Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. ... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies -- all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth. -- George Orwell, 1984

From Orwell's 1984

"All the tyrannies of the past were half hearted and inefficient.. Part of the reason for this was that in the past no governement had the power to keep it's citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate puplic opinion and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneousely on the same instrument, private live came to an end. Every citizen could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police. The possiblity of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the state, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects now existed."

ms:Animal Farm (remember some animals are more equal then others, does this refer to the neoconservatives and the Bush-Administration? Judge by you own)

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SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE PEACE THROUGH WAR: ORWELL REVISITED By Gary Fields

March 21, 2003

If truth is indeed the first casualty of war, it is equally obvious that the route leading to the U.S. military attack on Iraq now commencing suffers from the same pathology.

George Orwell in his foreboding novel, "1984," coined the term newspeak to describe a language of deception used by a future totalitarian government to subvert democracy and create support for a permanent state of war among its citizens. Orwell's bleak picture of a totalitarian future, nurtured on the power of propaganda, could not be more appropriate in describing the pathway to the current situation.

What we have experienced over the past year is the political equivalent of what economists term, a "market failure," a failing of democracy in which truth has been subverted. How did the administration arrive at this moment?

The Preamble to the U.N. Charter states as one of its primary aims, the protection of future generations "against the scourge of war." In his recent admonitions to the world community, President George W. Bush advanced the claim that the United Nations, to remain "relevant," had to approve a resolution supporting a war to disarm Iraq. War is thus the path to peace while peaceful means to control the Iraqi regime through weapons inspections emerged as the route to appeasement and terror. Orwell's classic is filled with examples of such linguistic leaps of logic.

Furthermore, the Bush administration argued that the United States needed to initiate a war against Iraq to protect the American people from an Iraqi-initiated terrorist attack. What Bush neglected to mention to the American public in his exhortations to war, is that the CIA itself, in its report of last October on Iraq and in a letter to Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., assessed the probability of such an attack to be "very low."

The CIA further concluded that only if attacked, would Iraq pose a serious threat to use so-called weapons of mass destruction against American interests. In effect, it is the Bush administration's bellicosity toward Iraq that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the Iraqi regime, pushed into war, eventually emerges as the belligerent it was characterized to be.

The Bush team repeatedly emphasized that both diplomacy and inspections failed to contain Saddam Hussein. How did the administration make this case? Simply by repeating, with all evidence to the contrary, that diplomacy and inspection failed.

Again, Orwell's work is replete with examples of how the totalitarian rulers of "1984" resort to simple repetition of propaganda statements to garner support for their policies. The fact is, after 12 years of sanctions, Iraq is an impoverished and exhausted society, its military, as both the Pentagon and CIA acknowledge, a shell of what it was in 1991 when it was crushed by the campaign to expel it from Kuwait.

Bush now makes reference to his "coalition" to disarm Saddam Hussein, an assortment of some 30-odd nations supposedly in favor of the U.S.-led war. He fails to mention that the overwhelming majority of the world's nations oppose what this "coalition" has unleashed. During the past three months, as millions of people around the world took to protesting the idea of a pre-emptive attack against Iraq, the administration ignored the protests, denigrating them as "focus groups," illegitimate for the making of foreign policy. For its part, the U.S. Congress made it much easier for the Bush administration to sidestep the democratic process in its relentless campaign of disinformation to convince the American people and world public opinion of the need for war. So extraordinary was this relinquishment of power that Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., in impressing upon his colleagues the need for serious debate on the question of war, observed incredulously how, on this the most critical policy issue facing any government, the hallowed chamber of the U.S. Senate remained "eerily silent."

It is in this democratic vacuum that roughly 140 cities across the United States passed resolutions against the war. As a City Council member from Los Angeles insisted: "We're debating this issue because those we have elected to debate this issue have abdicated." There is no precedent for such public expression in anticipation of war. Sadly, the Bush administration ignored this outpouring of democracy.

