Welcome to Orwell’s world

Obama's lies over the Afghanistan war remind us of the lessons of Nineteen Eighty-Four

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate, Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that "passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past'."

Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that "extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan" to "disorderly regions, failed states, diffuse enemies". He called this "global security" and invited our gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which the US has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: "We have no interest in occupying your country."

In Oceania, truth and lies are indivisible. According to Obama, the American attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was authorised by the United Nations Security Council. There was no UN authority. He said that "the world" supported the invasion in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks. In truth, all but three of 37 countries surveyed by Gallup expressed overwhelming opposition. He said that America invaded Afghanistan "only after the Taliban refused to turn over Osama Bin Laden". In 2001, the Taliban tried three times to hand over Bin Laden for trial, Pakistan's military regime reported, and they were ignored.

“Hearts and minds"

Even Obama's mystification of the 9/11 attacks as justification for his war is false. More than two months before the twin towers were attacked, the former Pakistani diplomat Niaz Naik was told by the Bush administration that a US military assault would take place by mid-October. The Taliban regime in Kabul, which the Clinton administration had secretly supported, was no longer regarded as "stable" enough to ensure US control over oil and gas pipelines to the Caspian Sea. It had to go.

Obama's most audacious lie is that Afghanistan today is a "safe haven" for al-Qaeda's attacks on the west. His own national security adviser, James Jones, said in October that there were "fewer than 100" al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan. According to US intelligence, 90 per cent of the Taliban are hardly Taliban at all, but "a tribal localised insurgency [who] see themselves as opposing the US because it is an occupying power". The war is a fraud. Only the terminally gormless remain true to the Obama brand of "world peace".

Beneath the surface, however, there is serious purpose. Under the disturbing General Stanley McChrystal, who gained distinction for his assassination squads in Iraq, the occupation of Afghanistan is a model for those "disorderly regions" of the world still beyond Oceania's reach. This is known as Coin (counter- insurgency), and draws together the military, aid organisations, psychologists, anthropologists, the media and public relations hirelings. Covered in jargon about winning hearts and minds, it aims to incite civil war: Tajiks and Uzbeks against Pashtuns.

The Americans did this in Iraq and destroyed a multi-ethnic society. They built walls between communities which had once intermarried, ethnically cleansing the Sunnis and driving millions out of the country. Embedded media reported this as "peace"; American academics bought by Washington and "security experts" briefed by the Pentagon appeared on the BBC to spread the good news. As in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the opposite was true.

Something similar is planned for Afghanistan. People are to be forced into "target areas" controlled by warlords, bankrolled by the CIA and the opium trade. That these warlords are barbaric is irrelevant. "We can live with that," a Clinton-era diplomat once said of the return of oppressive sharia law in a "stable", Taliban-run Afghanistan. Favoured western relief agencies, engineers and agricultural specialists will attend to the "humanitarian crisis" and so "secure" the subjugated tribal lands.

That is the theory. It worked after a fashion in Yugoslavia, where ethnic-sectarian partition wiped out a once-peaceful society, but it failed in Vietnam, where the CIA's "Strategic Hamlet Program" was designed to corral and divide the southern population and so defeat the Vietcong - the Americans' catch-all term for the resistance, similar to "Taliban".

Behind much of this are the Israelis, who have long advised the Americans in both the Iraq and the Afghanistan adventures. Ethnic cleansing, wall-building, checkpoints, collective punishment and constant surveillance - these are claimed as Israeli innovations that have succeeded in stealing most of Palestine from its native people. And yet, for all their suffering, the Palestinians have not been divided irrevocably and they endure as a nation against all odds.

Imperial cemeteries

The most telling forerunners of the Obama Plan, which the Nobel Peace Prize-winner and his general and his PR men prefer we forget, are those that failed in Afghanistan itself. The British in the 19th century and the Soviets in the 20th century attempted to conquer that wild country by ethnic cleansing and were seen off, though after terrible bloodshed. Imperial cemeteries are their memorials. People power, sometimes baffling, often heroic, remains the seed beneath the snow, and invaders fear it.

“It was curious," wrote Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, "to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same - everywhere, all over the world . . . people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same - people who . . . were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world."

13 comments

upyoursintheoffice's picture

@Anthony O Wilkinson (not verified
Coming up for air Tony,??
Pilger venomous tongue has been news speak since his days of raking it in for ITN. If 1984 was relevent here he would be FBIed by now.

Will Podmore's picture

The US state funds Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, which all fund al-Qaeda. The US state uses al-Qaeda for false-flag operations to foment sectarian conflict to break up states, as in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Iran.

