An Orwellian New World

CREATING A CULTURE OF FEAR

September 11th 2001 was a horrible day in human history.  It marked the American psyche with a dark and jagged scar that will never fade or be forgotten.  To the American people and lovers of freedom in the international community, it was a tragedy.  To the Bush Administration, it was an opportunity.

In his prophetic and terrifying projection of the future, written in a novel entitled 1984, George Orwell forecast a world in a perpetual state of war; a world where history is rewritten and existences are erased by the “Ministry of Truth”; where individual liberty is subordinate to party loyalty; a totalitarian society in which “Big Brother” is always watching.

The year 1984 came and went without the introduction of the newspeak dictionary or giant posters of a Stalinesque Big Brother figure gazing down omnisciently from every building and billboard; and everyone breathed a sigh of relief.  But a mere generation later, there is an increasingly thin line between reality in the post-September 11th world and the fiction of 1984.

In the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, overcome by fear, grief, and anger, we became a passive society of sheep willing to allow the government to do whatever it deemed necessary to protect us from experiencing again the pain we felt on September 11th.

Instead of declaring a war against al-Qaeda, the admitted perpetrator of the September 11th attacks, the government came up with a new and ominous enemy.  An enemy not bound by geography, ideology, or state authority.  An enemy that could be lurking around every corner, in every subway station, aboard every airplane, mowing your lawn, pumping your gas, teaching your children.  Within a few days of September 11th, the country was immersed in a “War on Terror.”  Grammar aside, the so-called “War on Terror” quickly became a war on Americans’ privacy, freedom of movement, freedom of thought, individuality, and civil liberties. . . .