The Ministries of Truth

The quiet and almost eerie calm of early Spring belies the dismal mood.  We hold our collective breath and watch as one of the mightiest Armadas ever assembled surrounds the desert wastelands where camel herders have wandered along ancient pathways for millennia.  The hands of the clock have reached the midnight hour and the cocky cowboy, the Little Mussolini of Texas, swaggers and struts his virtual stage bathed in electrical phosphorescence, belching out crude bellicosities and appearing in the mind’s eye like Charlie Chaplin juggling a giant globe of the world with frivolous abandon in The Great Dictator.  While in Downing Street his minions have blooded themselves with warriors’ chants, echoing the days of Empire when the White Man’s Burden was enunciated by the ritual brandishing of swords.

The Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s day was quite a clunky apparatus compared to now where leaders speak blithely as if War is Peace and Peace is War and where presidents who buy elections cover themselves quite naturally in the mantle of the Protector of Freedom and Brotherhood.  Is there really an argument to be made that once War starts the collective will demands we go along with it because that’s the way things work in a democracy?  Is War really like a football game?  Have we actually signed a social contract giving our elected leaders the right to kill in our name just because we once put a mark on a ballot paper years ago?   Or are there some things that can’t be voted on – like lynching, apartheid, and invasions of sovereign states in defiance of the will of the United Nations? 

These issues are not ones that can be overridden by even the most Quisling of Parliaments.   We cannot allow the Ministries of Truth to define morality and justice unless we have decided that Orwell’s Brave New World is all we can ever hope for.  And, since most of us haven’t reached that embittered state of cynicism, it’s time to rise up and say ‘Piss off!’ to the Parliamentary cowards who voted us into Bush’s father’s oily war.  The bombing might have started, the missiles may be raining on Baghdad and the so-called Armies of Liberation may soon occupy that ancient land where civilisation was said to have been born many thousands of years ago but the real battle for those cherished ideals of Peace, Liberty, Hope and Justice continues – on the streets, in the workplace, in the cafes and the pubs.  The Ministries of Truth may seem awesome and impenetrable but wasn’t it just a little girl and her dog that pulled away the curtain to find a frightened old man with a batch of electronics that allowed him to appear to be Bush, the Great and the Terrible?