For The Australian Worker, Oct. 2004

Howard victory nights are bad for the health, I find. You can start shouting at some well-meaning moron in the sorrowing crowd and, at my age, risk a stroke. So I stayed home on October 9, watched alone the bad news slowly altering the lineaments of Bob McMullan's melancholy sweetness, went to bed early and sober and at dawn began writing my Orwell screenplay.

It was a coincidental task, of course. But it proved a heat-shield against current events and even on the day Bush won (by cheating, apparently, not on those computers that left no paper trail but, cunningly, on those that did). Orwell's unfortunate life and his firm cast of mind and the fresh, enduring new thoughts he added to human understanding in our time were a very present help in my troubles, and the world's.

Orwell found out early how effective the Big Lie was when his faction in the Spanish Civil War, the POUM, were accused by the Stalinists of helping Franco's fascists (they had come from England and America and Belgium and Czechoslovakia, it seemed, giving up safe jobs and pleasant marriages to wreak this treacherous duplicity) and arrested and tortured and shot. He found out early how fatal division was in the Left. At the least the fascists know what they want, he said. While we're still quarrelling over the seemly way to protest their actions, they're efficiently abolishing democracy, building concentration camps and closing down the media. They're getting on with what they have to do, and we're holding socialist summer camps to discuss the options and the implications.

So he would have found the current Bush Big Lies entirely familiar. That Iraq after Saddam Hussein is much better off, although he killed forty thousand Iraqis in thirty years and we killed a hundred thousand in one year, plus five hundred thousand children (each one a human being, each mourned in his little coffin) prior to that with sanctions. That the ongoing war in Iraq is only 'pockets of resistance', though killing nineteen or twenty people a day. That, no, wait, the war in fact is foreign terrorists sabotaging freedom, and if we fight the terrorists there we won't have to fight them here. That none of the war against America in Iraq is being fought by Iraqis, only 'foreign terrorists' and their dupes. That the Iraqis are glad, really glad, American forces are there, even though American forces have killed in the past thirteen years at least two members of each extended family.

That 'freedom' involves the freedom of the President to lock and torture anyone he likes for as long as he likes, and the freedom of Philip Ruddock to agree with this. That freedom involves the freedom to elect any former CIA agent America appoints as leader. That any election, however miscounted or terrorised, is better than no election at all (Marcos, Mugabe, Saddam and Bjelke- Paterson believed this too) and is a sure sign that freedom has pitched its tabernacle at last, at last, in the Middle East.

Freedom, Orwell's formula said, is slavery. War is peace. Ignorance (and how prescient he was of George Bush when saying this) is strength. The words you put on things, Orwell said, somehow magically change the nature of what they describe. So 'suicide bombers' are 'homicide bombers' now. War is 'the peace process', or 'peace-keeping'. Any politician who opposes your view is 'extremist' or 'hardline' and therefore can be taken out by a helicopter gunship in freedom's name. Freedom is the freedom to surrender to anyone who has helicopter gunships; discuss. 'Minimising civilian casualties' is killing forty thousand children; discuss.

Orwell's 1984 world, in fact, is spin gone mad. And it's the world that only twenty years later we see today, a world of 'embedded' reporters (embedded clearly means 'fucked over'), 'clarification statements' (the President actually meant the opposite of what he said), 'recontextualisations' and 'moving on from yesterday's questions to tomorrow's needs' (denying that what happened, happened).

It was in the year 1984 in fact that Margaret Thatcher uttered her most chilling, frosty sentence. 'We must deprive the terrorists,' she said, 'of the oxygen of publicity'. And for twenty years since then her side of politics have been doing just that, and redefining 'terrorists' as you and me. She once famously ordered the BBC to dub actors' voices on the faces of terrorists like Gerry Adams, lest their own persuasive regional brogues be heard. The Irish responded to this less subtly by blowing up her hotel, when she was in the toilet and survived. With even less subtlety her successor, policy heir and lookalike Tony Blair made the BBC apologise and sack its chief, for daring to imply that Blair, a politician, had boosted his case -- the way politicians do -- for going to war, by saying Saddam's weapons were state-of-the-art and ready to go. Although he admits now there were no weapons, he still says he was right to have punished the BBC for impugning his sincerity in believing there were, to wit, believing a lie. He was right to believe a lie, and they were wrong to point out the truth and have been rightly punished therefore.

And so it goes that the BBC is now not what it was, and is now more like the Ministry of Truth. And so is the ABC and NBC and CBS and CNN and newspapers all over America; fearful of losing 'access' if they don't go along with the current President's crazy line that trillions of deficit don't matter so long as nobody bombs New York. Did this Orwellian deprivation of oxygen help out Howard also? Of course it did. Many media hours were spent on Latham's Liverpool Council finances but none, or almost none, on Howard's disastrous, pratfalling seven years as Federal Treasurer and his final deficit, the biggest in Australia's history. And when the Prime Minister, clearly ragged and sleepless, said he might 'pre-emptively' bomb, say, Malaysia or Indonesia if it seemed like a good idea at the time, he had a bad couple of days in the headlines, but then 'news cycle' 'moved on' and no more was heard of it. If Prime Minister Beazley had said such a thing the news cycle would have wrapped itself round his neck like a python and squeezed and squeezed till his face empurpled and he breathed his last. And then there was the Latham-Learner boot-on-the-human-face advert, unfair to the point of obscenity, broadcast without complaint. And so on.

How then do we live in these oxygenless times, comrades, and how to we fight the good fight? Beats me. After I've finished with Orwell I might have a better idea. His last book ends, though, this way, 'But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother'. And that's a worry.