Suppose
public opinion poll results could be broken out by those who have and haven’t
read 1984. I’d wager that support for President Bush would be a good ten
percent higher in the non-reader group. Why? Unless you actually liked Orwell’s
Winston in Wonderland nightmare, you’d be at least a bit unsettled by some of
the similarities between it and what the Bushmen are pushing.
Similarity
one: using fear of an unseen enemy to control the populace. Big Brother kept
his people in fear by maintaining an illusion of Oceania’s perpetual war with
the unseen enemies of Eurasia. This was easy, since his control of the media
exceeded that of even a Stalin or Saddam. Rove and Murdoch aren’t seeking that
kind of control. They don’t need it. The beauty of the war on terrorism, from
the standpoint of aspiring authoritarians, is ease of manipulation. Cold War
fear was fed by real images of gray-faced Soviet leaders saluting vast parades
involving real nuclear missiles. Post- September 11, when you can justify a
$100 billion invasion with false information, how hard can it be to turn up the
terror alert to red when needed to swing an election in your favor, or crack
down on a non-violent popular uprising?
The world
of 1984 is perhaps best known for turning truth on its head. “War is peace.
Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” Big Brother’s newspeak leads us to
the second similarity. The Neocons are waging another global war, but it’s one
that they must carefully conceal. It is the war on our very globe itself, on
the health of the earth and all her inhabitants. (Note: I don’t claim the
President’s men are a bunch of bloodthirsty zombies who get kicks from shooting
birds in cages, though Dick Cheney’s recent pheasant “hunting” trip makes you
wonder. Their secret global war is more a matter of good old-fashioned lust for
wealth and power, in combination with a paradigm that sees the human race as
temporary visitors to a profane planet. More about this in a later column.)
Bush’s
assault on the earth is thoroughly documented. Check out bushgreenwash.org, or
the Natural Resources Defense Council’s “the Bush Record” at
nrdc.org/bushrecord. NRDC lawyer Robert
F. Kennedy Jr. writes, “George W. Bush will go down in history as America's worst
environmental president. In a ferocious three-year attack, the Bush
administration has initiated more than 200 major rollbacks of America's
environmental laws, weakening the protection of our country's air, water,
public lands and wildlife.”
But Bush
knows that this news would be deadly to his reelection chances. In a March 2003
private memo, Republican pollster Frank Luntz laid out the White House’s
strategy. "The environment is probably the single issue on which
Republicans in general and President Bush in particular are most vulnerable,"
he wrote. So how do the Repubs protect the profit margins of their major
campaign contributors, like Haliburton, without alerting the public?
Kennedy
again: “The White House has masked its attacks with euphemisms that would have
embarrassed George Orwell. George W. Bush's ‘Healthy Forests’ initiative
promotes destructive logging of old-growth forests. His ‘Clear Skies’ program,
which repealed key provisions of the Clean Air Act, allows more emissions. The
administration uses misleading code words such as streamlining or reforming
instead of weakening, and thinning instead of logging.”
The Global
Warming issue is especially telling. In the section entitled “Winning the
Global Warming Debate”, Luntz writes, “The scientific debate is closing against
us but is not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge
the science.” And through that open window they’d drive the Cheney energy bill,
the one crafted in secret by Ken Lay and the coal-oil-nuclear energy lobbyists.
While the President pledges to make us safe from terrorists, his energy program
promotes huge centralized power plants, including nuclear, making our power
supplies vulnerable to terrorist attack compared to decentralized renewable
energy. So, Mr. President, *why*?
Our
ignorance is their strength. Spread the word and change the nation, so we can
fight *for* the earth.