The US state also uses criminal gangs. Using Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, it runs the drugs route from Afghanistan through Turkey and the Balkans to Western Europe and the USA, often using NATO planes.
The CIA runs the top Afghan and Pakistani drug traders. Dennis Dayle said: “In my 30-year history in US Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA.”

GuntherLudwig's picture

Fundamentally he's a very weak president and the Republicans have sussed him out. Instead of fighting for what he believes, he buckles. This is because he doesn't really believe in anything at all - apart from Obama. In that way he is remarkably like Tony Blair. http://www.education101.net

odellbuchana614's picture

Yes, Guy Cybershy, you are sort of right, I think.
Orwell's novel tries but cannot capture the enormity of,
for example, the horror of Stalin's reign of terror; and no
literary work can adequately capture the nature of life in
a wrecked place like Iraq or Afghanistan. John Pilger
uses Nineteen Eighty-Four as a reference point to
impress upon readers the cynicism of the Obama
regime's defence of its position; however, the literary
allusion has the unintended effect of further removing
what the US is saying and doing from reality and aligning
it with the world of the imagination. US presidents are
already so heavily mediated by TV and their spin-
doctors that they have come to possess a kind of
fictional identity, which merges with their 'real' existence.
Pilger is trying to replace the narrative Obama and his
image-makers created with another image, Oceania; but
it is one that has already been used for another
purpose, viz, the undermining of sympathies felt by naive
Western intellectuals for the USSR in the immediate
post-war period.

writeon1's picture

i think Obama's main characteristic is he ability to bend and accomodate himself to those with power in the American political system, as most presidents do.

What's sad is that there will be no change, only a change of tone, and for the millions that believed and hoped for real, substantive, change; Obama's "betrayal" will be a harsh and rude awakening. Dashing the hopes of a generation is probably not too much of an exaggeration.

Fundamentally he's a very weak president and the Republicans have sussed him out. Instead of fighting for what he believes, he buckles. This is because he doesn't really believe in anything at all - apart from Obama. In that way he is remarkably like Tony Blair.

He's retreating into the role of commander in chief, which is the easy option for presidents who have failed, and Obama is a failure. He's too insubstantial to be a real, reforming, emperor; and instead has become a mere puppet of his legions and the aristocracy who own the empire.

gerald spezio's picture

I agree with you, John, but ...

Lawyer Obama's double-talking words are lawyering mystifications, blatant falsehoods, & more mystifications.
I wouldn't expect anything else.

But surely your brief quote laying all the blame on the Caspian oil pipeline is a profound distortion also.
It could result in more mystification because you completely leave out the glaring behemoth of Israeli Zionist State expansionism.

"Exodus" the blockbuster movie!
"God gave this land to me."
From the Tigris to the Euphrates.
You must remember this; Zionism is still Zionism.

You say; "Even Obama's mystification of the 9/11 attacks as justification for his war is false. More than two months before the twin towers were attacked, the former Pakistani diplomat Niaz Naik was told by the Bush administration that a US military assault would take place by mid-October. The Taliban regime in Kabul, which the Clinton administration had secretly supported, was no longer regarded as "stable" enough to ensure US control over oil and gas pipelines to the Caspian Sea. It had to go."

But ...you leave it there.

The Caspian oil pipeline is part of it, but the pipeline's big job is to provide the cover for the Zionist Expansionist State agenda to destroy Iran & its culture.
The Zionist cabal has already succeeded in destroying Iraq using American booty & blood.

From you, this a significant lapse.

mchisholm's picture

c'mon people do you really think that Obama has the brain power to think this trough. Its people like his chielf of staff and political advisors that are really runningt the show. He reads what is on the teleprompter and moves on. He leaves all the details to others he does not have time for that. If you do not believe me then read all the promises during the campaign about going throughevery peice of legislation and being the most transparent administration ever. God I get so sick of people trying to put a brain that operates in his head. He is as inept as George Bush, in fact he is Bush on steriods. When are we going to consider voting for a real statesman?

