Prophecies from Bradbury and Orwell

When it comes to prophets, you can have Nostradamus and his esoteric metaphors. I’ll take George Orwell and Ray Bradbury, but I’ll take them with a heavy dose of foreboding.

Orwell’s 1984, published in 1950, and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, both depict futuristic societies in the oppressive grips of tyrannical governments. These governments nefariously employ technology and propaganda to exercise total dominance of its citizens. Both novels are recondite and prophetic, especially given the current geo-political climate.

Let’s consider two of Orwell’s most chilling dicta as stated in 1984, to wit: War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Strip away all the faulty rationale, the cherry-picked intelligence, the erroneous assumptions, and the bold-faced lies that were associated with our ill-conceived war with Iraq, and the political hawks on Capitol Hill and in the Pentagon still claim that we should not withdraw all of our troops from either Iraq or Afghanistan because it would weaken our national security. Meanwhile, they agitate for armed intervention in both Iran and Syria, or wherever else an opportunity to flex Uncle Sam's muscle may arise.

“War is peace.” The Orwellian premise is that war accomplishes three essential goals in keeping a society in total control. It puts and keeps its citizens at work; it maintains and assures production and technological developments from the military/industrial corporations and, perhaps more importantly, combined with the expert use of propaganda, keeps its citizens focused on an external enemy while an internal oppressor tightens its grip.

War is a constant motif in Fahrenheit 451 as well. Despite it’s best efforts to maintain, through technology, propaganda, and the banning of books, a society of obliviously busy and artificially gleeful citizens, the government in Bradbury’s novel eventually goes to war with another nation. War is peace. When is the United States not at war? Our troops are still dying in Afghanistan, 13 years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Freedom is slavery. How can that be possible? A paradox is an apparently contradictory statement that can nevertheless be true. Consider former National Security Agency employee and current fugitive Edward Snowden's plight after he revealed that the NSA has been recording and archiving millions of U.S. citizens' private phone calls. Snowden's freedom is very much in jeopardy, whether he becomes a permanent Russian resident or not. Former President George W. Bush claimed he never broke any of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act laws when he authorized the wiretapping of phone calls made from this country to overseas destinations. We’ve since learned that those phone taps were done without the prerequisite warrants, and we’ve also learned that three U.S. phone companies have been supplying intelligence agencies with information about millions of phone calls made within the United States. Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez Jr. refused to cooperate with any congressional investigations into the legality of the National Security Agency’s activities, and Central Intelligence Agency director, General Michael V. Hayden, insisted that all the squabble over domestic surveillance is nothing but a “political football” and should therefore cease.

As the 9/11 terrorist attacks fade in our collective memories, the objections to NSA intrusions are growing, but many still believe that our government is violating our privacy to protect our lives and our freedom and approve of it. Read between the lines, and our government is saying, “Freedom is slavery.” At this juncture, “slavery” is hyperbole. Still, the ghost of Patrick Henry must be apoplectic while we cede some of our basic freedoms in the interest of safety. And let’s beware of that slippery slope; shall we?

Orwell’s Big Brother, whose ubiquitous video surveillance assures no citizen a sliver of privacy, is not a benevolent overseer. The misleading apparition is classic Orwellian doublespeak. In other words, Orwell’s Ministry of Truth produces nothing but lies (sound familiar?); the Ministry of Peace is primarily concerned with war, and the Ministry of Love with re-education, read: torture. But the United States does not torture its enemies, or so we are told.

Fahrenheit 451 also features constant video surveillance of its citizens while predicting, a half-century before their actualization, television reality shows in a scene where Bradbury depicts the nationally televised pursuit of protagonist/fugitive Guy Montag. Bradbury also introduces his readers to interactive television, while his seashell earplugs anticipate the MP3 players and Ipods that are so popular today.

Both Bradbury and Orwell portray societies with increasingly illiterate citizens who are too overwhelmed with work (ring a bell?) to contemplate their government’s insidious encroachment on their freedoms and too inundated with propaganda to object to it.

The premise behind the censorship that leads to the book banning in Fahrenheit 451 is a diverse society that’s hypersensitive to political correctness. I don’t know about you, but that sounds eerily familiar to me.

The next time you drive on Route 95 or log on to the Internet, you’ll witness the Bradbury vision of a world obsessed with speed.

When certain media watchdogs disclosed that our government has been destroying historical archives and classifying secrets at an alarmingly record rate, the news was evocative of Orwell’s society where history, including records of its citizens, is incessantly and systematically either altered or destroyed.

Speaking of history, we could very well be at a crossroads. Naysayers might look at alarmists and cite two other literary characters, Chicken Little and the Boy Who Cried Wolf, but it would behoove this nation’s citizens to know Orwell’s motivation for writing 1984.

He wrote it to warn us. Take it from him, and Bradbury, not me.