Orwell's '1984' becomes real

Lawrence Powell, Guest Columnist

"You can complain about Big Brother and how this is a potential programme run amok, but when you actually look at the details, then I think we've struck the right balance." -  Barack Obama, at a press conference defending leaked NSA surveillance policies.

First, let me commend The Gleaner for having the courage to print Andre Wright's Tuesday exposé ('US espionage and the emperor's new clothes'), in which he speaks truth to power, holding up to Jamaica's eyes the worrisome parallels between Bush-era and Obama-era secret 'police-state' spying on citizens and journalists.

Last week, former CIA employee Edward Snowden went public about the National Security Agency's widespread collection of 'metadata', gleaned from millions of Americans' private telephone and Internet activities. Together with similarly chilling recent disclosures showing Associated Press reporters being secretly monitored, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four vision of an omnipresent Big Brother surveillance state, obsessively tracking the thoughts and movements of its citizens, is looking hauntingly prophetic.

In his Tuesday column, Wright unapologetically criticises the Orwellian erosion of democratic free-speech rights that these covert actions (by BOTH administrations) imply. He wryly lampoons the entire morphed 2001-2013 presidency as that of 'George W. Obama'.

Surely, this is not the complacent, sycophantic coverage that the American government - and its military-industrial complex, and IMF - would prefer to hear from us. Don't Jamaican journalists understand their proper place in the neocolonial world order? Has no one informed them that "when we want your opinion, we'll give it to you"?

So it was refreshing to see that all is not lost for free thought and expression, not yet anyway. Progressive 'foreign' newspapers do still occasionally risk publishing irreverent journalistic critiques of America's security policies.

As Orwell himself had pointed out, "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." And that is exactly why the US government is so keen to make ugly, intimidating examples of Edward Snowden (who leaked the Prism programme), and Bradley Manning (who leaked embarrassing war-crime secrets to WikiLeaks), and Julian Assange (the founder of WikiLeaks, who remains under protection in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, pending arrest and extradition to the US). These nasty whistleblowers refuse to 'know their place'. They keep insisting on informing the people about what is going on.

OBAMA MORPHS INTO BUSH

When Obama was inaugurated in January 2009, millions of freedom-loving people worldwide (not just in the US) were filled with fresh hope of a more democratic America; many wept with joy at the sight of 'America's first black president' taking the oath of office - believing that meant a new era of tolerance and international peace had dawned.

Obama was a compassionate saviour, a next-generation Martin Luther King come to rescue us from the harsh Bush-Cheney years - with their ruthless 'pre-emptive strikes' and 'regime changes' in places like Iraq, and their lies about 'weapons of mass destruction' and their Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay inhumane prison tortures, and their Nazi-like airport security searches, and their covert phone and Internet surveillance, and their Patriot Act suspensions of citizens' basic civil liberties - all in the name of a trumped-up 'War on Terror'.

Obama assured us that on his watch everything would be different. That eight-year nightmare of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld right-wing paranoia, blitzkreig foreign invasions, and torture without apology was finally over. Early in his first term, Obama was even granted a Nobel Peace Prize by the Norwegians, in fond anticipation of the Gandhi-like things they expected he would soon do to promote peace and freedom.

But as time went on, eery resemblances to the authoritarian Bush-Cheney surveillance state mentality began to creep back in. Despite his 2008 campaign rhetoric, once in office Obama began reneging on his earlier promises to put an end to the anti-democratic, Bush-era Patriot Act suspensions of basic constitutional rights. He also reneged on his promise to abruptly end the incarceration without trial of Guantánamo Bay detainees, as well as his promises to scale back drone attacks that indiscriminately maimed innocent civilians, and covert operations attempting to 'destabilise' and 'change' inconvenient regimes (such as Libya, Syria, Iran, Venezuela.)

What has come to light over the past few months is even more disillusioning. The Obama government has also been exposed spying on reporters whose stories it didn't like, and secretly collecting a massive database of citizens' information without their consent or knowledge, mined from companies like Verizon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, AOL, and Facebook.

GLOBAL REACH

So Wright is right. As ominously predicted in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the WikiLeaks disclosures of Manning and Assange, and now also ex-CIA operative Snowden, reveal that under 'G.W. Obama', the US government and its global-reach military seem to be trying as hard as they possibly can to become a Big Brother presence - under the flimsy excuse that preventing 'terrorism' and 'weapons of mass destruction' necessarily requires Americans, and others worldwide, to accept the indefinite suspension of some of their most cherished, historically hard-won, democratic freedoms: of speech, press, association, privacy, and freedom from arbitrary search and seizure.

The 'shock-and-awe' trick seems to be to get Americans so afraid a terrorist act could affect them personally (which statisticians say is actually less likely than the probability of being struck by lightning) that they are willing to accept a permanent state of emergency as the norm, and continue to support a bloated defence establishment with their tax dollars.

Think about it. Much of what Orwell predicted when he penned his 1949 novel IS here, and has been with us for some time. After all, since World War II, the US has constructed a massive, tremendously expensive global presence, with military deployments in more than 100 countries worldwide.

That presence is further backed up with the implicit threat of its arsenal of several thousand nuclear warheads, each of which has a destructive capacity well beyond that used to level Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which renders US concerns about Iraq, and now Iran, developing a nuclear capacity rather absurd.)

Maintaining that dominant US presence as the world's policeman, in turn, requires absolutely humongous expenditures on the CIA and the military - which recent history shows have repeatedly been used to destabilise and 'regime-change' one government after another that doesn't play by US economic and geopolitical rules.

All the while, the international corporate media get used to spread the necessary newspeak and doublethink messages (aka propaganda that passes for news), to keep a compliant populace in the right state of mind. (For example, by parroting Pentagon-provided phrases like 'collateral damage', which really means maimed women and children from a US drone gone astray; or 'democratic regime change', which really means a US-orchestrated coup d'état that violates sovereignty and self-determination, in the process installing a US-friendly government.)

So with the advent of Google Glass, and with a camera eye now staring at you from every laptop, iPod, iPad, supermarket aisle, and London street corner - the Big Brother Orwell had envisioned is definitely here, watching you, looking for evidence that you just might be a 'terrorist', requiring interrogation.

If you value your privacy, you can, of course, place a piece of tape over that electronic eye that's watching your every move, but the PRISM data-mining project that Snowden has just revealed ensures that, even then, Big Brother will still be logging your every keystroke. Have a nice day.

Lawrence Alfred Powell is honorary research fellow at the Centre of Methods and Policy Application in the Social Sciences at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and a former senior lecturer at UWI, Mona. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and lapowell.auckland@ymail.com.