SIDEBAR: I have included in this report Christopher Hedges’ commentary so that I could posit a concise rebuttal to his clever, but flawed ruminations on what he calls “a brave new Dystopia,” the title of his aforementioned article in which he argues against several alarming trends he sees in society and in particular, certain policies of our government such as the War on Terror; a war he and other progressive socialists(1) attribute to George W. Bush, but which in reality had begun long before the US’ involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. To be precise, this war has been waged against the West since the founding of Islam by the prophet Mohammed, and in modern times it commenced in earnest with the taking of American hostages by Iran in 1979, but which Hedges and other “progressives” see as “Orwellian” because of its nature and duration, and many of the draconian steps the Bush Administration began taking after 9/11, which has since Barack Obama taken office expanded beyond anything the previous administration had ever envisioned.
While I agree partially with Hedges’ analysis of the dangers of our society having fallen into the wrong hands, and thus having become an Orwellian nightmare – for different reasons than his – I disagree with his belief that less centralized control via the repeal of certain federal regulations, has brought about some of the excesses we see today within the private sector, on the contrary, it is precisely the centralized controls and manipulation of our markets and the various sectors of our economy that has brought US to the brink of collapse.
If truth be told, the excesses have been in federal power and not necessarily all in the private sector, as Hedges alleges. Where Hedges describes that our society is increasingly, as he put it, “dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that uses crude and violent forms of control,” and that a good part of the American electorate is “entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by profligate consumption” as it embraces unknowingly its own oppression via an ever growing federal bureaucracy with ever expanding federal powers; I do not agree with his disdain for the free market principles which once made the United States the envy of the world, and which even in its current caricatured and depressed form, has set the poorest American far above what is considered “normal” in many societies, even amongst western nations, as evidenced by the enormous amount of people from almost all of those other lands flocking to our shores for a better life they know they cannot obtain in their own lands. America would not have the current illegal and undocumented immigration problem if this weren’t so.
As bad as America is made out to be by liberal progressive writers, pundits, academics, and Marxists theologians, millions of others numbering tens of millions still consider her to be far greater than their own countries, otherwise they would have stayed where they were born, and would not be trying to “get in” by any means possible. There is no better testimony to a nation’s greatness than to see people from other nations voting with their feet, or crossing shark infested waters, some in desperation to reach the glimmering shores of this great land for a life they cannot in any possible way enjoy in their own country of origin.
Because of Barack Obama’s radical agenda, America has only now awakened to the dangers enumerated above, which Hedges incorrectly attributes to the “Christian Right” and what he calls “corporate totalitarianism” – one which he has written about in such works of his as American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America where Hedges equates conservative mainline Christians with fascists and national socialists – an absurd mischaracterization from one who should know better, but does not.
In this work Hedges attempts to draw parallels between Biblical Christian Theology (really Judeo-Christian ethics) and the Neo-Pagan Fascists and Nazis of Europe in the past century. Obviously, he ignores history, because apart from the Jews of Europe, there was no greater persecuted group than the Christians of the lands conquered by the Hitlerian hordes. One thing Fascists, Eugenicists, Fabian Socialists, National Socialists, and International Socialists – Globalists in general – have in common is their seething hatred of Jews and Christians. History has taught US this, and we are now beginning to see it in our own nation coming from liberal progressives, secular humanists, and the militant radical Left. It is not surprising to me that Hedges himself is a vociferous critic of Israel. The Anti-Semitic fruit does not fall far from the proverbial Anti-Christian tree. But we have been warned that we “shall know them by their fruits.” (Matthew 7:16, 20) (2)
In Hedges’ arguments which he cleverly posits in his books and articles such as the one below, one can see the “fruits” of the heavy Leftist indoctrination he received at Harvard Divinity School, where he studied under James Luther Adams, a Unitarian Minister of the liberal wing of Christendom’s elites, where Hedges obtained his Masters of Divinity degree. Of course, we should not be surprised to hear that Hedges has an honorary doctorate from the Unitarian Universalist Seminary, Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, California. which he was awarded in May 2009.(3) These institutions are not bastions of Mainline Evangelical Christian Theology and are not representative of the rich teachings and traditions of the Judeo-Christian traditions that were once taught at our nation’s institutions of higher learning when they were founded as organizations to further “the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” something most Americans are unaware of, and which is no longer is taught in our public schools.
