The slogans of 1984

As a postscript to the entry below, I did a quick Google search for "war is peace, freedom is slavery" and hit a nice contribution on a website for American school students which explains the slogans in contemporary terms - see the URL above. To cater for linkrot, here's the text, complete hyperlinks and typos:

[ 1984 ]

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Posted by Gregory Wonderwheel (216.229.107.189) on July 06, 2003 at 18:10:34:

In Reply to: The slogans WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH posted by Mary-ooooooh on January 07, 2003 at 23:42:29:

War is Peace: means that the government's military industrial complex maintains order by creating a perpetual environnment of war, threate of war, and war expenses. In today's world it is embocied in Bush's War on Terrorism, which morphs into what ever will create the next place to attack in order to distract the population from democracy. Peace is defined as the state controlling all dissent. War is used as the national security rationale to quash dissent of the government and therfore create the illusion of peace.

Freedom is Slavery: means that the government uses the supposed "chaos" of freedom to say that those who act freely are threatening society and therefore put the rest of society into slavery to fear. The freedom of civil liberties are used as the reason to restrict freedom because such freedom may threaten national security. If we, so says the government/capitalist controllers of the media military industrial complex, allow freedom then we will be enslaved by those who use freedom against us. In fact the truth of that logic is used by them to enslave us by corporate contol of the media.

Ignorance is strength: Only by keeping people in igornance can a nation state remain strong in its ideological purity. Most religions or political groups can not survive when their members are in doubt. Just think of how questions are received in the sunday school class.
Thus keeping the members in ignorance prevents doubt and makes for the unquestioning obedience to the "group" and its leaders. That is a strong group in which inquisitions and witchhunts are freely enslaving the people. But the group is strong based on the ignorance of the individual members.

Where there's a will there's a way

I wrote the wee entry below back at the start of October and stashed it away on my hard disk and just plain forgot about it, and only came across it just now in a little tidy-up:

You've got to laugh, haven't you? At least, I did, out loud and long, at 11am this morning [3rd October] when I heard the news headlines. Apparently, Jack Straw, our esteemed Foreign Minister, has "defended" the war of conquest against Iraq - sorry, "liberation of the Iraqi people" - despite a US team not finding any trace of nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons after 3 months of searching in occupied Iraq. Straw's 'rationale' is no longer, as he loudly and repeatedly proclaimed before the war, that Iraq had "weapons of mass destruction" and was ready to launch these at the "free world" at a moment's notice. No, now he's saying that, had the "international community" (ie the Yanks and the Brits, with a few minor hangers-on such as Poland) not invaded Iraq then it would have lost it's "will" to topple Saddam and the dictator would then have gone on to develop WMD. Or, to put it in Straw's own words:

"There is no doubt, from all the evidence, that they did indeed pose a current and serious threat," Mr Straw told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
"If we had not taken military action at the time, as we did, in the face of that defiance then the resolve of the international community would have died down, and then inspectors would have found it more and more difficult to do their work as they had done before.

"Then they would have been kicked out. Then we would have had a Saddam Hussein still there, re-empowered and re-emboldened and able to continue to develop these programmes in a more dangerous form, to continue to disrupt the region and threaten international peace and security and to continue his reign of terror on his own people." (Straw defends 'justified and essential' war, Guardian online, 3/10/03)

That is, although Saddam had no WMD his regime was apparently thinking about perhaps developing them at some time or other, so "we" intervened just in the nick of time. Brilliant! You couldn't make it up, you really couldn't.

Moreover, he then comes up with the classic:

"The foreign secretary told BBC Radio 4's Today programme the fact no weapons of mass destruction had been found did not mean they did not exist. " (Iraq report 'proves case for war', BBC online, 3/10/03)

As any fule kno, you can't prove a negative hypothesis. It would be conceptually and practically impossible to prove that Iraq didn't have WMD, in the same way as you can't prove that God doesn't exist, or that Jack Straw doesn't have an invisible imp on his shoulder telling him what to do, or even that the world isn't flat (it's a strange thing that you can prove that the world is round but you can't disprove the theory that it's flat).

George Orwell got it bang on in 1984: War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength. Slogans which sum up the Blairite regime perfectly.