“'I have pressed the first lever,' said O'Brien. 'You understand the construction of this cage. The mask will fit over your head, leaving no exit. When I press this other lever, the door of the cage will slide up. These starving brutes will shoot out of it like bullets. Have you ever seen a rat leap through the air? They will leap on to your face and bore straight into it. Sometimes they attack the eyes first. Sometimes they burrow through the cheeks and devour the tongue.'
“'It was a common punishment in Imperial China,' said O'Brien...”
There are certain predictions implied in Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” that seem more prescient now than ever in the U.S. Homeland Security and the Patriot Act shadowing the Thought Police. Our society’s addiction to media devices mimicking the ever-present telescreens. Initialisms and other abbreviations truncating the language similar to Newspeak. The use of torture to exact information and debase as is done in the Ministry of Love.
But I think most important is the government’s successful transition to perpetual, unending war. ISIL, an organization that began as the relatively weak and marginalized Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, has spent more than a decade growing ever stronger as a direct result of our 2003 invasion of Iraq. They transitioned to AQI (al-Qaeda in Iraq) in 2004 after joining the Iraqi insurgency and now, despite numerous airstrikes, are arguably still more powerful than ever.
So, we seek to destroy one radicalized group that was born of our attempt to destroy another. And the Mujahideen that laid the foundation for al-Qaeda was formed from our own training and weapons.
To paraphrase Bill Hicks, we’re “arming the world, then sending troops to destroy those we’ve armed.” But we’re also encouraging those to find ways to arm themselves and come after us on their own. We do this by fostering unrest and instability through military action against the would-be insurgents’ surroundings, territories, and livingspace.
I mean, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. laid this all out when he said, “Violence... is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It destroys a community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends by defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.”
The solution, then, would be to simply stop fighting. Unfortunately, I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
-- ∆☩Y§ ☨♆∀☥✠