (leading), and the generally deluded well meaning middle
Englanders (the herd). He says it was a shame that even half
this number wouldn't bother to turn up in a rally in favour of
the Kurds who have been fighters for democracy in Iraq and basically
accuses the peace marchers as fifth columnist appeasers working
to keep the Iraqi dictator in power. Hitchens is a self-confessed
disciple of Orwell (he has recently published a book on him)
and takes pride in his alleged ability to speak unpopular truths
to lift the gloom of mass ignorance. What is wrong with this
analysis of the current peace movement? In short, everything.
Worse, his own position is compromised by his deliberately dishonest
interpretation of facts.
First, peace movement is not a political
party, there are no leaders who hand down programmes to the led.
It is a network. There are organisers who take feedback from
the widest coalition in Britain, and help them come together
for demonstrations, discussions, rallies and in near future,
if need be direct action. Debate, dissent, even open
derision of some of the speakers marked the crowd's behaviour
in the rally. But all were united in a powerful expression of
democratic will enough of this game of death played by
Bush-Blair and Bin-Laden/Saddam, purveyors of two kinds of fundamentalist
evil that threatens to give us the gift of never-ending war.
We will fight them with weapons of peace.
Second, had the British government been
preparing troops and armaments to massacre the Kurds in Iraq,
we can assure Mr Hitchens that there would be the same number
of people on the streets. The hypocrisy of this would be Orwell
of our age on the Kurdish problem is breath-taking. Where is
Hitchens when the USA supplies Turkey with well over £2
billions in arms, much of which is used to kill Kurds who are
fighting there for the democratic rights to their language and
regional autonomy? Or perhaps the democracy of Kurds being
repressed by a key US ally is not as important as the ones in
Iraq? Where was Hitchens when the Iraqi Kurds and Shias were
encouraged to rise up against Saddam Hussein after 1991 by George
Bush (snr) and then left to be butchered? Does he take note of
Kurdish activists and exiles who are voicing their sense of betrayal
and concern at the U.S. plans of post-Saddam Iraq which involves
establishing military protectorate under General Tommy Franks
assisted by Ba'athists? He would have us believe that the US-British
aggression is based on moral concern for Kurds. If he had the
minimum decency and honesty, not to mention the salutary self
critical edge of his master, he would not dare propose this in
public. This is not just the peddling of partial truths. It
is the silencing of facts that is about to have murderous consequences.
Orwell's writings were marked by a refreshingly
critical reception of power, especially the way in which power
in democracies as well as totalitarian regimes can be captured
by the elites. Animal Farm and 1984 are as useful in the critique
of the increasingly surveillant, 'big brother' societies in the
West today as they were of east European Stalinist societies.
Indeed, the recent drama production of 1984 by Northern Stage
in Britain reinforces this point. His bastards however, are
willing slaves of the new world order. They have surrendered
their critical integrity by refusing to criticise those propagandas
and myths coming out of the circuits of power in the west (like
the 'clash of civilisations', for instance) that are designed
to impose the military, technological and political might of
the Atlantic bloc (USA and Britain) over the global 'south' as
well as over Europe. Hitchens, Thomas Friedman, David Aaronovitch
have all accepted that the contemporary world is marked by a
struggle between the Bush doctrine and the bin-Laden doctrine,
and have thrown in their critical might behind the fundamentalist
from Texas (I use the word fundamentalist not only in its religious
sense, but also the political sense which is summed by the current
George Bush's formula 'You are either with us, or against
us' and the elevation of conflict/war as a political strategy
by Washington). They attempt to mask this by promoting the vision
of a war for democracy. This flimsy lie is of course knit with
telling silences. Where are the new Orwellians when Saudi Arabia,
Israel, China, Turkey, Russia and India commit massive human
rights violations on a regular basis on their own citizens? Each
of these is current or prospective U.S. allies in Washington's
quest for geo-political 'Full Spectrum Domination', and thus
exempt from the moral crusader's wrath. We do not hear from
these columnists about the human rights abuse going on in Guantanamo
Bay prison camps, where the U.S. military is holding innocent
civilians along with suspected Taliban and al-Qaida militants
without any charges and frequently subjecting them to 'soft'
torture (continuous interrogation, sleep deprivation etc). They
do not talk about the leaked Pentagon document that hit the media
less than a week ago about the U.S. disregard for nuclear proliferation
and intention of developing a new generation of nuclear weapons
and other weapons of mass destruction. With the history of using
depleted uranium shells in Gulf war one, 'bunker busters' and
'daisy cutters' in Afghanistan and Kosovo, the USA should be
a prime candidate for weapons inspection. At least, its murderous
hypocrisy of conducting the war in the name of controlling WMDs
should be noticed by our new Orwellians, but their silence on
this is resounding and telling. They are unmoved when Washington,
under pressure from the Pharmaceutical lobbies, maintain the
merciless licensing and patent laws that prevent life-saving
drugs reaching millions of AIDS patients in Africa and across
the world condemning them to painful deaths. Many more
people are dying, will die to protect the interests of companies
that finance the Republican Party campaigns. Many more than Saddam
Hussein's victims in Iraq. But Orwell's bastards have chosen
their side, and it is not the one where millions of people across
the world belong to.
