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2017 Isn’t ‘1984’

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2017 isn’t ‘1984’ – it’s stranger than Orwell imagined

John Broich, Case Western Reserve University

A week after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, George Orwell’s “1984” is the best-selling book on Amazon.com.

The hearts of a thousand English teachers must be warmed as people flock to a novel published in 1949 for ways to think about their present moment.

Orwell set his story in Oceania, one of three blocs or mega-states fighting over the globe in 1984. There has been a nuclear exchange, and the blocs seem to have agreed to perpetual conventional war, probably because constant warfare serves their shared interests in domestic control.

Oceania demands total subservience. It is a police state, with helicopters monitoring people’s activities, even watching through their windows. But Orwell emphasizes it is the “ThinkPol,” the Thought Police, who really monitor the “Proles,” the lowest 85 percent of the population outside the party elite. The ThinkPol move invisibly among society seeking out, even encouraging, thoughtcrimes so they can make the perpetrators disappear for reprogramming.

The other main way the party elite, symbolized in the mustached figurehead Big Brother, encourage and police correct thought is through the technology of the Telescreen. These “metal plaques” transmit things like frightening video of enemy armies and of course the wisdom of Big Brother. But the Telescreen can see you, too. During mandatory morning exercise, the Telescreen not only shows a young, wiry trainer leading cardio, it can see if you are keeping up. Telescreens are everywhere: They are in every room of people’s homes. At the office, people use them to do their jobs.

The story revolves around Winston Smith and Julia, who try to resist their government’s overwhelming control over facts. Their act of rebellion? Trying to discover “unofficial” truth about the past, and recording unauthorized information in a diary. Winston works at the colossal Ministry of Truth, on which is emblazoned IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. His job is to erase politically inconvenient data from the public record. A party member falls out of favor? She never existed. Big Brother made a promise he could not fulfill? It never happened.

Because his job calls on him to research old newspapers and other records for the facts he has to “unfact,” Winston is especially adept at “doublethink.” Winston calls it being “conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies… consciously to induce unconsciousness.”

Oceania: The product of Orwell’s experience

Orwell’s setting in “1984” is inspired by the way he foresaw the Cold War – a phrase he coined in 1945 – playing out. He wrote it just a few years after watching Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin carve up the world at the Tehran and Yalta conferences. The book is remarkably prescient about aspects of the Stalinist Soviet Union, East Germany and Maoist China.

Orwell was a socialist. “1984” in part describes his fear that the democratic socialism in which he believed would be hijacked by authoritarian Stalinism. The novel grew out of his sharp observations of his world and the fact that Stalinists tried to kill him.

In 1936, a fascist-supported military coup threatened the democratically elected socialist majority in Spain. Orwell and other committed socialists from around the world, including Ernest Hemingway, volunteered to fight against the rightist rebels. Meanwhile, Hitler lent the rightists his air power while Stalin tried to take over the leftist Republican resistance. When Orwell and other volunteers defied these Stalinists, they moved to crush the opposition. Hunted, Orwell and his wife had to flee for their lives from Spain in 1937.

George Orwell at the BBC.

Back in London during World War II, Orwell saw for himself how a liberal democracy and individuals committed to freedom could find themselves on a path toward Big Brother. He worked for the BBC writing what can only be described as “propaganda” aimed at an Indian audience. What he wrote was not exactly doublethink, but it was news and commentary with a slant to serve a political purpose. Orwell sought to convince Indians that their sons and resources were serving the greater good in the war. Having written things he believed were untrue, he quit the job after two years, disgusted with himself.

Imperialism itself disgusted him. As a young man in the 1920s, Orwell had served as a colonial police officer in Burma. In a distant foreshadowing of Big Brother’s world, Orwell reviled the arbitrary and brutish role he took on in a colonial system. “I hated it bitterly,” he wrote. “In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the gray, cowed faces of the long-term convicts…”

Oceania was a prescient product of a particular biography and particular moment when the Cold War was beginning. Naturally, then, today’s world of “alternative facts” is quite different in ways that Orwell could not have imagined.

Big Brother not required

Orwell described a single-party system in which a tiny core of oligarchs, Oceania’s “inner party,” control all information. This is their chief means of controlling power. In the U.S. today, information is wide open to those who can access the internet, at least 84 percent of Americans. And while the U.S. arguably might be an oligarchy, power exists somewhere in a scrum including the electorate, constitution, the courts, bureaucracies and, inevitably, money. In other words, unlike in Oceania, both information and power are diffuse in 2017 America.