In truth, this war is not about weapons or terrorism, although the attacks of Sept. 11 certainly provided the enabling backdrop for such an enterprise. It is about remaking the Middle East and the rest of the world according to a vision articulated 10 years ago by such figures as Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. It is about the United States committing itself to military action as a solution to the world's problems regardless of world public opinion. It is about the arrogance of empire. It is about the folly of peace through war. It marks a sordid chapter in this nation's history – when truth and democracy became sacrificed to the destructive ambitions of a select few.

Gary Fields is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California San Diego. His forthcoming book Territories of Profit examines economic empire-building and globalization. Copyright 2003 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.

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Sowohl wie oben in 1984, als auch in Animal Farm, beschreibt George Orwell eindrücklich über ein halbes Jahrhundert im voraus, was unterdessen wie ein Drehbuch unserer neokonservativen Amerikaner, die die Bush-Administration kontrollieren, wirkt. Sie scheinen sich tatsächlich wie die Schweine zu fühlen, die den von ihnen ursprünglich selbst gesteckten Spielraum dauernd mit Anti-Terror Notgesetzen und Anschuldigungen gegen den Terror, den sie selbst geschickt inszenierten, zu ihren Gunsten und den Ungunsten des restlichen Tierreichs verändern. Wo bleibt hier die Glaubwürdigkeit der restlichen, sogenannten "freien" Welt? Aus lauter Interessenskonflikten tanzen alle Regierungen und Massenmedien momentan nach der Geige dieser christlichen Talibanen und der Begriff Wahrheit ist zu einem äusserst dehnbaren Begriff geworden.

obviousely I am not the only one coming to this conclusion:

The Freedom of Information Center
Bush creates Orwellian society

By Matthew Brophy Minnesota Daily September 27, 2002 Freedom is Slavery; War is Peace; Ignorance is Strength. This is the motto heralded by Big Brother in George Orwell’s book, “1984.” This motto might as well be from the George W. Bush administration. Since the tragic Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration has incrementally been seizing power, desecrating the U.S. Constitution and subordinating our civil rights in the name of national security.

We are told that to protect freedom, we must forfeit our liberties. To have peace, we must fight a prolonged war. To be strong, we must be kept ignorant of our government’s actions. In short, to be good Americans we must believe in apparent contradictions and submit to our government entirely.

The parallels between Orwell’s dystopian vision and Bush’s post-Sept. 11 governmental policies are so striking some journalists have facetiously accused Bush of plagiarism. Orwell’s book depicts a society dominated by a totalitarian government in which citizens’ liberties are suppressed on the basis of an endless war. In post-Sept. 11 America, the same reasoning is being used to justify turning our nation into a police state.

In Orwell’s society, a person can be arrested not just for public speech, but for their private thoughts as well. In our nation, this nightmare has come to life through Bush’s USA Patriot Act. This act enables law enforcement departments to spy on citizens and non-citizens alike: To read private e-mail correspondence, monitor Internet usage, tap into phone conversations, delve into computer files and conduct “sneak-and-peak” searches of homes and offices without immediately, if ever, presenting residents with a search warrant. Law enforcement no longer needs judicial oversight or probable cause. So, be careful: Big Brother is watching.

Furthermore, this act states that citizens and non-citizens can be detained on mere suspicion. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, more than 1,100 immigrants have been imprisoned. The charges against them remain undisclosed; even their names and identities remain largely unknown. The Bush administration admits these prisoners are not terrorists. So far, the FBI has racially profiled and interrogated more than 5,000 recent immigrants. Those immigrants Bush deems “terrorists” can be tried before closed military tribunals rather than in open court.

In Orwell’s society, citizens join the government in the suppression of speech and thought; citizens constantly monitor neighbors and coworkers, informing the government if a person seems “suspicious.” Bush’s “Operation TIPS” makes such paranoid spying a reality. This program asks mail deliverers, utility meter readers, truckers and other citizens to spy on their neighbors and customers, and report any suspicious activity that could be related to terrorism. A recent example of TIPS in action occurred just two weeks ago. Three men were detained, searched and interrogated for being overheard apparently joking about Sept. 11 at a restaurant in Georgia. Bush and a federal law enforcement official in Washington eventually exculpated the men, reporting they had no evident ties to terrorism.

