From ‘Amusing Ourselves To Death’ by Stuart McMillen – May 2009

There was an interesting piece of work from a couple of years ago being re-circulated the other day.

It’s a clever piece of graphic communication that makes observations and arguments to show that perhaps Orwell was completely wrong in his dystopian view of the future and Aldous Huxley was right in his observations made in Brave New World.

Both these authors are favourites of mine. This type of debate however, reminds me of one of my all-time favourite comedy routines from a classic British sitcom in my youth –  ‘Yes, (Prime)Minister’. It’s a scene where Sir Humphrey, the wily senior civil servant, is discussing what his boss, Jim Hacker, should do in a difficult debate about Nuclear Weapons. Sir Humphrey demonstrates very artfully how selective use of facts and observations could be used very credibly to support both sides of the argument. Not only was it a very funny piece of writing but also very thought-provoking.

So, taking this idea further, reading the Sunday Times this morning, I came across a whole bunch of articles that demonstrate the outlook of Orwell, and the main observations of his future gazing, could be seen as equally valid at this point in history as Huxley’s.

Perpetual War – While the majority of the western world may well be ‘amusing itself to death’ – which is the main thrust of the ‘Huxley was right, Orwell was wrong’ argument – there are several articles in today’s Sunday Times alone that emphasise the state of ‘perpetual war’ the world currently endures…

• “Pentagon calls in British drama squad for 6-hour lesson in war” – The sub-line of this article is ‘The world’s most powerful army has called in a tiny London theatre company to educate it about Afghanistan’. For me this was a perfect summary of what members of the US congress are increasingly calling an “epic failure and a national embarrassment”. It is also a great example of that old adage ‘shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted’. The theatrical performance that those being deployed in Afghanistan will be sitting down to watch is called The Great Game and covers the troubled history of foreign involvement in the country. Whilst I admire the efforts to think differently to try to end this ‘perpetual war’ I can’t help but think it is 10 years too late. Let’s not forget that it isn’t the military that has suffered in Afghanistan – in many ways it has advanced military causes and technology immensely – it is the ordinary civilians. As a percentage of overall deaths, 90% of them have been civilian – the highest ratio of any major war fought in the last 100 years. In response to concerns about occupying generals and soldiers for the best part of day to watch this performance, I agree with the observations that if you are sending these people into ‘the theatre of war’ the least they can do is spend some time understanding why the local population might be a bit peeved if you mistakenly drop a 1000lb bomb on their house.

• “Sergeant Lucky survives four direct hits in Taliban firefight” – One of those steady trickle of tales from a war that is entering its 10th year now that shows that despite the propaganda about having the ‘upper hand’ and the war being ‘winnable’ – the fighting continues to be very ferocious and more than often it is ‘blind luck’ and slightly superior equipment that prevents the military casualties from being higher than they are.  As ‘lucky’ Sergent Lee Paxton is quoted as saying.. “I thought I had been hit twice , but the medics at Bastion kept finding bullets lodged in my kit as they cut it away”

• “Army adds cyberattack to arsenal” – This article is about the UK military following in the Pentagon’s footsteps and planning to set up a Cyber Command.  It cites Russia’s cyber attack on Estonia in 2007 as an example of the first ‘known’ state-to-state conflict with Moscow subsequently using similar tactics when it invaded Georgia the following year. The article also cites the Stuxnet worm used against Iran’s nuclear programme in 2009 as the most sophisticated computer worm ever detected and reminds us that its source ‘remains unknown’. The director of GCHQ says there were 1000 deliberate attacks a month on British government computer systems last year and is quoted as saying “Cyberspace is contested every day, every hour, every minute, every second”. So, regardless of if, or when, the war in Afghanistan finally ends, it is clear that at this point in our history, the world is indeed in a state of perpetual war – only one that it is almost impossible to see.