Why then should the reader be surprised that though Hedges is correct in deploring the nihilism and self-gratification and consumerism of current popular culture “seduced and manipulated…through sensual gratification, cheap mass-produced goods, boundless credit, political theater and amusement” – his attributing such foibles to capitalism, rather than to the signs of a society in moral social decline; which has beset every empire since the beginning of time, and the human race’s evil inclination – what Mainline Protestant Christianity has taught as “man’s fallen nature,” and what the Roman Catholic Church calls “original sin” – a human condition of fallen humanity which bedevils the human race, and has since Adam and Eve’s fall and banishment from the garden in the Book of Genesis?
Though he is correct to bemoan the decline and fall of this society due to what he sees as an increasingly authoritarian/totalitarian mindset, where the public is intentionally impoverished, Hedges misses the point of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and George Orwell’s 1984; yet he understandably makes the following observations:
“Now that credit is drying up, good jobs for the working class are gone forever and mass-produced goods are unaffordable, we find ourselves transported from “Brave New World” to “1984.” The state, crippled by massive deficits, endless war and corporate malfeasance, is sliding toward bankruptcy. It is time for Big Brother to take over from Huxley’s feelies, the orgy-porgy and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. We are moving from a society where we are skillfully manipulated by lies and illusions to one where we are overtly controlled.
Orwell warned of a world where books were banned. Huxley warned of a world where no one wanted to read books. Orwell warned of a state of permanent war and fear. Huxley warned of a culture diverted by mindless pleasure. Orwell warned of a state where every conversation and thought was monitored and dissent was brutally punished. Huxley warned of a state where a population, preoccupied by trivia and gossip, no longer cared about truth or information. Orwell saw us frightened into submission. Huxley saw us seduced into submission. But Huxley, we are discovering, was merely the prelude to Orwell. Huxley understood the process by which we would be complicit in our own enslavement. Orwell understood the enslavement. Now that the corporate coup is over, we stand naked and defenseless.” (4)
Where Hedges misses the point is that our arrival at this point of our own brave new dystopia is part and parcel of the process which will usher in the Global New World Order of which Evangelicals and certain circles of Orthodox Jewish thinkers and theologians believe the world is headed before the coming/return of the Messiah. Hedges attributes such signs of the times to a collapse that is brought on in Hedges’ own flawed Marxist worldview which posits that, “unfettered and unregulated capitalism is a brutal and revolutionary force that exploits human beings and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse.”(4) Hedges, like Marx, is wrong; earning a wage is not exploitation, but a return on one’s productivity which accords those dutifully employed a means to purchase goods for a service, or services rendered through their labor, and collapse has come when the natural order has been manipulated by monopolies and repressive governments that along with certain corporate entities allied to them at the exclusion of all others, have brought societies to such collapse in order to change the social-economic order of such societies into the Hitlerian and Stalinist “paradises” that such orders have established throughout every society regardless of nationality, race, religion, or geographic location. The historic track records are there for review and reflection.
Hedges is correct in sounding the alarm and clarion call to beware of the excesses we have seen in big government’s authoritarian methods against its own citizens as opposed to using these to combat America’s enemies, who live to destroy US and usher in Islamic Sharia Law with the defeat of Western Culture as it continues its thirteen hundred year Jihad against our civilization, and its ultimate goal of establishing Islam’s largest and most powerful Caliphate here in the United States once its demise has been secured from within through radical transformation and reinterpretations of its laws, which has already started in earnest in recent years.
The bold attempt of building a mosque and Islamic Center in the hallowed grounds near Ground Zero is only one of many bold steps Islamists and those who promote these efforts have taken, in total being the evidence that the wheel of this process has turned full circle, and has increased in speed years after Hedges wrote this article. But, Hedges is looking in the wrong direction.
Orwell’s description of this decline which Hedges cites as part of our decline sounds more like the policies and political ideology and mindset that has gripped Washington elitists of both parties than corporate America, though I understand where Hedges is coming, but his conclusions are flawed. Orwell describes it in this manner:
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake,” Orwell wrote in “1984.” “We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”(4)
Again, where Hedges is wrong in his belief that Orwell is describing corporate America and not the all-powerful federal government which is now ruling under the most dangerous dictator this nation has known in its history, wielding untold powers through Executive Order, federal unelected bureaucracies such as OSHA, and the EPA, and others, and the more than thirty two radical and Marxist “Tsars” he has put in place without congressional oversight, answerable only to him; powers which far exceed those allowed by our Constitution, and which this president has been using since he came to the presidency five years ago, though he is correct in calling Obama an “attractive spokesperson” hired, as he calls it, to do the bidding of powerful corporate interests who control and manipulate the American political landscape more than most Americans realize. Without naming names, or citing organizations, Hedges admits to the unnatural influence that elites from the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission and several others wield over a good number of our elected officials and the domestic and foreign policies they put in place.