Those who study the decline in standards of evidence and reasoning in the U.S. electorate chiefly blame politicians’ concerted efforts from the 1970s to discredit expertise, degrade trust in Congress and its members, even question the legitimacy of government itself. With those leaders, institutions and expertise delegitimized, the strategy has been to replace them with alternative authorities and realities.

In 2004, a senior White House adviser suggested a reporter belonged to the “reality-based community,” a sort of quaint minority of people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.… That’s not the way the world really works anymore.”

Orwell could not have imagined the internet and its role in distributing alternative facts, nor that people would carry around Telescreens in their pockets in the form of smartphones. There is no Ministry of Truth distributing and policing information, and in a way everyone is Big Brother.

It seems less a situation that people are incapable of seeing through Big Brother’s big lies, than they embrace “alternative facts.” Some researchers have found that when some people begin with a certain worldview – for example, that scientific experts and public officials are untrustworthy – they believe their misperceptions more strongly when given accurate conflicting information. In other words, arguing with facts can backfire. Having already decided what is more essentially true than the facts reported by experts or journalists, they seek confirmation in alternative facts and distribute them themselves via Facebook, no Big Brother required.

In Orwell’s Oceania, there is no freedom to speak facts except those that are official. In 2017 America, at least among many of the powerful minority who selected its president, the more official the fact, the more dubious. For Winston, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” For this powerful minority, freedom is the freedom to say two plus two make five.

The Conversation

John Broich, Associate Professor, Case Western Reserve University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Reader’s Advisory: The Handmaid’s Tale

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The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood is an old favorite of those who would make unpleasant books go away, and was listed 37th on the American Library Association’s list of 100 Most Banned Books from 1990 to 1999. It was challenged in 2001 in Dripping Springs, Texas by a group of parents who declared it anti-Christian and pornographic. Also quite recently, the Judson School District Board in San Antonio, TX overturned a ban of The Handmaid’s Tale by the superintendent. Ed Lyman had ordered the book taken out of the advanced placement English curriculum when a parent complained it contained sexual and anti-Christian content. A committee comprised of teachers, students, and a parent had recommended the book remain in the class, but Lyman said he felt it did not fit in with the standards of the community.

To be fair: violence, certainly. Sex, absolutely. Anti-Christian, perhaps, if you happen to believe that Jesus was all about wielding obscene levels of wealth and power against the meek. Pornographic, no. There is nothing arousing about the situations found in this book.

The world of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a grim one. Women are second-class citizens in the recently formed Republic of Gilead. Women may not own property or carry money. All dresses and hats come with veils. They may not read, write, or (occasionally) speak unless spoken to.  Older women are often pressed into service as domestic Marthas, ruled over by Wives. Because of falling fertility rates in Gilead the younger and hopefully more fertile women are sometimes assigned as Handmaids, expected to produce children for the elite rulers of Gilead. Early in the book, it’s suggested that the suicide rate among Handmaids is quite high.

Meanwhile, older women, barren women, homosexuals and criminals are declared Unwomen and sent to colonies to enjoy hard labor cleaning up environmental disasters, toxic chemical spills, or other similar work. Secret police, known as Eyes, are everywhere.

All this is told to the reader through the eyes and voice of Offred, a Handmaid who’s assigned to an older military officer (the Commander.) Her job is to produce a child for the couple, which is unlikely, as the Wife believes that her husband is actually sterile—a dangerous thought, as Gileadan law says that only women can be sterile. Desperate to manage the situation, the Commander’s Wife arranges for Offred to sleep with Nick, her husband’s driver, in an effort to get her pregnant. Nick and Offred become attached to each other. Eventually, Nick tells her that he can get her out of the country if she’s willing to trust him. The book ends with an assumed contact of Nick’s leading her into an unmarked van, although whether she’s being saved or led to her doom by Eyes is left unsaid.

You don’t read a lot about the men in this society directly, since Offred’s dealings with them are sharply limited by the rules she lives by. Men are either in charge, as the Commander is; or they serve those in charge, as Nick, his driver, does; or they populate the military and police forces that maintain order. The pecking order is rigid and there is no escape. Men conform or die, their bodies to be hung in a public square as a testament to the Gileadan manner of justice. Simple.

The most frequently cited reasons for banning this book are the description of Christianity found in its pages. However, the fundamentalist government depicted in the book merely uses certain images found in Christianity as a tool to maintain militarily enforced rules of society. For an environment supposedly espousing Christian values, Christ himself–who commanded his followers to love the poor, tend the sick, comfort those in prison, and abhor excessive wealth–is nowhere to be found.