• FROM THE ARCHIVE – “In Vietnam, patriotism easily slips into murder” – With the US administration’s outcry over Wikileaks and the appalling case of Bradley Manning this is a very timely re-publishing of an article from The Times archive about ‘One of the classic trials in military history’ – the My Lai massacre. Alongside a particularly gruesome picture of women’s and children’s bullet riddled and bloodied bodies piled up on an open road is the account of the trial of William Calley for premeditated murder involving the deaths of 102 Vietnamese men, women and children. The defence argued that ‘war and morality make unhappy bedfellows’ which picked up on the vibe of the bar-rooms in the US at that time that ‘each human life is not equally valuable, and killing a Vietnamese is less criminal than killing an American’.  The prosecution’s case however was put forward by a 29 year old military lawyer, Captain Aubrey Daniel. He has subsequently been described as heroic in threatening to leak the case to the press if the military did not prosecute. Daniel’s main argument against the defence was that they were asking the jury to ‘legalise murder’ – he told the jury “When the accused put on the uniform of an American officer and took the oath of allegiance to this country, he was not relieved of his conscience. He was not relieved of his responsibility to know the difference between right and wrong” – the article then goes on to say that the army recruits did not like the ruling and the fact that Calley was convicted of murder. Apparently they used to chant “Calley, Calley he’s our man, and if he can’t do it Medina can” (a reference to Calley’s commanding officer). Sadly, 40 years on from this historic ruling, Wikileaks has been exposing how the biggest warrior nation on earth is still behaving in similar ways on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Pervasive Government Surveillance – Aside from the fact that we in the UK live in one of most monitored societies on the planet, with CCTV cameras watching almost every inch of our towns and cities, it we would appear we have been sleepwalking into the ultimate ‘Big Brother’ society. Ask those who live in some of the most authoritarian regimes in the world about how they view the wonders of ‘social media’ and the utopian ideals of a few years ago have been tempered somewhat by the fact this ‘medium’ has been used to identify and persecute them.

• “Assange balks at Twitter Leaks” – This article is about a secret court order issued in Virginia US that requires Twitter to release private messages and other records of accounts run by Assange and others (including Bradley Manning), as part of the US government’s probe into the leak of 250,000 State Department cables. It is believed other operations such as Google and Facebook may also have been ordered to release such information. The interesting point here is this was a ‘secret court order’ that Twitter has ‘let-slip’ about. I think Assange is right to draw comparison’s to Iran’s behaviour in matters like this when he says that if they attempted to do the same thing, “human-rights groups around the world would speak out”. It is another example, I think, of a number of comments I’ve seen recently about how the jobs of ‘secret police forces’ around the world have been made so much easier by the growth of social media.

• “An unspeakable tragedy” – In an article associated with the shooting of a US congresswoman, Twitter is once again in the spotlight. This time it is has the sub-text of surveillance with political motive. It is suspected that seemingly innocent tweets by the congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords enabled a politically crazed gunman to stalk her and time his attack for maximum effect. It is also suspected that the vitriol stirred up by her right-wing political rivals during hard-fought mid-term elections contributed to the actions of the gunman. All in all it makes for pretty sordid reading about the state of US ‘democracy’.

Incessant Public Mind Control – One of the key themes of Orwell’s writing was that power rested in the hands of very few people and that the collective society worked to further their goals. That society is manipulated through the incessant propaganda of the news media. Certainly in the West, we have become corporate wage slaves and also ‘slaves to consumerism’ and I would say this echoes  Orwell’s theme well.

• “Crisis? What crisis? It’s bonus time again” – We are still being bombarded with messages to spend our way out of financial crisis but as the Sunday Times opinion column points out “While most workers face below inflation salary rises (if they get any at all) bank bosses will receive multi-million pound bonuses” – To me this is a classic representation of the oligarchical and collectivist vision of society Orwell portrayed.

• “Apocalypse claims crash back to earth” – This is the story of the US catching Armageddon fever during last week as some birds dropped dead in Arkansas and the web became swamped with religious references to the ‘End of Days’ as more and more tales of mass animal deaths made headlines. Another great example of ‘network effects’ because as far as scientists are concerned, they see this stuff all the time. And the explanation for birds falling out of the sky in Arkansas? Blunt force trauma casued by New Year fireworks. In the words of a notorious Apache pilot ‘Nice’.

So, with just a few examples from just one weekend newspaper, I would say that in this Brave New World of the 21st Century, there are many examples of Orwell’s dystopian visions around us. They may not all look like the grim depictions made popular by the ‘John Hurt’ 1984 film but they are there.