Increasingly, it seems we must all be wary of saying or doing anything that could be construed as subversive; after all, your neighbor might turn you in to the thought police. The reach of the thought police has even extended to academia, where certain factions have attempted to stifle the free exchange of ideas. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, for example, has sought to “blacklist” more than 40 professors who were deemed “anti-American.” One professor, an emeritus from the University of Oregon, was blacklisted for recommending that “we need to understand the reasons behind the terrifying hatred directed against the U.S. and find ways to act that will not foment more hatred for generations to come.” Even one of the Daily columnists has received threatening letters for suggesting that U.S. foreign policy might be somewhat casually responsible for terrorism.

It seems that to be strong and united, we must silence all dissenting voices. Attorney General John Ashcroft has declared that critics of the Bush administration’s post-Sept. 11 measures “only aid terrorists” and “give ammunition to America’s enemies.” For this reason, the Bush administration has explained we need to “suspend” certain liberties for the duration of the war.

The message is clear: To criticize America, right or wrong, is either to be unpatriotic or, worse, to be a terrorist sympathizer (Does anyone smell McCarthyism yet?). It seems ignorant patriotism has become a virtue.

The Bush administration has heavily promoted the idea of ignorance as strength. On this basis, it is making sure the media and American public are kept ignorant. Invoking the excuse of national security, the Bush administration has imposed heavy restrictions on what we can know. For example, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security includes an exemption from the Freedom from Information Act. Additionally, the military has disallowed journalists from accompanying American forces fighting in Afghanistan and even from interviewing military personnel after their missions.

In addition to this governmental censorship, the media has even censored itself. CNN Chairman Walter Isaacson, for instance, ordered his news staff to limit reports of Afghan casualties and to use World Trade Center deaths to justify the killing abroad. Furthermore, the largest U.S. radio station owner, Clear Channel, sent out an internal memo prohibiting certain songs from being played on the air — including “Imagine” by John Lennon.

In Orwell’s society, the duration of the war is never-ending, waged against an enemy that is ever-changing and ambiguous. The same is true of Bush’s declared “war on terrorism.” This war has no fixed, geographical definition. It is directed against an expansive “axis of evil” and a shadowy faction known as al-Qaida. Moreover, this war has been estimated to continue indefinitely (current estimates say at least 10 years).

This ambiguous, protracted crusade is an efficient way to fuel the hatred and fear necessary to justify the Bush administration’s seize of power. With the winds of war behind him, and a 90 percent approval rating, Bush has hurdled the checks and balances of the other two governmental branches and has used “war” as an excuse to increase his dominance and serve his administration’s interests — for example, finishing his dad’s business in Iraq or squelching opposition to NAFTA and the WTO.

To rally the war cry, Bush spews monosyllabic propaganda, simplistically characterizing the terrorists’ purpose to be to “attack our freedom,” and that those individuals and nations who oppose our policies are satanically “evil.” We, of course by contrast, are righteous and good. Disregard our past alliances with these “evil” regimes, our training and financing of radical Islamist terrorists, our forcible replacements of democracies with dictatorships or any instances of our past foreign policy that might be relevant to understanding why the United States is resented in many parts of the world.

Terrorism isn’t what terrifies me. I fear fear itself. As a result of our nation’s fear, our constitution is being desecrated, civil rights are being trampled, and our democratic nation is degenerating into a fascist regime. Disturbingly, it seems the only inaccuracy of Orwell’s prescient book is that it was 17 years off.

Surely we must make some sacrifices in times of war, yet we must not sacrifice the very principles upon which the United States was founded. In the words of one of our founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

© 2002 The Minnesota Daily

even George Soros states:

Bush's Inflated Sense of Supremacy

By George Soros

March 13, 2003—With U.S. and British troops poised to invade Iraq, the rest of the world is overwhelmingly opposed. Yet Saddam Hussein is generally seen as a tyrant who must be disarmed and the United Nations Security Council has unanimously demanded that he disclose and destroy his weapons of mass destruction. What has gone wrong?