Where he writes: “The corporate state does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader. It is defined by the anonymity and facelessness of the corporation. Corporations, who hire attractive spokespeople like Barack Obama, control the uses of science, technology, education and mass communication. They control the messages in movies and television. And, as in “Brave New World,” they use these tools of communication to bolster tyranny. Our systems of mass communication, as Wolin writes, ‘“block out, eliminate whatever might introduce qualification, ambiguity, or dialogue, anything that might weaken or complicate the holistic force of their creation, to its total impression.’”
The result is a monochromatic system of information. Celebrity courtiers, masquerading as journalists, experts and specialists, identify our problems and patiently explain the parameters. All those who argue outside the imposed parameters are dismissed as irrelevant cranks, extremists or members of a radical left.” (4)
Such an observation is true, except that it is completely reversed. It is not the Left which is demonized, because the Left predominates the organs of information such as academia, the trade unions, entertainment, the government at the federal, state, and local levels, and the news media, but it is conservatives, who are marginalized and called “extremists,” “racists,” “reactionaries,” “Zionists,” “homophobic” and “sexist,” and to do this, they employ such time rewarding phrases used by Marxists-Leninists such as “the Right,” “the Christian Right,” “the Zionist Conspiracy,” “Teabaggers,” and whenever they have the opportunity to use.
Former Presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Nancy Pelosi (D. California), Barbara Boxer (D. California), Alan Grayson (D. Florida), Harry Reid (D. Nevada), Dick Durbin (D. Illinois), John Kerry (D. Massachusetts), Chuck Schumer (D. New York), Jerrold Nadler (D. New York), Anthony Weiner (D. New York), and Robert Menendez (D. New Jersey) have used such phrases against those who disagree with their policy objectives. And why not? It works.
Lacking the intellectual or moral argument to support their point of view to rebut their opposition, they employ the best tried and true method of discrediting their political opponents as cranks and disgraceful liars who lack shame and are on the wrong side of the issues and history. Of course, without a rebuttal or a defense, those who employ this method silence the opposition effectively by deflecting attention from the weakness of their own argument while avoiding having to defend it, while put the other side on the defensive, forcing them to explain themselves. But, by the time this is done, all argument has been discarded, because the general public has been prejudiced by the discrediting remarks used. But back to the topic at hand.
In a an article written by White House Correspondent Bill Koenig, he aptly makes the following observation, confirming my own above:
“We hear frequently of polarized partisan discourse and the lack of civility in American politics and among the public over Congress and the White House's actions. Let's set this straight:
America's partisanship is fueled by conservatives' reaction to the political left's position on moral issues, the Obama Administration's fiscal irresponsibility, moves to make the federal government larger, and the federal takeover of health care — which is 6 percent of the U.S. economy.
Obama has called for unity when, in fact, his and the Democratic Party's policies and agenda are the very reason for the deep political divisions in America.
Adolph Hitler's propaganda master, Joseph Goebbels, would stir things up and then blame the Jews for the problem. That is what the political left is doing to those who oppose their misguided agenda with the help of their enablers at CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC and MSNBC.
The good news is this birthed the tea party movement, which has a larger membership than the Republicans and Democrats, although most vote Republican and are Republicans.” (5)
The political correctness that has gripped the body politic in Washington, D.C., the mass media, and popular culture in this country is crushing free speech, dissent, and has all but emasculated our nation’s ability to function in its interests overseas, or forge a cohesive domestic policy here at home. It has crippled this country and made it appear weak and vacillating before its enemies in what is one of its most delicate and dangerous periods in its two hundred and fifty plus years. This political correctness is Orwellian, or rather the way in which Orwell wrote about it in his master work, 1984, is almost prophetic in its description of life in a society that has degenerated into a police state where free speech is what the state dictates, alliances are quickly and conveniently changed, and government-media complex control all means of information and uses this to dominate foreign and domestic policy. Sound familiar?
I wrote this several years ago, when the Obama White House was entering its second year in office, and before the disastrous 2012 presidential elections, and its aftermath we are currently all suffering under – all, except the elites in Washington of both political parties, who daily work to undermine the institutions and way of life so many sacrificed to preserve – as these elites do their masters’ bidding to bring Obama’s dream of “fundamentally transforming the United States” into reality. This is what they’re all about, and this is the only way to understand why there is no opposition to Barack Hussein Obama.
