In George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, he describes a superstate called Oceania where truth and lies are indivisible, so that lies become truth when they passed into history, and peace is not peace but a permanent war. Oceania used to be thought of as being the USSR, but obviously it was not. What then was Oceania? What is it? The USA!
Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. He is the Supreme Commander of a country that fights a permanent war, yet it is peace, and Obama wins The Nobel Peace Prize for faithfully leading it, like his neofascist predecessor. Obama says the American attack on Afghanistan in 2001 was authorized by the United Nations Security Council. There was no such authority. It “extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan to disorderly regions and diffuse enemies”, he tells us. A decade after invading Afghanistan, the President of Oceania says to the Afghans, “We have no interest in occupying your country”. US forces remain in Iraq, invaded with the support of the whole world after 9/11 except that it was not—all but three of 37 countries surveyed by Gallup were overwhelmingly opposed to it, yet Iraqis and others remain in Guantanamo Bay. This is “global security”.
Another lie is that America invaded Afghanistan “only after the Taliban refused to turn over bin Laden”, yet Pakistan, the adjacent country, said that the Taliban tried three times to hand over bin Laden for trial, in 2001, and Oceania ignored them. Two months before the Twin Towers were attacked, the Bush administration told Pakistani foreign minister, Niaz Naik that an American military assault would take place. The Taliban regime in Kabul, secretly supported by Clinton, was too unreliable to ensure America’s control over oil and gas pipelines in the Middle East.
Though we hear continuously from Oceania’s new President, and his surly puppet, Brown in the UK, that Afghanistan today is a “safe haven” for Al Qaida, General James Jones, a national security advisor, said in October there were less than 100 Al Qaida in Afghanistan, and US intelligence admits that all but a handful of “Taliban” are tribal rebels “opposing the US because it is an occupying power”. The war is a fraud, and, while in the UK, sycophantic media, notably the BBC, play upon the coffins of “our boys” being paraded through Wootten Bassett in Wiltshire on being flown in from Asia, no mention is made of the body count of the Afghans, over 1000 a month—all Taliban murderers of course, and deserving of it.
Meanwhile Americans do their utmost to set Afghan against Afghan just as they set Iraqi against Iraqi, Sunnis against Shia against Kurds, destroying communities that had once intermarried, ethnically cleansing the Sunni, driving millions abroad, and ravaging the country of Abraham, a multiethnic society which included Christians. So much for the Godliness of these self proclaimed lovers of God. They created a desert and called it peace. As in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the opposite of peace was true.
The British in the nineteenth century and the Soviets in the twentieth century tried to tame Afghanistan and failed, though after terrible bloodshed in each case. Cemeteries are their memorials. In the latter case, the Taliban were armed and financed by the USA. Though Yankees are proud of their revolutionary past, they have all now adjusted comfortably to imperialism, and perpetual wars called peace. The old revolutionaries are now the neocolonialists. Yet barring superficial differences, people are the same everywhere, and these Asians, whether Vietnamese, Palestinians, Iraqis, or Afghans all do not differ a jot in wanting to defend their own land against the machinations of foreign powers, just as the American states did against the British.
Orwell was describing what has turned out to be the USA. Even then US propaganda was working overtime against Asia, then against the communist countries, who were never the threat they were painted as. Events have shown that the USSR was a paper tiger, if it was any sort of tiger at all, but the real monster is the USA, Oceania today, a military state inhabited by pious idiots and run by rich maniacs.
From an article by Jon Pilger