Iraq is the first instance in which the Bush doctrine is being applied and it is provoking an allergic reaction. The doctrine is built on two pillars: first, the US will do everything in its power to maintain unquestioned military supremacy; second, it arrogates the right to pre-emptive action. These pillars support two classes of sovereignty: American sovereignty, which takes precedence over international treaties; and the sovereignty of all other states, which is subject to the Bush doctrine. This is reminiscent of George Orwell's Animal Farm: all animals are equal but some are more equal than others.

The Bush doctrine is grounded in the belief that international relations are relations of power; legality and legitimacy are decorations. This belief is not entirely false but it exaggerates one aspect of reality—military power—at the exclusion of others.

I see a parallel between the Bush administration's pursuit of American supremacy and a boom-bust process or bubble in the stock market. Bubbles do not grow out of thin air. They have a solid basis in reality but reality is distorted by misconception. In this case, the dominant position of the US is the reality, the pursuit of supremacy the misconception. Reality can reinforce the misconception but eventually the gap between reality and its false interpretation becomes unsustainable. During the self-reinforcing phase, the misconception may be tested and reinforced. This widens the gap leading to an eventual reversal. The later it comes, the more devastating the consequences.

This course of events seems inexorable but a boom-bust process can be aborted at any stage and few of them reach the extremes of the recent stock market bubble. The sooner the process is aborted, the better. This is how I view the Bush administration's pursuit of American supremacy.

President George W. Bush came into office with a coherent strategy based on market fundamentalism and military power. But before September 11 2001 he lacked a clear mandate or a well-defined enemy. The terrorist attack changed all that. Terrorism is the ideal enemy. It is invisible and therefore never disappears. An enemy that poses a genuine and recognized threat can effectively hold a nation together. That is particularly useful when the prevailing ideology is based on the unabashed pursuit of self-interest. Mr. Bush's administration deliberately fosters fear because it helps to keep the nation lined up behind the president. We have come a long way from Franklin D. Roosevelt's dictum that we have nothing to fear but fear itself.

But the war on terrorism cannot be accepted as the guiding principle of US foreign policy. What will happen to the world if the most powerful country on earth is solely preoccupied with self-preservation?

The Bush policies have already caused severe unintended adverse consequences. The Atlantic Alliance is in a shambles and the European Union divided. The US is a fearful giant throwing its weight around. Afghanistan has been liberated but law and order have not been established beyond Kabul. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict festers. Beyond Iraq, an even more dangerous threat looms in North Korea.

The global economy is in recession, stocks are in a bear market and the dollar is in decline. In the US, there has been a dramatic shift from budget surplus to deficit. It is difficult to find a time when political and economic conditions have deteriorated as rapidly.

The game is not yet over. A rapid victory in Iraq with little loss of life could cause a dramatic reversal. The price of oil could fall; the stock market could celebrate; consumers could overcome their anxieties and resume spending; and business could respond by stepping up capital expenditure. America would end its dependency on Saudi Arabian oil, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could become more tractable and negotiations with North Korea could be started without a loss of face. This is what Mr. Bush is counting on.

Military victory in Iraq would be the easy part. It is what follows that should give us pause. In a boom-bust process, passing an early test tends to reinforce the misconception that has given rise to it. That could happen here.

It is not too late to prevent the boom-bust process from getting out of hand. The Security Council could allow more time for weapons inspections. Military presence in the region could be reduced—and bolstered if Iraq balks. An invasion could be mounted at summer's end. The UN would score a victory. That is what the French propose and the British could still make it happen. But the chances are slim; Mr. Bush has practically declared war.

Let us hope that if there is war, it will be swift and claim few lives. Removing Mr. Hussein is a good thing, yet the way Mr. Bush is going about it must be condemned. America must play a more constructive role if humanity is to make any progress.

George Soros is chairman of the Open Society Institute and of Soros Fund Management.