That said, the folks who complain about the sheer brutality of the book’s worldview may have a point: violence is the center of the Handmaid’s world. Society at some point in the not too distance past was disrupted when a cabal of fundamentalist-minded military officers executed the civilian government and declared themselves rulers over God’s kingdom. Wars against the infidel are endemic; a news show described by Offred mentions the execution of Quaker and Baptist rebels, and the forcible uprooting of “Children of Ham” (i.e., Blacks) to North Dakota. Jews are given a choice: convert or leave for Zion. There’s some question as to how many of those put on the boats ever arrive at their destination.

The violence that Offred experiences is more psychological than physical, although she says at one point the Wives are allowed to beat Handmaids as long as they use bare hands, since “there’s scriptural precedent.” Handmaids have no names except for those assigned (Offred, Ofglen, Ofwarren, etc.) by the management. Money has been replaced by pictograph tokens they can use to buy food at the local grocery; even the store signs have been replaced by wordless logos. The ostensible reason for this—the reason the Handmaids are told during their training as state-sponsored breeders—is that it’s for their own protection. Women are too valuable, they’re told, to have to deal with such types of stress.

So here we are. 2017 and Handmaid’s Tale is every bit as creepy as it was when first published in 1985. In a way it’s worse now. The Commander’s Wife, a genteel lady named Serena Joy, was, in her prime, a televangelist who railed against the horrors of modern life and worked tirelessly to bring about the world she now lives in, a world directed by “Christian” values and enforces “traditional” family life. One imagines that she’s resigned to being the head of a household rather than a self-directing individual in a world of business, power, wealth, and religion. One expects that she’d imagined herself being rather more free and/or powerful than she is allowed to be by the leaders she helped bring to power.

As we head into a new presidential administration, it’s worth remembering that this book was meant to be a cautionary tale of a dystopian reality. But…there are those who would use it as a handbook to create a future they very much want to see.

Let’s do better than Gilead did.

Banned Book Week 2015: Fahrenheit 451

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Bad news: 451 degrees F is not, in fact, the temperature at which paper bursts into flame. (It’s actually between 440 and 470 degrees F depending on the type of paper).

Good news: Ray Bradbury’s novel about censorship, mass media, and induced apathy in the modern world is as accessible and spooky as it was the day he finished writing it in 1953.

Fahrenheit 451 is the story of Guy Montag, a fireman in the most literaTo everything, burn, burn, burn...l sense: he sets books on fire. Bradbury said in interviews that he wrote the book to address the popularity of the idea of book burning during the McCarthy years in the U.S. As time wore on, he came to describe the book in more general terms. The book has pulled down  a number of awards starting with the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and the Commonwealth Club of California Club Gold Medal in 1954. Francois Truffaut wrote and directed an excellent film adaptation in 1966, and the BBC produced a radio adaptation in 1982.

And of course, it’s been banned, censored, and redacted by schools and libraries since its publication. (The irony of banning a book about burning books is apparently lost in some circles.)

Anyway, Guy Montag burns books. In this world, firemen seek out and seize stashes of books in private homes and ignite them. Books are considered confusing things, filled with all sorts of ideas that make people uncomfortable (“painful, awful, hurting words” as his wife Millie describes them). In that sense, the firemen perform a public service: they keep the masses happy and allow them to focus on the permissible outlets: television (parlor walls), visual mass media, and sports events.

Frankly, Montag is okay with his life until he meets Clarisse, a new neighbor, a high school girl who is far more likely to ask “Why?” than “How?” While she vexes her teachers and fellow students, Montag finds her refreshing and fascinating–until she disappears. Montag’s wife, Millie, thinks the girl died in an auto accident but doesn’t really know or care.

Missing Clarisse is bad enough, but Montag truly questions his life when he takes a call to burn the stash of an elderly woman with a huge hidden library. The house is torched and the woman elects to burn to death with it rather than give up her library. Superficially, Montag understands that the woman sealed her own fate, but his guts tell him a different story.

Montag starts stressing out. Beatty, his fire chief, takes him aside to explain that the books aren’t really illegal per se. A fireman is even allowed to keep one and read it as long as he burns it within 24 hours. It’s the books’ effects on the public that forces the state to employ firemen. After he leaves, Montag reveals to his wife that he does have a stash of books, and he has no intention of burning them.

