[Infowarrior] - OT: 2010: Welcome to Orwell’s World

[Richard Forno]

2010: Welcome to Orwell’s World

by John Pilger, December 31, 2009

http://original.antiwar.com/pilger/2009/12/30/2010-welcome-to-orwells-world/
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate called  
Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that "passed into history  
and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan,  
‘controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.’"

Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches  
at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize winner affirmed that  
peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that "extends  
well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan" to "disorderly regions and  
diffuse enemies." He called this "global security" and invited our  
gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which America has invaded and  
occupied, he said wittily: "We have no interest in occupying your  
country."

In Oceania, truth and lies are indivisible. According to Obama, the  
American attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was authorized by the United  
Nations Security Council. There was no UN authority. He said the "the  
world" supported the invasion in the wake of 9/11 when, in truth, all  
but three of 37 countries surveyed by Gallup expressed overwhelming  
opposition. He said that America invaded Afghanistan "only after the  
Taliban refused to turn over [Osama] bin Laden." In 2001, the Taliban  
tried three times to hand over bin Laden for trial, reported  
Pakistan’s military regime, and were ignored.  Even Obama’s  
mystification of 9/11 as justification for his war is false. More than  
two months before the Twin Towers were attacked, the Pakistani foreign  
minister, Niaz Naik, was told by the Bush administration that an  
American military assault would take place by mid-October. The Taliban  
regime in Kabul, which the Clinton administration had secretly  
supported, was no longer regarded as "stable" enough to ensure  
America’s control over oil and gas pipelines to the Caspian Sea. It  
had to go.

Obama’s most audacious lie is that Afghanistan today is a "safe haven"  
for al-Qaeda’s attacks on the West. His own national security adviser,  
General James Jones, said in October that there were "fewer than 100"  
al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. According to US intelligence, 90 percent of  
the Taliban are hardly Taliban at all, but "a tribal localized  
insurgency [who] see themselves as opposing the US because it is an  
occupying power."  The war is a fraud. Only the terminally gormless  
remain true to the Obama brand of "world peace."

Beneath the surface, however, there is serious purpose. Under the  
disturbing General Stanley McChrystal, who gained distinction for his  
assassination squads in Iraq, the occupation of one of the most  
impoverished countries is a model for those "disorderly regions" of  
the world still beyond Oceania’s reach.  This is known as COIN, or  
counter-insurgency network, which draws together the military, aid  
organizations, psychologists, anthropologists, the media, and public  
relations hirelings.  Covered in jargon about winning hearts and  
minds, its aim is to pit one ethnic group against another and incite  
civil war: Tajiks and Uzbeks against Pashtuns.

The Americans did this in Iraq and destroyed a multi-ethnic society.  
They bribed and built walls between communities who had once inter- 
married, ethnically cleansing the Sunni and driving millions out of  
the country. The embedded media reported this as "peace," and American  
academics bought by Washington and "security experts" briefed by the  
Pentagon appeared on the BBC to spread the good news. As in Nineteen  
Eighty-Four, the opposite was true.

Something similar is planned for Afghanistan. People are to be forced  
into "target areas" controlled by warlords bankrolled by the Americans  
and the opium trade. That these warlords are infamous for their  
barbarism is irrelevant. "We can live with that," a Clinton-era  
diplomat said of the persecution of women in a "stable" Taliban-run  
Afghanistan. Favored western relief agencies, engineers, and  
agricultural specialists will attend to the "humanitarian crisis" and  
so "secure" the subjugated tribal lands.

That is the theory. It worked after a fashion in Yugoslavia where the  
ethnic-sectarian partition wiped out a once peaceful society, but it  
failed in Vietnam where the CIA’s "strategic hamlet program" was  
designed to corral and divide the southern population and so defeat  
the Viet Cong — the Americans’ catch-all term for the resistance,  
similar to "Taliban."

Behind much of this are the Israelis, who have long advised the  
Americans in both the Iraq and Afghanistan adventures. Ethnic  
cleansing, wall-building, checkpoints, collective punishment, and  
constant surveillance – these are claimed as Israeli innovations that  
have succeeded in stealing most of Palestine from its native people.  
And yet for all their suffering, the Palestinians have not been  
divided irrevocably and they endure as a nation against all odds.

The most telling forerunners of the Obama Plan, which the Nobel Peace  
Prize winner and his strange general and his PR men prefer we forget,  
are those that failed in Afghanistan itself. The British in the 19th  
century and the Soviets in the 20th century attempted to conquer that  
wild country by ethnic cleansing and were seen off, though after  
terrible bloodshed. Imperial cemeteries are their memorials. People  
power, sometimes baffling, often heroic, remains the seed beneath the  
snow, and invaders fear it.

"It was curious," wrote Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, "to think that  
the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as  
here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same,  
everywhere, all over the world … people ignorant of one another’s  
existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost  
exactly the same people who … were storing up in their hearts and  
bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world."