Orwell's Bastards

We ordinary earthlings, were informed by George Bush Senior in his 1991 State of union Address, are livingunder 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 ofthe 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 theIraqi desert presided over by another George Bush. Pentagon spokespeople assure us that they have prepared ashower of missiles on Baghdad that will rival Hiroshima. The U.N. estimates up to half a million Iraqicivilian 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 areopposed to. There is growing evidence that a remarkable number of U.S. citizens are also opposed to this warabout 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 massmurderous consequences, this is the hour we desperately needed a clear, searching, analytical voice like thatof 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 feebleparodies of his voice.

How does one recognise Orwell's bastards? Whereas Orwell himself was acutely aware of historicalcomplexities and constantly tested himself with searching criticism (perhaps most painfully in Homage toCatalonia), 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 thehistoric peace march in London (Feb 15, 2003) as an example. Lamenting the fact that it did not rain on thisparade, Hitchens sees two kinds of people in the largest ever political rally in Britain ­ those belonging tothe sinister Marxist-Muslim Fundamentalist cabal (leading), and the generally deluded well meaning middleEnglanders (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 theKurds who have been fighters for democracy in Iraq and basically accuses the peace marchers as fifth columnistappeasers working to keep the Iraqi dictator in power. Hitchens is a self-confessed disciple of Orwell (he hasrecently published a book on him) and takes pride in his alleged ability to speak unpopular truths to lift thegloom 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 themcome 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. Butall were united in a powerful expression of democratic will ­ enough of this game of death played byBush-Blair and Bin-Laden/Saddam, purveyors of two kinds of fundamentalist evil that threatens to give us thegift 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, wecan assure Mr Hitchens that there would be the same number of people on the streets. The hypocrisy of thiswould 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 usedto kill Kurds who are fighting there for the democratic rights to their language and regional autonomy? Orperhaps the democracy of Kurds being repressed by a key US ally is not as important as the ones in Iraq? Wherewas Hitchens when the Iraqi Kurds and Shias were encouraged to rise up against Saddam Hussein after 1991 byGeorge 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 atthe U.S. plans of post-Saddam Iraq which involves establishing military protectorate under General TommyFranks assisted by Ba'athists? He would have us believe that the US-British aggression is based on moralconcern for Kurds. If he had the minimum decency and honesty, not to mention the salutary self critical edgeof his master, he would not dare propose this in public. This is not just the peddling of partial truths. Itis 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 whichpower in democracies as well as totalitarian regimes can be captured by the elites. Animal Farm and 1984 areas useful in the critique of the increasingly surveillant, 'big brother' societies in the West today as theywere of east European Stalinist societies. Indeed, the recent drama production of 1984 by Northern Stage inBritain reinforces this point.

His bastards however, are willing slaves of the new world order. They have surrendered their criticalintegrity 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 andpolitical 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 astruggle between the Bush doctrine and the bin-Laden doctrine, and have thrown in their critical might behindthe fundamentalist from Texas (I use the word fundamentalist not only in its religious sense, but also thepolitical sense which is summed by the current George Bush's formula ­ 'You are either with us, or againstus' 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 knitwith telling silences. Where are the new Orwellians when Saudi Arabia, Israel, China, Turkey, Russia, Pakistanand Indiacommit massive human rights violations on a regular basis on their own citizens? Each of these is current orprospective U.S. allies in Washington's quest for geo-political 'Full Spectrum Domination', and thus exemptfrom 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 militantswithout any charges and frequently subjecting them to 'soft' torture (continuous interrogation, sleepdeprivation 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 otherweapons of mass destruction. With the history of using depleted uranium shells in Gulf war one, 'bunkerbusters' and 'daisy cutters' in Afghanistan and Kosovo, the USA should be a prime candidate for weaponsinspection.

At least, its murderous hypocrisy of conducting the war in the name of controlling WMDs should be noticedby 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 preventlife-saving drugs reaching millions of AIDS patients in Africa and across the world ­ condemning them topainful deaths.

Many more people are dying, will die to protect the interests of companies that finance the RepublicanParty campaigns. Many more than Saddam Hussein's victims in Iraq. But Orwell's bastards have chosen theirside, and it is not the one where millions of people across the world belong to.

We charge Orwell's bastards not merely of inconsistencies. We charge them with deliberate attempts tomislead, to silence, to confuse the millions who are combining against the new world order. We charge themwith slandering the peace movement as appeasers and non-interventionists. We have been saying no to war, notto action. We have been arguing to lift the sanctions regime that murders Iraqi civilians and strengthens thehand 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' ofthe Cold war - when the USA financed and armed Islamic fundamentalist groups against the Soviet Union- mustnow 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 beraised for a genuinely democratic world, we charge them with serving the interests of a hyper power and theelites 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 dislikeablequarry 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 thisand some of his other recent writings, I begin to imagine that, encountering him, still glowing and red-facedfrom the pleasures of the chase, in the tap-room of the local inn afterwards, one might begin to see aresemblance not to Trotsky and other members of the European revolutionary intelligentsia whom he onceadmired, nor to the sophisticated columnists and political commentators of the East Coast among whom he nowpractises his trade, but to other red-coated, red-faced riders increasingly comfortable in their prejudicesand their Englishness - to Kingsley Amis, pop-eyed, spluttering and splenetic; to Philip Larkin, farcing awayat the expense of all bien pensants; to Robert Conquest and a hundred other 'I told you so's. They would begood company, up to a point, but their brand of saloon-bar finality is only a quick sharpener away fromphilistinism, and I would be sorry to think of one of the essayists I have most enjoyed reading in recentdecades turning into a no-two-ways-about-it-let's-face-it bore. I just hope he doesn't go on one hunt too manyand 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 andother Orwell's bastards find themselves, in Hitchens's own words, with no one left to lie to.

Dr. Pablo Mukherjee teaches at the University of Newcastle.