Montag loses his desire to play by the rules and obsesses about the books. He contacts an old English professor in a desperate attempt to figure out how reading works (and why it’s forbidden), only for him to avoid Guy like the plague. Guy then crashes his wife’s “parlor wall party,” reads the poem Dover Beach, and makes one guest cry. Millie flips out, Guy burns the book to mollify the guest, everyone storms out, and his wife turns Montag over to the authorities.

Millie leaves him on the spot while firemen burn his house. After a grand chase, Montag escapes the city to find a group of exiles who live by the river. Each of them has memorized one book in the hopes that the future will be more receptive to the idea of reading and preserving thoughts through the written word. War breaks out, the city is destroyed, and when the flames die down, Montag and his new friends head in to rebuild.

Bradbury’s work is generally allegorical, but Fahrenheit 451 is a thematic wonderland. Besides the obvious comparisons to real-life book burning which are perpetrated in the name of racial, political, or cultural purity, Bradbury equipped many of his characters with “Seashell ear-thimbles,” tiny earpieces through which individuals received streams of personalized media entertainment. On the surface, it’s just a radio, but just beneath that is the desire to surround oneself with a cocoon of sound to keep the world at bay. In that respect, one can’t exactly look at a world where tens of millions of personalized iPhones, Androids, iPads, tablets of every size and price range, float around keeping their users’ attention focused on their glowing screens at the expense of their neighbors and not be a little concerned.

Beyond that the book itself has been the victim of corporate meddling in the name of education standards. Starting in 1967 the book was subject to the expurgation of all words “hell,” “damn,” and the word “abortion” by its publisher, Ballantine Books, to create a high-school friendly version. Worse, by 1973 the cleaned up edition was the only version on the market. When Bradbury learned of this in 1979 he insisted that the original text be reinstated, and in 1980 it was.

One bit that appears frequently in the text that I sped over in this review is the mechanical “hound” that follows Montag, literally sniffing out trouble. It’s basically a robot that’s designed to assist the firemen in their daily lives, including sniffing out book stashes. Besides emerging as a stand-in for continual state surveillance, it’s one of these drones that chases Montag all over the city as a last ditch attempt by the government to silence him. For all that, the hound fails. It’s his wife, Millie, that rats him out the the government, showing that people are still the more dangerous enemy.

Another bit that recurs in the text: there are very few scenes where the subject of war isn’t in evidence. Bombers constantly fly overhead on their ways to foreign targets, Millie’s friend’s husband has been called up (she figures he’ll be back in a week because it’ll be over quickly), and Montag’s home town gets annihilated at the end of the book. The fact that war even exist in this world gives the lie to the danger that books and reading supposedly represent. If everyone must be kept happy and quiescent, why even have wars? Bradbury’s characters are not even sophisticated enough to ask that type of question. Even Beatty is, at heart, a just a functionary. And while Montag and the exiles have the best intentions, we have no clue if they have the skills to rebuild anything, even as they’re willing to try.

As always, many thanks to Shiela DeChantal and her Book Journey blog for giving awareness boosts to Banned Book Week.

Memorial Day History Lesson

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I’ve been away for a bit and it’s been amazingly busy at the Academy library, but in response to stuff like this and bits like this , I feel that I must respond by posting links to the full text of the United States Constitution and the Declaration of Independence (in that order).  I chose that order for the simple reason that according to Google, more people do searches for the former (upwards of 38 million hits) than the latter (a mere 1.1 million) which is, in my view, a ray of sunshine in an otherwise depressing sea of current events ("Anna, Anna, ANNA!!!.")  Yowza.

That said, the links I posted are to the website of the U.S. National Archives, which for the time being at least is still an amazing authority on the history of these documents and their online presentation is exceptional.   

Enjoy! And enjoy the three-day weekend.

You Have Nothing to Fear From Islam

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Charlie Reese—who is in my mind not exactly a bastion of liberal thought— explains why in this article.  One of the better points he makes is this one:

If Muslims really desired to conquer the world, don’t you think it’s strange that we’ve been living in peace with them for nearly a millennium and a half, except for those times when we attacked them (the Crusades, the European colonial movement and our invasion of Iraq)? Don’t forget either that some of the countries the Bush administration calls allies are themselves Muslim – Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, etc.

The moral of the story is simple: if you’re afraid that if we pulled out of Iraq, the Arab hordes would swim to our shores and knife us in our sleep, relax, it’s not going to happen.  What you should worry about more is the fact that our government is presenting that idea as a foregone conclusion–which it cannot be since it hasn’t happened.

