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An interesting article on George Orwell and the future we’ve become. What would Orwell have thought about the big brother of national security and the never-ending war on terror. And what would he have thought of the internet and blogs? Here’s a snippet:
“In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if not sooner. This is something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you out.
In Iraq, U.S. soldiers are blaring the soundtract to ‘Apocalypse Now’ to psych themselves up to war:
“With Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ still ringing in their ears and the clatter of helicopters overhead, soldiers rammed vehicles into metal gates and hundreds of troops raided houses in the western city of Ramadi”
Meanwhile in my hometown of Philadelphia four teenagers listened to the Beatles’ ‘Helter Skelter’ over forty times before attacking and beating to death one of their friends.
Horrific as both stories are, what strikes me is the choice of music. ‘Helter Skelter’ and most of the music on ‘Apocalpse Now’ were written in the late 1960 and early 70s (the movie itself came out in 1979). Why are today’s teenagers picking the music of their parents to plan their attacks? Can’t you kill to Radiohead or Linkin Park? Couldn’t the Philly kids have shown some hometown pride and picked Pink? Why the Oldies Music? Seriously, there have been some topsy-turvy generational surprises in the support and opposition to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Is there some sort of strange fetish for all things 70s going on here?
In Iraq, U.S. soldiers are blaring the soundtract to ‘Apocalypse Now’ to psych themselves up to war:
“With Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ still ringing in their ears and the clatter of helicopters overhead, soldiers rammed vehicles into metal gates and hundreds of troops raided houses in the western city of Ramadi”
Meanwhile in my hometown of Philadelphia four teenagers listened to the Beatles’ ‘Helter Skelter’ over forty times before attacking and beating to death one of their friends.
Horrific as both stories are, what strikes me is the choice of music. ‘Helter Skelter’ and most of the music on ‘Apocalpse Now’ were written in the late 1960 and early 70s (the movie itself came out in 1979). Why are today’s teenagers picking the music of their parents to plan their attacks? Can’t you kill to Radiohead or Linkin Park? Couldn’t the Philly kids have shown some hometown pride and picked Pink? Why the Oldies Music? Seriously, there have been some topsy-turvy generational surprises in the support and opposition to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Is there some sort of strange fetish for all things 70s going on here?
The New Republic has a long article by John B Judis & Spencer Ackerman detailing the subversion of the intelligence agencies to the political agenda of the pro-war hawks in the Bush Administration. The job of the Central Intelligence Agency is to provide the U.S. with credible information on threats to national security. Subverting it to fit a political agenda is the real threat to national security.
“Had the administration accurately depicted the consensus within the intelligence community in 2002 – that Iraq’s ties with Al Qaeda were inconsequential; that its nuclear weapons program was minimal at best; and that its chemical and biological weapons programs, which had yielded significant stocks of dangerous weapons in the past, may or may not have been ongoing – it would have had a very difficult time convincing Congress and the American public to support a war to disarm Saddam.”
By now, WMD have taken on a mythic role in which fact doesn’t play much of a part. The phrase itself – ‘weapons of mass destruction’ – is more like an incantation than a description of anything in particular.”
Here’s a nostalgic listing of Bush Administration quotes assuring us WMDs existed. (Thanks toStuffedDog for the link)
Yesterday North Korea claimed that it has processed enough plutonium to make six nuclear weapons. I’ve often argued that wars don’t begin when the shooting actually begins, that we need to look at the militaristic decisions made years before to see how they planted the seeds for war. After the First World War, the victorious allies constructed a peace treaty designed to humiliate Germany and keep its economy stagnant. With the onslaught of the Great Depression, the country was ripe for a mad demagogue like Hitler to take over with talk of a Greater Germany.
In his January 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush’s team added North Korea to the “axis of evil” that needed to be challenged. By all accounts it was a last minute addition. The speechwriting team never bothered to consult with the State Department’s East Asia experts. In all likelihood North Korea was added so that the evil three countries wouldn’t all be Muslim (the other two were Iraq and Iran) and the “War on Terror” wouldn’t be seen as a war against Islam.
North Korea saw a bulldog president in the White House and judged that its best chance to stay safe was to make a U.S. attack too dangerous to contemplate. It’s a sound strategy, really only a variation on the Cold War’s “Mutually Assured Destruction” doctrine. When faced with a hostile and militaristically-strong country that wants to overthrow your government, you make yourself too dangerous to take on. Let’s call it the Rattlesnake Defense.
Militarism reinforces itself when countries beef up their militaries to stave off the militaries of other countries. With North Korea going nuclear, pressure will now build on South Korea, China and Japan to defend themselves against possible threat. We might be in for a new East Asian arms race, perhaps an East Asian Cold War. Being a pacifist means stopping not only the current war but the next one and the one after that. In the 1980s activists were speaking out against the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein, an American friend who was gassing his own people. Now we need to speak out against the cowboy politics that is feeding instability on the Korean Peninsula, to prevent the horror and mass death that a Second Korean War would unleash.
By Martin Kelley. How can we use online tools to measure the state of the Peace Movement?