JB
References:
1.) As he describes himself. See Wikipedia, the Online Encyclopedia which includes the following about Hedges: “In December 29, 2008 column for Truthdig, Hedges identified himself as a ‘socialist’ in contrast to what he sees as ‘ruthless totalitarian capitalism.’"[10])
4.) http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/2011_a_brave_new_dystopia_20101227/
5.) Bill Koenig, Koenig's Eye View, January 28, 2011
2011: A Brave New Dystopia
Posted on Dec 27, 2010
By Chris Hedges
The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” The debate, between those who watched our descent towards corporate totalitarianism, was who was right. Would we be, as Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that used crude and violent forms of control? Or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression? It turns out Orwell and Huxley were both right. Huxley saw the first stage of our enslavement. Orwell saw the second.We have been gradually disempowered by a corporate state that, as Huxley foresaw, seduced and manipulated us through sensual gratification, cheap mass-produced goods, boundless credit, political theater and amusement. While we were entertained, the regulations that once kept predatory corporate power in check were dismantled, the laws that once protected us were rewritten and we were impoverished. Now that credit is drying up, good jobs for the working class are gone forever and mass-produced goods are unaffordable, we find ourselves transported from “Brave New World” to “1984.” The state, crippled by massive deficits, endless war and corporate malfeasance, is sliding toward bankruptcy. It is time for Big Brother to take over from Huxley’s feelies, the orgy-porgy and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. We are moving from a society where we are skillfully manipulated by lies and illusions to one where we are overtly controlled.
Orwell warned of a world where books were banned. Huxley warned of a world where no one wanted to read books. Orwell warned of a state of permanent war and fear. Huxley warned of a culture diverted by mindless pleasure. Orwell warned of a state where every conversation and thought was monitored and dissent was brutally punished. Huxley warned of a state where a population, preoccupied by trivia and gossip, no longer cared about truth or information. Orwell saw us frightened into submission. Huxley saw us seduced into submission. But Huxley, we are discovering, was merely the prelude to Orwell. Huxley understood the process by which we would be complicit in our own enslavement. Orwell understood the enslavement. Now that the corporate coup is over, we stand naked and defenseless. We are beginning to understand, as Karl Marx knew, that unfettered and unregulated capitalism is a brutal and revolutionary force that exploits human beings and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse.
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake,” Orwell wrote in “1984.” “We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”
The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin uses the term “inverted totalitarianism” in his book “Democracy Incorporated” to describe our political system. It is a term that would make sense to Huxley. In inverted totalitarianism, the sophisticated technologies of corporate control, intimidation and mass manipulation, which far surpass those employed by previous totalitarian states, are effectively masked by the glitter, noise and abundance of a consumer society. Political participation and civil liberties are gradually surrendered. The corporation state, hiding behind the smokescreen of the public relations industry, the entertainment industry and the tawdry materialism of a consumer society, devours us from the inside out. It owes no allegiance to us or the nation. It feasts upon our carcass.
The corporate state does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader. It is defined by the anonymity and facelessness of the corporation. Corporations, who hire attractive spokespeople like Barack Obama, control the uses of science, technology, education and mass communication. They control the messages in movies and television. And, as in “Brave New World,” they use these tools of communication to bolster tyranny. Our systems of mass communication, as Wolin writes, “block out, eliminate whatever might introduce qualification, ambiguity, or dialogue, anything that might weaken or complicate the holistic force of their creation, to its total impression.”
The result is a monochromatic system of information. Celebrity courtiers, masquerading as journalists, experts and specialists, identify our problems and patiently explain the parameters. All those who argue outside the imposed parameters are dismissed as irrelevant cranks, extremists or members of a radical left. Prescient social critics, from Ralph Nader to Noam Chomsky, are banished. Acceptable opinions have a range of A to B. The culture, under the tutelage of these corporate courtiers, becomes, as Huxley noted, a world of cheerful conformity, as well as an endless and finally fatal optimism. We busy ourselves buying products that promise to change our lives, make us more beautiful, confident or successful as we are steadily stripped of rights, money and influence. All messages we receive through these systems of communication, whether on the nightly news or talk shows like “Oprah,” promise a brighter, happier tomorrow. And this, as Wolin points out, is “the same ideology that invites corporate executives to exaggerate profits and conceal losses, but always with a sunny face.” We have been entranced, as Wolin writes, by “continuous technological advances” that “encourage elaborate fantasies of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery, actions measured in nanoseconds: a dream-laden culture of ever-expanding control and possibility, whose denizens are prone to fantasies because the vast majority have imagination but little scientific knowledge.”