Being prepared and willing to defend our soil is one thing.  Swallowing government propoganda is another. The first can be defended on principle, but not the second.

At the very least, the article is worth the five minutes it takes to read.  Enjoy!

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Democrats Push ‘Net Neutrality

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From Variety, the most hopeful news I’ve heard all year (the whole 10 days):

Democrats push ‘Net neutrality

Internet Freedom Preservation Act is introduced


WASHINGTON — Democrats, who all but sank major communications reform
legislation in the previous congressional session over the issue of
so-called ‘Net neutrality, marked the first day of the new Congress by
introducing a bill that will mandate ‘Net neutrality, which is intended
to guarantee the equal accessibility and flow of content over the
Internet.

The
Internet Freedom Preservation Act, sponsored by Sens. Byron Dorgan
(D-N.D.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), "would ensure that broadband
service providers do not discriminate against Internet content,
applications or services by offering preferential treatment," according
to a statement by Dorgan.

Without a federal mandate for ‘Net
neutrality, Dorgan said, broadband providers could be "gatekeepers
capable of deciding which content can get through to consumers, and
which content providers could get special deals, faster speeds and
better access to the consumer."

The bill "marks another step
toward ensuring the fate of the Internet lies in the hands of its users
and not the hands of a few gatekeepers," Snowe said in a statement.
"The tide has turned in the debate between those who seek to maintain
equality and those who would benefit from the creation of a toll road
on the Internet superhighway."

Last year, the GOP-controlled
Senate tried to move a massive communications reform bill that included
changes to national video franchising rules. Democrats tried but failed
to attach a ‘Net neutrality amendment to the bill while still in
committee. While some Republicans supported their effort, Democrats
took the lead in threatening a filibuster should the bill come to a
floor vote without any provisions for ‘Net neutrality. As a result, the
bill never made it to the floor.

Legislation requires broadband
service providers to operate networks in a nondiscriminatory manner,
while leaving them free to protect the security of the network or offer
different levels of broadband connection to users.

Consumer
groups hailed the bill. "This bill will help ensure that consumers will
continue to enjoy the competitive and affordable services that
broadband has brought them and that big telecommunications companies
cannot use their networks to hinder consumers’ access to those
services," said Jeannine Kenney, senior policy analyst at Consumers
Union, in a statement.

Opponents of ‘Net neutrality say a federal
mandate is a solution in search of a problem "that doesn’t exist," said
Peter Davidson, Verizon senior VP for federal government relations.

"Most
policymakers will focus on how to increase broadband deployment, and
wonder how ‘Net regulation advances that goal," Davidson added. "It’s
ironic that this bill is introduced at the same time the Consumer
Electronics Show is filling the news with broadband-enabled
innovations. There is a disconnect between consumers’ desires for new
products and services and the stifling effects of this bill."

Both
the Motion Picture Assn. of American and the Recording Industry Assn.
of America declined to comment on the bill. Officials at the MPAA have
said that member companies are still split over whether ‘Net neutrality
will be good or bad for business.

Co-sponsors of the bill include
Dem Sens. John Kerry (Mass.), Barbara Boxer (Calif.), Tom Harkin
(Iowa), Patrick Leahy (Vt.), Hillary Clinton (N.Y.) and Barack Obama
(Ill.).

A Very Big Deal indeed.  Call/write/e-mail your congressfolk and let them know you want them to support this baby.

Electoral-Vote.com

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From Andy’s website:

"This terrific site
is running again. It has tons of election data (click successively on all the
icons below the map to see what is there) and a "nonpartisan" (but enlightened)
blog about the state of the mid-term elections. Click
on the "Previous report" link at the top of the page to see previous blogs. In 2004, I’m
told, this was the most popular election site in the country, pulling in 700,000
visitors a day."

The site in question is Electoral-vote.com and it was immensely addictive through 2004.

Politics Expressed in MARC

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Here is a summary of a recent GAO report that should be getting much more media attention than it has. Even if you don’t come to the same conclusions as the authors, the GAO Report is (to put it lightly) extremely disturbing.

But since this is a librarian blog (or, more importantly, since I keep claiming it is), let’s not dwell on the unpleasant facts . . . let’s catalog!

(BTW, if anybody wants to alert me to problems in my 650 fields, go right ahead, I’m no all-knowing expert. But do keep in mind that I’m using MESH, which is extremely limiting compared to LC. Also, yes, the 856 is a live link to the report itself.)

