Opinion/Editorial
OCEANIA
The United States of America is at war with Afghanistan. It can also be argued that we are still at war with Iraq, Syria and quite possibly North Korea, soon. The U.S. has been at war in Afghanistan for 17 years and there is absolutely nothing in the way of progress to suggest this year will be any different from all the others. The U.S. is secretly at war with Syria, with president Trump right now making plans to coordinate our war with Syria by going all in with Russia in their attacks on that country. A future war is being discussed with North Korea, although that talk is quieter simply because North Korea is a nuclear power. This was all predicted by a man named George Orwell, and he wrote a book called 1984 to illustrate his farsighted thinking. Orwell was one year from his deathbed when he finished the novel. His critical thinking and conclusions deduced that there would be a rise in the military industrial complex whose combined needs would require a continuous war with massive funding that would never end, unlike the ‘one-at-a-time’ wars (like WWI and WWII) wars that had come before. George envisioned a time in the future when an imaginary war could be constructed that would have a solid core of fear-founded belief, enabling the war to be fought fiercely (at least in belief opposition), and yet possessing the ability for the war to be modified and changed to suit variations occurring in the surrounding cultures where the war had to be centered.
Oceania was the name Orwell chose to use for this place and its war. The war for the conquest of Oceania would never be won or lost. It would simply go on with different variations throughout time. Funding would be massive and continuous. Security at home in the U.S. would be ever more intensive with intrusions on all freedoms that had come before, explained away as necessary to overcome the enemy abroad. Orwell’s idea was predictive of a military industrial complex that would never stop building, more and more weapons of ever greater destructive potential.
It is hard to conceive of a country that has been so taken with the application of the book 1984, not as a warning for future generations, but used as an actual primer for the development of America’s military forces of today. It is also hard to conceive of a nation that has gotten so dumbed down that it believes its own military forces are not strong enough, and must be made stronger. The U.S. now fields more military power than the rest of the world combined and that margin is growing.
The wars in Afghanistan and Syria are going well. Afghanistan has been warred against for 17 years. Both of these countries are located in desert areas. With these wars in mind, the U.S. is building 51 Virginia class nuclear submarines to go fight in that desert war, at a cost of almost two billion dollars apiece. Zumwalt destroyers are also being built, at seven billion apiece, to head on over to the desert to supposedly engage the enemies. America went to war with Al Qaeda, which had training camps built in Afghanistan, following the downing of the World Trade Center Towers. When Al Qaeda petered out, the U.S. went to war with the Taliban in the same area. Today, the Taliban have been retired and replaced by an even more amorphous power called ISIS. F-35 fighters, at half-a-billion apiece, are being fielded right behind F-22 fighters, that cost a billion apiece. The enemy has no fighters at all. B-2 bombers, at two billion apiece are being fielded to continue to bomb the bombed out caves and rubble that used to be called towns and cities in those places. There is nothing left to bomb anymore, however.
Whom would have thought that the current U.S. military budget could be considerably larger today than it was during the cold war, than it was during the Korean War or the Vietnam War? Only Orwellian thinking could have allowed for an extension of his work to be turned into a defense spending primer. George understood what was trending back in 1949, just as Eisenhower did when he gave his famous departure speech, throwing out a tepidly weak warning about what was about to happen.
Bellicose forces of studied and deliberate ignorance continue to control many media site, and feed bits about the failing U.S. military, and about how it must be supported with increased spending and the addition of ever more troops and new equipment to the American public. How is it that something so physically obvious to absolutely anyone looking up military might on the Internet can miss that fact that the U.S. already controls the world? How is it that Orwell could have written such a popular book, and still today nobody can understand what he was predicting? How can anyone of rationality question the obvious fact that the U.S. is deeply committed to the war in Oceania, just as described by Orwell? How is it that so many people can possess the intellect to see and understand what has happened, and yet there is no existent movement of any size set up to stop such a country and freedom killing course of action through the coming years?
