The Evil That Men Do

It is often pointed out that the price tag for the Dear Leader's Iraqi Catastrophe can be represented not only in actually dollars consumed (It will, in the end, send somewhere between 2-3 trillion of your tax dollars up in smoke, which, by way of comparison, represents roughly the entire GDP of Israel for the next 20 years) but that it can also be represented as opportunity costs

As the price of schools unbuilt, health care unprovided, bridges unrepaired and so forth.

To which I always respond, “Are you fucking insane?”

Because if, on Monday, the Sweet Queen Tinikling-Dancin’
Virgin Mary,

the Wise Men and the entire Buddha Justice League reverse raptured (a helluva sexual position, BTW; you and a loved one should really try it sometime) down onto the Washington Mall bearing a Magic Mithras Day Sack containing three trillion dollars in gold and gave it to the United State Congress on the sole condition that it be spent on the poor and the needy or no fucking deal…

…come Tuesday morning bright and early the Republican Party would demand -- demand! – a three trillion dollar package of offsetting tax cuts and subsidies for billionaires, oil companies and telcoms.

And then would, without hesitation, they would take up their hollow Bibles and fake-patriot Flags and heroically filibuster tantrumbuster the government to a standstill until they got their way.

And if, by some miracle, a bill passed in both houses that did not include trillions of dollars in giveaways to Republican Party corporate overlords, the Dear Leader would veto it and then stagger onto the teevee machine and slur out some incoherent, half-in-the-bag explanation that would include the words “terr’ist”, “Democrat Party”, “surrender” and “nukuler”.

To the resounding cheers of the Pig People.

Because the Modern GOP is not interested in using the instrumentalities of government to help the citizens of the United States of America.

Not remotely.

Never were, and never will be, and no sane observer who watched the GOP tell sick children to fuck off because caring for them is “too expensive”, while were simultaneously forcing American taxpayers to shit solid gold ingots into the shifting sands of Iraq, day after day, month after month, for half a decade can reasonably believe otherwise anymore.

No, the GOP is interested in power solely for the same reason they have been amassing it for thirty years: in order to liquidate the government of the Unite States, sell off its assets to their cronies at pennies-on-the-dollar, and turn the full, voracious fury of an Imperial Presidency and unregulated corporate America loose on the world.

Period.

A free, open, hopeful, activist and progressive America is and always has been the Modern Conservative's worst nightmare; an fierce impediment to the Republican’s long-term goal of a full-privatized. one-world corporate feudal State.

For Jebus, of course.

And when Slagging Democracy is the program, as George Orwell reminds us in the ever-timely “1984”, permanent warfare serves one and only one purpose (emphasis scattered here and there by me):

…

The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living.

Hellooooo SCHIP

…

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.

Got Christopaths?

…
And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process -- by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute -- the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.

But it was also clear that an 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.
…

Shorter: Pin-headed hordes of trailer trash watching Fox News is not some accidental byproduct of the Conservative Movement.

It is the Movement's apotheosis.

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. A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built.

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.

Like Health Care.

Like affordable housing.

Like a college education for everyone who wants one.

Like safe food.

Clean water.

Unpolluted air.

All of which could be well within the reach of the average American if we as a nation chose to focus our efforts into making it so.

But instead, all rapidly becoming commoditized into premiums that only the privileged will be able to afford.

…
War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society.

What is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself.

And this is where the parallels with the Bush Regime are most striking…

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.

Offhand, can anyone think of any past or current members-in-good-standing of the ruling clique -- from Monica Goodling to Ann Coulter to Alberto Gonzalez -- to which the description "credulous and ignorant fanatic" does not apply?

In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.

…

It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no 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.

Which is why, on Mondays and Wednesdays, the Dear Leader announces definitively that Osama bin Laden is a marginalized, beaten, punk that we really don't need to worry about any more.

While on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the Dear Leader announces with equal certitude that Osama bin Laden is an opponent so wily, vicious and dangerous that if OBL says that the United States leaving Iraq is his goal, well then just to be on the safe side, to thwart him we had just damned well better stay in Iraq for the next 100 years hadn't we!

That even hinting we might someday leave Iraq would hand Global Victory Forevah over to this monstrous villain and his vast army of kill-crazy jihadists!

Even though, as the Dear Leader reminds us on Friday, bin Laden is a half-dead loser, reduced to skulking impotently in caves in fear of his life.

…

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. The scientist of today is either a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with real ordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture…

In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat. In the past, also, war was one of the main instruments by which human societies were kept in touch with physical reality. All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers, but they could not afford to encourage any illusion that tended to impair military efficiency.

…

But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity. Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded. As we have seen, researches that could be called scientific are still carried out for the purposes of war, but they are essentially a kind of daydreaming, and their failure to show results is not important. Efficiency, even military efficiency, is no longer needed.

Nothing is efficient in Oceania except the Thought Police.
…

The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It 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. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. 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.

Republicans do not care that America was attacked while its leaders slept.

That the wars they started are pointless.

That the wars they started will never end.

That our enemies are now mere shadow puppets to be trotted out only when it becomes necessary to terrify the public into supporting one stupid, disastrous policy after another.

That we have lost whole cities like New Orleans through Republican incompetence.

That the post-conquest Iraq was turned over to children, cronies and party hacks to be looted and run into oblivion.

They do not give a shit that “nothing is efficient in Oceania” except the apparatus by which the Bush Regime maintains its gulags and illegally spies on its citizens. Except the regularity with this the Constitution is sneeringly violated by their Dear Leader.

Because the “object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact."

Because for the GOP, "1984" is not cautionary, dystopia science fiction; it is an ideological playbook they cheerfully follow into Hell.

And this is possible only because, for the GOP, abysmal, hateful Ignorance really is their only remaining Strength.