Permanent War: WAR IS PEACE
Top officials in the U.S. and in Afghanistan have been leaking to the public the idea that the U.S. must continue its wars in the middle east for at least another twenty (20) years. http://articles.latimes.com/2009/dec/09/world/la-fg-afghan-mcchrystal9-2009dec09 This an astonishing claim, given that the entire U.S. involvement in World War II only lasted 3 1/2 years.
As we listen to national leaders proclaim that the War Against Terror will last forever, through our lifetimes and those of our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, that it is a war against any nation chosen by our leaders as being suspected of "harboring" terrorists, or "supporting" terrorists, with no geographical limits, no identifiable enemies, no timelimits or deadlines, it's easy to feel that we have gone mad. Or at least our leaders have.
Who is so sick that they could imagine a war that never ends against an enemy that cannot be identified, who is accused of secret thoughts or beliefs, with unknown and unlimited co-thinkers? When will this end?
George Orwell predicted this whole situation. Orwell's book 1984 portrayed a world divided into three roughly equal territories, always at war. Permanent war. In his book, the ruling elites had realized early in the 20th century that there were enough resources, enough inventions and machinery, to make sure that every person in the world had a good life. 
Everyone could have good food, nice homes, clothing, an education, could work a decent work week but have plenty of time to enjoy their lives, enough money to go on vacations and holidays, to be a part of a community. But if this happened, then the small ruling elite, those who control the money and the power, would lose their control because they would be just equal with everyone else.
The ruling elite decided that they would prevent most of the people from ever receiving the bountiful blessings of the earth, prevent most of the people from having decent homes, education, food, safety or security. The way to accomplish that was permanent war. The surplus in society, scientific and medical research and advances, agricultural developments, none of this would go to make peoples' lives better. Instead it would be devoted to weapons, troops, on permanent war against other nations. This would also guarantee that much of the world would live in severe poverty for their entire lives, would be little more than slave colonies existing for the benefit of the rich. The best way to keep the majority of the people afraid and obedient is to ensure that they have no security, and they are constantly terrified.
In Orwell's book 1984, there is a character named Emmanuel Goldstein, who may or may not actually exist, but who is repeatedly held up by the government to the public as being an enemy. Goldstein supposedly wrote a book titled "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism." Another character in the book, Winston Smith reads the Goldstein book before being arrested. It is possible that the "enemy" Goldstein has been invented by the state as an enemy figure they can point at any time to justify the never-ending wars. Kind of like Osama bin Laden.
Of course the book 1984, and the idea of a Big Brother government/dictatorship always spying, always snooping, engaged in thought control, has found a permanent place in the world, and is used by many as a symbol of everything that is bad.
Here are some excerpts from the enemy's fictional book. It may sound shockingly familiar. If we believed that anyone in the Bush administration read books, you might believe they just copied this and applied it to the nation. And the big question now is whether the Democrats will continue to embrace these policies. So far, it appears that they will.
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[The world had been divided up into three super-states: Eurasia, Oceania, and Eastasia].
[T]hese three super-states are permanently at war, and have been so for the past twenty-five years.
[W]ar hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries, and such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals against prisoners which extend even to boiling and burying alive, are looked upon as normal, and, when they are committed by one's own side and not by the enemy, meritorious. ...
In so far as the war has a direct economic purpose, it is a war for labour power.
Between the frontiers of the super-states, and not permanently in the possession of any of them, there lies a rough quadrilateral with its corners at Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin, and Hong Kong, containing within it about a fifth of the population of the earth. It is for the possession of these thickly-populated regions, and of the northern ice-cap, that the three powers are constantly struggling....
All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals.... But above all they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labour. Whichever power controls equatorial Africa, or the countries of the Middle East, or Southern India, or the Indonesian Archipelago, disposes also of the bodies of scores or hundreds of millions of ill-paid and hard-working coolies.
The inhabitants of these areas, reduced more or less openly to the status of slaves, pass continually from conqueror to conqueror, and are expended like so much coal or oil in the race to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, to control more labour power, to turn out more armaments, to capture more territory, and so on indefinitely.
The primary aim of modern warfare ... is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. ....
In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient - a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete - was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person. Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society. As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago. ....
[A]n all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction - indeed, in some sense was the destruction - of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared.
.... For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. ....
The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed.
.... In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another.
.... Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war.
.... It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. ....[N]o Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world.
All members of the Inner Party believe in this coming conquest as an article of faith. It is to be achieved either by gradually acquiring more and more territory and so building up an overwhelming preponderance of power, or by the discovery of some new and unanswerable weapon. ....
In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for 'Science'. The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. ...
The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand. In so far as scientific research still continues, this is its subject matter. ....
Some [scientists] are concerned simply with planning the logistics of future wars; others devise larger and larger rocket bombs, more and more powerful explosives, and more and more impenetrable armour-plating; others search for new and deadlier gases, or for soluble poisons capable of being produced in such quantities as to destroy the vegetation of whole continents, or for breeds of disease germs immunized against all possible antibodies; .... others explore even remoter possibilities such as focusing the sun's rays through lenses suspended thousands of kilometres away in space, or producing artificial earthquakes and tidal waves by tapping the heat at the earth's centre. ....
War prisoners apart, the average citizen of Oceania never sets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or Eastasia, and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages. If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate. ....
In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat. ....
The war... eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. ....
The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. .... This - although the vast majority of Party members understand it only in a shallower sense - is the inner meaning of the Party slogan: War is Peace.
http://www.panarchy.org/orwell/war.1949.html
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