Orwellian Britain

 
  In his 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell describes a dystopian, totalitarian state ruled by an inner core of detached elites who manipulate the lower orders with deft use of a pet media machine; conduct endless foreign campaigns in order to drain resources and keep average quality of life at a level which prevents resistance; and use a secretive security organisation to pluck suspected enemies of the state from the streets and torture them into submitting to the guiding ideology of the day. Oceania is a place where surveillance is everywhere, poverty and hunger are widespread, and foreigners are senselessly demonised as scapegoats for all the ills plaguing society.

  Sound familiar?

  One could be forgiven for thinking that political leaders both here in Britain and in other western democracies have been reading Orwell's magnum opus a little too much like a blueprint, rather than a warning. We have seen, for example, that David Cameron and George Osborne have been accused of being too closely involved with BBC appointments; that the organisation has faced numerous claims of bias against anti-establishment parties such as the Greens - over 85,000 people have supported a petition declaring they believe this to be the case; and that other media organisations, such as the Murdoch group, are just a little too friendly with certain politicians.

  We have six million CCTV cameras in this country - roughly one for every eleven people - which is one and a half times as many as in China and nearly a quarter of the world total. Security services are able to access our every online and telephone communication, and all three establishment parties in Parliament collaborated back in July 2014 to force through a bill overturning EU regulations which would have banned this practice in just eight days. The Home Office has the power to tag, relocate and restrict the movements of terror suspects without any judicial oversight and for an essentially indefinite period, even if they don't have enough evidence to make a criminal charge.

  Over 900,000 people rely on food banks to live, as a direct result of the Coalition's welfare 'reforms' and ideologically-driven, economically-illiterate spending cuts. The UK has not had a single year of peacetime since 1935. Nigel Farage and David Cameron are engaged in a seemingly desperate race to pile as much of the blame for our economic woes on immigrants, rather than attack the reckless finance capitalists and ineffective regulation by establishment politicians which caused the problem in the first place. Quality of life has stagnated for years; income inequality has been growing since the 1980s and wealth inequality is at its highest point since the late nineteenth century. Politicians are aloof, disconnected and seemingly deliberately unengaging, resulting in voter turnouts lower than at any point since the Second World War.

  Our country has yet to plumb the depths of Orwell's fictional super-states - luckily for me, or it would be off to the Ministry of Love for a little stay in Room 101 just for thinking this, let alone writing it - but the direction of travel is clear. The CIA's use of despicable torture against untried foreign nationals, the growing instability in North Africa and the Middle East and the disturbing actions of Russian President-stroke-Mafia-boss Vladimir Putin show that the UK - or should I say Airstrip One? - isn't the only part of the world seemingly falling in with the writer's dark predictions.

War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. Welcome to 2015, boys and girls.

Remembrance

For King, flag and country they took to the field

For Kaiser and Sultan they snatched up their guns

For Tsar and for Emperor they readied their cannon

For freedom and glory they pounded the drums

For France and for Belgium the Entente declared

No German or Austrian the Channel would sight

The Tsar of the Russias swore his Slavic brothers

Would be beholden no longer to the Habsburg Duke’s might

The Germans for their part defended the honour

Of their Austrian cousins whose son had been slain

Austria-Hungary readied its armies

For the death of an Archduke, now bloodshed would reign

Uncle Sam and his legions came late to the fray

The Italian Prime Minister switched sides at the last

The Ottoman Empire was wooed by the Germans

The Balkans rose up against their Austrian past

The fighting was bitter; the casualties many

Sixteen million lives were snuffed out in the war

Four Empires were shattered; the others were crippled

The balance of power was balanced no more

What did they fight for, those bravest of soldiers?

For what did they struggle through barbed wire and shells?

What reason could send seventy million men

To risk their lives and their futures for four years of Hell?