We charge Orwell's bastards of not merely
of inconsistencies. We charge them with deliberate attempts to
mislead, to silence, to confuse the millions who are combining
against the new world order. We charge them with slandering
the peace movement as appeasers and non-interventionists. We
have been saying no to war, not to action. We have been arguing
to lift the sanctions regime that murders Iraqi civilians and
strengthens the hand of Saddam Hussein. We have been backing
weapons as well as human rights inspections. Further, we call
for these to be carried out in states other than Iraq Israel,
China, North Korea, Pakistan, India, Saudi Arabia, Russia, USA,
Turkey, to name a few. We reject the idea that the 'blowback'
of the Cold war - when the USA financed and armed Islamic fundamentalist
groups against the Soviet Union- must now be contained by further
conflicts that have already claimed thousands of lives and will
claim many more. We charge them with sabotaging political and
diplomatic structures for peaceful resolutions of conflicts.
Where Orwell would have lent his sharp critical faculties to
build and support the movement of the masses, they act surreptitiously
to inject doubt into them. When millions are yearning for courageous
voices to be raised for a genuinely democratic world, we charge
them with serving the interests of a hyper power and the elites
who have dedicated themselves to a unipolar world and a war without
end.
In his fine review of Hitchens's latest
homage to Orwell in the recent London Review of Books, Stefan
Collini ends with this unforgettable image "The sight
of Hitchens view-hallooing across the fields in pursuit of some
particularly dislikeable quarry has been among the most exhilarating
experiences of literary journalism during the last two decades.
He's courageous, fast, tireless and certainly not squeamish about
being in at the kill. But after reading this and some of his
other recent writings, I begin to imagine that, encountering
him, still glowing and red-faced from the pleasures of the chase,
in the tap-room of the local inn afterwards, one might begin
to see a resemblance not to Trotsky and other members of the
European revolutionary intelligentsia whom he once admired, nor
to the sophisticated columnists and political commentators of
the East Coast among whom he now practises his trade, but to
other red-coated, red-faced riders increasingly comfortable in
their prejudices and their Englishness - to Kingsley Amis, pop-eyed,
spluttering and splenetic; to Philip Larkin, farcing away at
the expense of all bien pensants; to Robert Conquest and a hundred
other 'I told you so's. They would be good company, up to a point,
but their brand of saloon-bar finality is only a quick sharpener
away from philistinism, and I would be sorry to think of one
of the essayists I have most enjoyed reading in recent decades
turning into a no-two-ways-about-it-let's-face-it bore. I just
hope he doesn't go on one hunt too many and find himself, as
twilight gathers and the fields fall silent, lying face down
in his own bullshit." The twilight has come but the fields
are far from silent. Smeared with their own bullshit, Hitchens
and other Orwell's bastards find themselves, in Hitchens's own
words, with no one left to lie to.
Pablo Mukherjee
teaches at the University of Newcastle. He can be reached at:
Pablo.mukherjee@ncl.ac.uk
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