Orwell’s 1984 Wasn’t Meant As a How-To Guide
In an ever-changing world, the one constant in Universe USA is rising Pentagon budgets. For President Trump, a trillion-dollar war budget is something to crow about. Of course, it’s sold as “peace through strength.” For what is more peaceful than more weaponry, especially nuclear-tipped ICBMs and SLBMs?
America is always arming, uparming, rearming for war allegedly to prevent war. The problem is arming for war usually leads to yet more war. You don’t “invest” in weaponry to keep it on a shelf, rusting away in armories.
Excuse my language, but Vietnam vets and war protesters put it well: Fighting (or bombing) for peace is like fucking for virginity.
More telling, however, is the constant state of war preparations that infect and influence our minds. Our “leaders” talk about “all options being on the table” when the only option they consider is military force. We are what we “invest” in. And weapons ‘r’ us.
In U.S. politics, strong and wrong is seen as far better than “weak” and right. And just about every politician inside the DC Beltway appeases the military-industrial complex, Israel, or both. That’s how you end up with disastrous wars of choice in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, together with full-throated support for genocide in Gaza.
Who cares about right and wrong when might always makes right?
An anecdote: I have a friend who works in the belly of the beast (the DoD). He told me his job makes him think of Winston Smith in George Orwell’s “1984.” The Pentagon under Pete Hegseth has become an exercise in eliminating DEI bad speak and replacing it with doubleplusgood warrior-ethos speak. Lots of time is wasted sending “bad” terms and names down the memory hole.
Even as the DoD’s language is purged of bad speak about DEI, the Pentagon’s embrace of a permanent war economy is tightened. The very idea of a “peace dividend,” floated by Republican President George H.W. Bush in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, is seemingly ancient history, an idea never to be considered again, not in Trump and Hegseth’s warrior-USA.
Preparing constantly for war is a powerful way to ensure more war. Overspending on esoteric and genocidal weaponry is a powerful way to hollow out one’s country while establishing the conditions for global mass death.
Perhaps our “leaders” need to recall that Orwell’s “1984” was meant to be a warning of what to avoid, not a how-to guide for authoritarian rule and perpetual war.
Bracing Views 
“In U.S. politics, strong and wrong is seen as far better than ‘weak’ and right.”
“You don’t ‘invest’ in weaponry to keep it on a shelf, rusting away in armories.”
I came across somewhere, many years ago, that in deciding to drop the bomb on Hiroshima – despite the utter blockade of Japan, despite there being no worthwhile targets remaining for USAAF and USN bombers to hit, despite top military advisors saying don’t drop it, despite a suggestion to detonate the bomb offshore as a demonstration, thus sparing countless lives, despite all this – Truman was moved to give the okay because he was concerned that if the Republicans found out about the tremendous cost of the Manhattan Project – I believe at an ungodly $3 billion in 1940s dollars – and the bomb hadn’t been used, then the political outfall couldn’t be withstood, and there goes any thought of 1948, if not the possibility of impeachment before then.
Fast forward post-Ike address January 1961, post-Cuban Missile Crisis, to JFK at American University June 10, 1963, chastened by the events of the previous October, asks,
“What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children–not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women–not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.”
Nothing in the subsequent 62 years as even remotely approached the candor, the hope, expressed in those words. Instead we get OBBBA – ONE BIG BEAUTIFUL BILL ACT – increasing the national debt by a projected $3.2 trillion, a $1+ trillion per year Pentagon budget, $800 billion over 10 years in Medicaid cuts and 17 million losing coverage, and servicing the national debt plus military spending amounting to 28%, and climbing, of the federal budget.
Pardon my language, but we seem only to accelerating our way over the fornicating cliff.
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