George Orwell’s novel 1984 had as its background theme the idea of the world being split up into three great military powers permanently at war with each other but with regularly shifting alliances. Orwell’s novel was published in 1948 and was extrapolating from the power structure following World War II, with the world carved up into three regions, those within the sphere of influence of the US, those within the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union, and the rest of the world that came to be known later as the non-aligned bloc of nations.
With the end of the Cold War, with the Soviet Union dismantling itself and essentially conceding military dominance to the US and China not yet emerging as a major power, there was a brief period when it was hoped that this would lead to a flowering of real prosperity as a result of the ‘peace dividend’, as the wasteful expenditures on militaries that were no longer needed would be re-directed to improving the lives of everyone.
That hope died quickly but not because Orwell’s dystopian vision in its pure form seems likely to occur soon. While there are signs of a tri-partite military world order centered around the US, Russia, and China being recreated that could turn into states of actual war between militaries, that does not seem to be the direction we are headed. The ‘wars’ of this century are more likely to be multipolar economic ones, with the US, Europe, Russia, Japan, China, India, and Brazil all reaching some level of economic parity in the near future and competing for dominance.
But it is within the US that one element of Orwell’s dystopian vision is clearly emerging and that is of a nation whose people are exhausted and bowed down by thinking they are in a state of permanent war against some vague and ill-defined but somehow ominous enemy. Successive US governments, and the oligarchies behind them, have discovered how useful it is to have people living in this state of fear, so that they willingly give up their rights and freedoms in order to be kept ‘safe’ from the unseen threats that are supposedly all around us, in addition to being willing to spend vast sums of public money to feed the inexhaustible appetite of the military-industrial-financial complex.
One way in which people can be anesthetized to being in a state of permanent war is to get them used to the idea of wars all around them all the time, and this is helped by the ease with which war metaphors are introduced into the public discourse. It seemed to start out innocuously with ‘wars’ on poverty, hunger, cancer, and so forth, which were clearly metaphorical. The use of these metaphors had the benefit of getting people to think of the war word ‘war’ in a positive light, as something that can be noble and worthy of support.
Then we had the war on drugs, and the word war became less of a metaphor and more of the real thing, with armed action both domestically and overseas. The war against drugs was the first real permanent war, something that has no end because it is being waged against an amorphous and decentralized enemy and there is no measure by which you can determine if you have won. This made it the perfect prototype for creating a state of permanent war because the war will continue as long as the government says it needs to continue.
The next major step of course was the war on terror. Unlike in the case in the war on drugs where many of the so-called enemy, both users and dealers, are actually living amongst us and could be our neighbors, with this new war, the enemy are clearly ‘the other’, foreigners, aliens, ‘not one of us’, and all restraints on the government are off. As Glenn Greenwald writes, in the US today the word ‘terrorist’ seems to be reserved for “anyone — especially of the Muslim religion and/or Arab nationality — who fights against the United States and its allies or tries to impede their will.” This is why there is such strong opposition to using the word ‘terrorist’ to describe people like Timothy McVeigh and the members of the various domestic armed groups that have attacked and killed Americans because of their ideological beliefs that the government or other organizations must be destroyed. The ‘war on terror’ serves its purpose of spearheading the elimination our constitutional rights only as long as it is seen as abrogating the rights of others and not of ‘us’.
Those who hoped that the death of bin Laden would mark the beginning of the end of the war of terror were wrong. As Karen J. Greenberg, the executive director of the New York University Center on Law and Security, writes:
The administration was visibly using the bin Laden moment to renew George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror (even if without that moniker). And let’s not forget about the leaders of Congress, who promptly accelerated their efforts to ensure that the apparatus for the war that 9/11 started would never die. Congressman Howard McKeon (R-CA), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, was typical. On May 9th, he introduced legislation meant to embed in law the principle of indefinite detention without trial for suspected terrorists until “the end of hostilities.” What this would mean, in reality, is the perpetuation ad infinitum of that Bush-era creation, our prison complex at Guantanamo (not to speak of our second Guantanamo at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan).
In other words, Washington now seems to be engaged in a wholesale post-bin Laden ratification of business as usual, but this time on steroids.
This is why I believe the war on terror will never end or at most will be replaced by some new and equally vague threat that will justify the same restrictions on our civil liberties. As 1984 illustrated, a state of permanent war is simply too useful a device for controlling populations.
Next: The next new shiny endless war?