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Osama and the Terrorists
By Marcel LeRoy, Southbury
In the book1984, George Orwell wrote about the government of Oceania—Big Brother—telling the people that they have a common enemy. At their daily "hate" sessions, the picture of the common enemy comes up on the screen, while the people scream in anger and horror at the image. The common enemy, they are told, is everywhere and must be destroyed.
In one way, it is difficult to draw the parallels between the common enemy in 1984 and America's latest enemy, Osama bin Laden, who has been accused of masterminding the suicide assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. After all, the common enemy in 1984 is a fictional character, and probably was a fictional character in Oceania as well. Osama bin Laden, on the other hand, is real—all too real—and has been the financier and "spiritual leader" of numerous terrorist cells around the world.
Thus, to draw comparisons between the two common enemies seems absurd. The 1984 version posed no real danger to anyone. But today what is left of the bodies of thousands of innocent people lie beneath the rubble of the once proud World Trade Center, the Pentagon salvage operation continues, and investigators have combed the rubble of the remains of Flight 93 in the Pennsylvania countryside.
Yet, the similarities are more real than apparent. They speak to what has been happening in the United States since World War II. Each decade has seen evil characters who have been hell-bent on destroying "our way of life" paraded before the American public. In the 1940s it was Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini of Italy, and Tojo and Emperor Hirohito of Japan. Later it was Josef Stalin and Nikita Kruschev of the U.S.S.R., followed by Mao Tse-tung of China and Lenoid Brezhnev of the U.S.S.R. In the late 1970s it was the Ayatollah Khomeni of Iran, then Khadafy of Libya in the 1980s, Saddam Hussein of Iraq in the 1990s, and now bin Laden.
What we must remember is that we believed—and certainly the U.S. government encouraged such thinking—that if we could just be rid of those folks, we would be safe. Granted, these were evil characters; they were responsible for hundreds of millions of innocent people’s deaths. Like the common enemy in 1984, each man menaced our society, striking fear and hatred into our hearts. Yet when they died, we were not a bit safer.
Instead, what we have seen is that with each decade a new enemy has appeared on the scene. The passing of one does not make us safer. In fact, in response to the latest terrorism, the U.S. government has invoked a number of World War I and World War II measures that will restrict the freedoms of ordinary, law-abiding Americans while not making us any safer than we were before the attack occurred.
For example, one reason that this vicious attack occurred on our soil is that the U.S. Armed Forces, while spending more than one-third of worldwide military expenditures, are nearly helpless in defending our own shores. This proud, high-technology military machine, which has laid waste to Iraq, Vietnam and Serbia, does not have the capacity to stop determined terrorists armed with nothing more than box cutters and homemade knives. After having trillions of dollars siphoned from our incomes to pay for the most powerful and sophisticated weaponry known to mankind; after years of having our persons and baggage subjected to searches at airports; after decades of being told that we must put up with the secrecy and personal intrusiveness of government "intelligence" agencies to ferret out threats to our well-being; we are now face-to-face with the reality of September 11. The greatest wartime destruction inflicted upon the American people was not caused by nuclear weapons, large invading armies, squadrons of bombers, or fleets of battleships and aircraft carriers, but by a dozen or so men armed with nothing more than small knives.
While the taxpayers of the U.S. have hundreds of billions of dollars confiscated from them each year to fund a U.S. military presence in other countries—including in many nations that really wish we were not there at all—the armed forces fail at performing even the cursory duties of what they are supposed to be doing: protecting us from enemy attack. Instead, we have witnessed the spectacle of the U.S. government begging other governments to help attack countries that may or may not have had anything to do with what happened.
Furthermore, when one thinks of the U.S. experience, the prospect of justifying the attacks on nations because they harbor terrorists borders on the absurd. First, all credible news reports have demonstrated that most of the terrorists had been living in the U.S. for many years, using our own facilities to train themselves for the attack of September 11. In other words, if the U.S. government wishes to condemn other nations for harboring terrorists, then it must begin with the U.S. We have funded millions of dollars through the CIA to train terrorists like bin Laden. We have allowed these terrorists to live here for years—virtually unchecked by governing authorities, despite the fact that they had records of associating with terrorist groups—and trained them to fly passenger jets.
It is without question that all terrorists should be brought to justice. Let's begin to start cleaning up our own doorstep first. You may recall that President George Bush said at the close of the Gulf War that we were going to establish a "New World Order," we were going to be safe, and that our troubles were over. Yet, it was the Gulf War that bin Laden says stirred him to wage a personal war against the United States.
As long as this nation continues to implement a flawed foreign policy in the Middle East, blindly supporting Israel over the Arabs, and continues to interfere with the internal sovereignty of other nations, people will rise to fight. They have already learned that they cannot defeat the U.S. on the battlefield, as the 1991 slaughter of Iraq's army so vividly proved. But they also know that there are other ways to strike at us.
Orwell, a socialist himself, understood the nature of totalitarianism, and he understood how governments constantly work to deceive those they govern. Like those hapless citizens of Oceania, Americans have seen one common enemy after another flash across our television screens. Unless we re-examine how our government acts abroad and start taking President George Washington's advice not to get involved in foreign entanglements, we shall see even more enemies in the future. They shall continue to kill us and strike fear into our hearts until we give up all God-given freedoms and civil liberties, until we all become slaves to a one-world totalitarian government, and George Orwell's 1984 becomes a living reality.
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