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Update and Replies

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Reply to Lisle:  No, I’m not in jail, and in all honesty, nothing happened last week. I sent the note from my cell phone for the coolness factor, intending to follow up later in the day.  When the incident took place, I was on my way to meet my boss to drive to New Rochelle for the 2005 New England Endeavor User Group meeting.

At any rate, the NYPD had six huge police officers stationed at the 63rd Drive subway stop in Queens that morning, and were basically searching anyone who a) had a backpack or briefcase and b) had a swarthy, sweaty, ("foreign") suspicious look to them, and I apparently qualified. Lots of white and Asian guys were walking through the turnstyles and going down to the platform, but not us olive skin types. And that neighborhood has tons of south Asians (Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, etc.) so the traffic was slow.  I was surprised mostly because while I’ve been kicked out of places of business  and had police stop me for being White before, I’ve never had it happen in NYC.  For the record, neither my wife nor my sister were at all surprised–to them it was a matter of time before I got picked up for something. (But the NYPD does NOT racially profile. Really.)

Yesterday, I walked out of the 103rd Street stop on the 6 train in Manhattan so se another trio of gigantic NYPD cops ready to pull off any suspcious ("swarthy, sweaty Jews") characters off to the side to have their bag searched, but they ignored my that time. Maybe they weren’t interested in people coming out of the train, or maybe they figured seatrching a white guy in a blavk/hispanic neighborhood made no sense. I can’t figure it out, myself. But then I didn’t vote form Bloomberg and am not a NYPD cop.

You tax dollars at work, y’all.

“Intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy.”

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"Never in our wildest dreams did we think we would see those words in black and white—and beneath a SECRET stamp, no less. For three years now, we in Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have been saying that the CIA and its British counterpart, MI-6, were ordered by their countries’ leaders to "fix facts" to "justify" an unprovoked war on Iraq. More often than not, we have been greeted with stares of incredulity.

It has been a hard learning—that folks tend to believe what they want to believe. As long as our evidence, however abundant and persuasive, remained circumstantial, it could not compel belief. It simply is much easier on the psyche to assent to the White House spin machine blaming the Iraq fiasco on bad intelligence than to entertain the notion that we were sold a bill of goods.

Well, you can forget circumstantial. Thanks to an unauthorized disclosure by a courageous whistleblower, the evidence now leaps from official documents—this time authentic, not forged. Whether prompted by the open appeal of the international Truth-Telling Coalition or not, some brave soul has made the most explosive "patriotic leak" of the war by giving London’s Sunday Times the official minutes of a briefing by Richard Dearlove, then head of Britain’s CIA equivalent, MI-6. Fresh back in London from consultations in Washington, Dearlove briefed Prime Minister Blair and his top national security officials on July 23, 2002, on the Bush administration’s plans to make war on Iraq.

Blair does not dispute the authenticity of the document, which immortalizes a discussion that is chillingly amoral. Apparently no one felt free to ask the obvious questions. Or, worse still, the obvious questions did not occur."

The rest of the article is here.

And from the memo itself for people who are pressed for time:

"C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."

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An Open Letter to Deroy Murdoch of the National Review Online

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A few days ago I found this article from the National Review online, where Deroy Murdoch claims that the only way to defend the lives of Americans is to limit access to our libraries to nice people. How we’d do this is to make sure the PATRIOT Act applied to libraries. The upshot is that librarians interested in defending our civil liberties are actually aiding and abetting terrorists.

Being an M.L.S., my first reaction is: get real. My second and third reactions are not that different, so I won’t bother writing them here. What I think is (short version) that Murdoch and his masters at the NRO are trying to freak out their readers to increase their daily ratings (call them "hits", "click-throughs", "eyeballs", they’re synonymous) and use the increased traffic to sell more ad space. Am I being a cynic? You bet, but that doesn’t mean I’m necessarily wrong (I worked in publishing too, once upon a time–and my wife works in publishing now, so maybe I’m not talking entirely out of my ass).

Even if Murdoch is correct and the Patriot Act really is the best law since the 1st Amendment, what he proposes is at best partial solution–remember there were 19 hijackers that day, and if 5 did their research here, 14 of them did not. If we ban every last Arab from our public buildings, well, that leaves the white Muslims, doesn’t it? My point is that this sort of thing doesn’t work in real life and we should know better than to try.

Anyway, my letter to Murdoch is behind the link.

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