Johan's picture

Some not so widely known facts:

"... it was revealed in 1996 that in 1949, Orwell offered to provide a secret Foreign Office Propaganda Unit linked to the intelligence services with the names of writers who could be trusted to write anti-communist propaganda, and also with the names of writers and journalists whom he regarded as being `crypto-communist' and `fellow-travellers'. This unit had been set up by the Attlee government in response to the “developing communist threat to the whole fabric of Western civilisation”. Well-known writers, such as Bertrand Russell, Stephen Spender and Arthur Koestler were employed to disseminate misinformation about the USSR, the East European Peoples' Democracies and the communist Parties of Western Europe. Papers release also show that the IRD (Information Research Department) actively promoted the foreign language publication of Animal Farm in places such as Saudi Arabia, where anti-imperialist activity was threatening the oil revenues of imperialism.
... "
...
...
"... Orwell's lack of understanding of politics, combined with his rabid anti-communism, meant that he was trying to get Animal Farm published in 1943, just as the future of humanity was being decided and the USSR was sacrificing all at Stalingrad. Publisher after publisher rejected it, until the war ended and the book's usefulness as a tool in the coming Cold War was recognised. Writing in The Guardian in August 1995, Stuart Jeffries says that although “many of those who read the book were right-wingers eager for a novel which appeared to show an ex-socialist recanting his beliefs. . . the book was chiefly aimed at the faithful, those who believed that the Soviet Union was the way and the truth”.
..."

(from http://www.stalinsociety.org.uk/orwell.html)

FM Shah's picture

Similarly all the business families (Mostly present
ruling establishment in Indo/Pak/Bangla Desh) are
those who acted as middle men for opium export to
China. Most of them control II Chundrigar Road,
Karachi/Bombay Stock exchange and Power Houses
in IndoPak. Those past collaborators/supporters of
past colonials and present day ruling elites will always
pray anthems of US/West. Any voice or force raising
against US/West is curbed with Iron hand, it may be
Lawyers Movement or Red Mosques or Tribal Areas or
Rag Tag Taliban. Please see the interview of Indian
Writer Amitav Gosh on BBC (23 June, 2008) about
opium wars of 1830s and 1850s and opium
production in Bengal/Bombay by East India Company.

This is not about blaming the US/West for our all
problems. Muslims needs to set its own house in
order but there is no question that the Heroin in
Afghanistan, NWFP and Tribal area were almost
nonexistent before CIA operation against Soviet
Invasion. Similar terrorism, intolerance, lawlessness
in Tribal Area is the direct product of the machinations
of the local/international establishment powers that
were based in Tribal region even before Afghan-Soviet
War in 1970s.
For we Muslims and Pakistani in particular, this is not
a time for optimism. It’s better to be cautious now –
even paranoid – than sorry later. The events in our
society in general and tribal region in particular did not
emerge from a void but are a continuation of a dirty
game played since colonization and continues
unabated, involving critical inside players and their
outside allies.

To draw a line in the sand, we should openly declare
US/CIA directly responsible for
creating/nourishing/sponsoring chaos, terror,
lawlessness, drug economy in our regions.

Regards

FM Shah

BCCI , CIA and Drugd Trade Scandal : Detailed Report
7 23 1991 NBC
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=ak9ug_9yD7g&feature=player_embedded#

BCCI Scandal CIA Connections 7 8 1991 NBC
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=SVXroOSAqMU&feature=player_embedded

This is a report from March 4, 1991 on the BCCI:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVT-
7OBe8eo&feature=player_embedded

Iran Contra Drug Smuggling, Detailed Report 4 6 1987
CBS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=x1Zo29RssOg&feature=player_embedded

Iran Contra Drug Smuggling, 2 CIA Contract Pilots
Confess 1 20 1987 ABC
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=M5wp9Ew4d_Q&feature=player_embedded

CIA Drug Running Judge Bonner 11 19 1993 CBS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=Q28NagfegJY&feature=player_embedded

Interview of Indian Writer Amitav Gosh on BBC (23
June, 2008)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7460682.stm

FM Shah's picture

We will take a common day example of the curse of
Heroin. As it is normally believed that Herion like
Terrorism popped out of blue from Pakistan Tribal
Areas/Afghanistan. It is generally believed that simple
tribal men and war lords are only responsible for
menace of Heroin but never told the link between
Afghan War, CIA, Heroin, BCCI and finance for US
Stringers made by private MNCs.

Heroin is prepared from morphine (extracted from
opium) by boiling it with acetic anhydride, and then
using a process that involves hydrochloric acid,
strychnine, and caffeine. The most essential chemical
for Heroin (i.e. acetic anhydride) is produced only in
West, No Muslim country has any plant for producing
acetic anhydride. Recently its import to Afghanistan
through Karachi Afghan transit route under flag of
NATO/US since 9/11 has increased exponentially.
MNCs producing all such chemicals are making
billions.
Heroin was basically invented by BAYER
Pharmaceutical/Agro MNCs. It is also operating in
many countries like Pakistan and making Billions. CIA
introduced Heroin in South America, Vietnam and Last
of all Afghanistan/Pakistan. Hereon and present drug
economy is very similar to Colonial era Opium trade.

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