Some fought for freedom; against oppression and empire

Some fought for justice and a world free of fear

Some fought for their families, to safeguard their future

Some fought for the countries that they held so dear

Some fought out of shame if they didn’t contribute

Some fought because their governments told them they must

Perhaps the bravest of all, did not fight at all

But stood up for their principles in the face of disgust

They each were lied to, those valiant warriors

Each man and each woman who stood up and risked death

There was no free world at the end of the struggle

Victor and vanquished; neither tasted success

No worker in London or Paris or Rome

Gained freedom from toil or protection from harm

No peasant in Hungary or France or in Poland

Gained the land or the bread for which he had borne arms

The Revolution in Russia – so much hope at the outset

Quickly dissolved into killing and lies

And no Treaty could bring back the 3 million innocents

Lost in the genocide the Turkish denied

And lest we forget, the war settled nothing

Versailles was a stitch-up, the peace was a fake

Twenty years later the fighting restarted

And another 85 million went to their graves

The Middle East was carved up by imperial powers

Now we see the results of this spelled out in blood

100 years later we cannot escape it

The sins of the fathers are the deaths of the sons

So then, my friends, my brothers and sisters

My comrades in peace, though pray never in war

Let us remember, this dreary November

The dead then and since – but do not be fooled

War is not and is never a glorious thing

And freedom is rarely the prize at the peace

So when political leaders extoll conflict’s virtues

Just keep in your minds who fights for whose needs

And though sometimes a war can be grim but be just

And to sit and do nothing may not be the remedy

Always be wary when the battle-horns sound

And remember – who is the real enemy?

Here We Go Again

  MPs in the House of Commons yesterday voted by 524 to 43 in favour of UK airstrikes against IS targets in Iraq. Ladies and gentlemen, here we go again. Barack Obama last week became the fourth successive US President to declare on live television an American bombing campaign in the Iraq region; now, David Cameron joins him in declaring military action in the failing state just three years after the last British forces withdrew from the country.

  War in Iraq seems to have become something of a hobby for the Anglo-American military-industrial complex. This time, though, we are not fighting the iron-fisted tyrant that was Saddam Hussein - instead, the enemy is a group of ultra-radical fundamentalist Islamists; a group whose interpretation of the Qur'an combins the worst evils of the early campaigns of bloodshed emanating from seventh-century Medina and more modern Wa'habist ideologies of an ultra-strict religious conservatism and adherence to a twisted brand of Sharia law. A target, therefore, one might think worthy of Britain's aggression? Perhaps.

  The problem is, though, so much of the current problem is derived directly from the Iraq War of 2003 and the earlier Gulf War of 1990. Despite the protestations of senior government figures to the contrary, blowback from overseas theatres of war is a real and present problem, and the history of modern British and American involvement in the Middle East is scarred with it. From the Afghan campaigns of the 1980s, which kickstarted the rise of the Taliban, to the brutal murder of Drummer Lee Rigby last May - whose perpetrators explicitly stated their aim as revenge for slaughtered Muslims in Iraq - the US-UK alliance is dogged by bloody reprisals against their people for the governments' actions abroad.

The territory controlled by the IS as of 22/09/14

  The success of the Islamic State, formerly an al-Qaeda offshoot, is based to a not inconsiderable degree on the violent actions of Western powers in the Middle East over the last half-century or so. The Arab Spring may have destabilised the region enough for ISIS to emerge in Syria, but it has been the justified hatred of Western interventionism which has helped to fuel its transformation from one of many small rebel groups set against the Assad regime to a de facto independent country straddling the borders of two of the regions former powers, and it is the weakness and sectarianism of Iraq in the wake of the Alliance's disastrous earlier invasion which has allowed the armies of Islamist extremism to run roughshod across the lands once home to the greatest civilisations on Earth.

  So, here we go, back into Iraq. So far the UK - along with the other European powers participating in the action (Denmark and Belgium) - are loathe to expand operations into Syria, but now that the USA has taken that step, in defiance of Assad's protestations of illegality, it can only be a matter of time. This war will be one without borders, one which Cameron has said could take three years but which could easily last five times that. Another war in an unstable area, and what will we be left with at the end of it? Two shattered states, a Middle East infected with a stronger poison of religious extremism than ever before and greater and greater hatred for the 'Great Satan' of Western intervention.

  And that's assuming we even win.