Our manufacturing base has been dismantled. Speculators and swindlers have looted the U.S. Treasury and stolen billions from small shareholders who had set aside money for retirement or college. Civil liberties, including habeas corpus and protection from warrantless wiretapping, have been taken away. Basic services, including public education and health care, have been handed over to the corporations to exploit for profit. The few who raise voices of dissent, who refuse to engage in the corporate happy talk, are derided by the corporate establishment as freaks.
Attitudes and temperament have been cleverly engineered by the corporate state, as with Huxley’s pliant characters in “Brave New World.” The book’s protagonist, Bernard Marx, turns in frustration to his girlfriend Lenina:
“Don’t you wish you were free, Lenina?” he asks.
“I don’t know that you mean. I am free, free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody’s happy nowadays.”
He laughed, “Yes, ‘Everybody’s happy nowadays.’ We have been giving the children that at five. But wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else’s way.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she repeated.
The façade is crumbling. And as more and more people realize that they have been used and robbed, we will move swiftly from Huxley’s “Brave New World” to Orwell’s “1984.” The public, at some point, will have to face some very unpleasant truths. The good-paying jobs are not coming back. The largest deficits in human history mean that we are trapped in a debt peonage system that will be used by the corporate state to eradicate the last vestiges of social protection for citizens, including Social Security. The state has devolved from a capitalist democracy to neo-feudalism. And when these truths become apparent, anger will replace the corporate-imposed cheerful conformity. The bleakness of our post-industrial pockets, where some 40 million Americans live in a state of poverty and tens of millions in a category called “near poverty,” coupled with the lack of credit to save families from foreclosures, bank repossessions and bankruptcy from medical bills, means that inverted totalitarianism will no longer work.
We increasingly live in Orwell’s Oceania, not Huxley’s The World State. Osama bin Laden plays the role assumed by Emmanuel Goldstein in “1984.” Goldstein, in the novel, is the public face of terror. His evil machinations and clandestine acts of violence dominate the nightly news. Goldstein’s image appears each day on Oceania’s television screens as part of the nation’s “Two Minutes of Hate” daily ritual. And without the intervention of the state, Goldstein, like bin Laden, will kill you. All excesses are justified in the titanic fight against evil personified.
The psychological torture of Pvt. Bradley Manning—who has now been imprisoned for seven months without being convicted of any crime—mirrors the breaking of the dissident Winston Smith at the end of “1984.” Manning is being held as a “maximum custody detainee” in the brig at Marine Corps Base Quantico, in Virginia. He spends 23 of every 24 hours alone. He is denied exercise. He cannot have a pillow or sheets for his bed. Army doctors have been plying him with antidepressants. The cruder forms of torture of the Gestapo have been replaced with refined Orwellian techniques, largely developed by government psychologists, to turn dissidents like Manning into vegetables. We break souls as well as bodies. It is more effective. Now we can all be taken to Orwell’s dreaded Room 101 to become compliant and harmless. These “special administrative measures” are regularly imposed on our dissidents, including Syed Fahad Hashmi, who was imprisoned under similar conditions for three years before going to trial. The techniques have psychologically maimed thousands of detainees in our black sites around the globe. They are the staple form of control in our maximum security prisons where the corporate state makes war on our most politically astute underclass—African-Americans. It all presages the shift from Huxley to Orwell.
“Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling,” Winston Smith’s torturer tells him in “1984.” “Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”
The noose is tightening. The era of amusement is being replaced by the era of repression. Tens of millions of citizens have had their e-mails and phone records turned over to the government. We are the most monitored and spied-on citizenry in human history. Many of us have our daily routine caught on dozens of security cameras. Our proclivities and habits are recorded on the Internet. Our profiles are electronically generated. Our bodies are patted down at airports and filmed by scanners. And public service announcements, car inspection stickers, and public transportation posters constantly urge us to report suspicious activity. The enemy is everywhere.
Those who do not comply with the dictates of the war on terror, a war which, as Orwell noted, is endless, are brutally silenced. The draconian security measures used to cripple protests at the G-20 gatherings in Pittsburgh and Toronto were wildly disproportionate for the level of street activity. But they sent a clear message—DO NOT TRY THIS. The FBI’s targeting of antiwar and Palestinian activists, which in late September saw agents raid homes in Minneapolis and Chicago, is a harbinger of what is to come for all who dare defy the state’s official Newspeak. The agents—our Thought Police—seized phones, computers, documents and other personal belongings. Subpoenas to appear before a grand jury have since been served on 26 people. The subpoenas cite federal law prohibiting “providing material support or resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations.” Terror, even for those who have nothing to do with terror, becomes the blunt instrument used by Big Brother to protect us from ourselves.
“Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating?” Orwell wrote. “It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself.”
Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute. His newest book is “Death of the Liberal Class.”
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