The Ministry of Truth on the loose in Iraq

PERSPECTIVE

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By Pekka Mykkänen
     
      "The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below."
      In George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Ministry of Truth served the Party, whose three slogans were famously: "WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH".
     
Orwell's dystopian vision of the future was brought sharply back to mind some days ago when my eye was caught by an article in the Boston Globe (5.12.2004) about the Iraqi city of Fallujah, to which the American forces are restoring peace.
      North Korea also came to mind, but a North Korea in which electricity and infrastructure actually work.
      In Internet weblogs, some of the more hot-headed bloggers have made comparisons between Fallujah and Warsaw during the Second World War, more specifically the suppression of the Ghetto Uprising of 1944.
      According to the Boston Globe, the Americans plan to make Fallujah into a "model city". The residents who fled the largely-razed community are to be returned to their homes via so-called "citizen processing centers", where their identities would be added to a database through the taking of fingerprints and DNA samples, and the scanning of their retinas.
     
The returning Fallujah residents would also be given ID lapel badges that show their name and home address, and these will have to be worn at all times.
      Since much of Fallujah is now rubble, all the able-bodied men in the city would be recruited for the rebuilding process. They would be paid for their services, but the decision to work would not be a voluntary one.
      The newspaper used terms like "military-style battalions" and "work brigades" in describing the way the men would be organised, and said they would participate according to their skills in "rubble-clearing platoons", cleaning up the mess caused by the recent fighting.
      The workers would be ferried from place to place and into and out of the city by bus, as Fallujah would be completely off-limits to private cars, the weapon of choice among insurgent suicide bombers.
     
"You have to say, 'Here are the rules', and you are firm and fair. That radiates stability..." "...They want to figure out who the dominant tribe is and say 'I’m with you'. We need to be the dominant, benevolent tribe", says Lt. Col. Dave Bellon, an intelligence officer with the U.S. Marine regiment that took part of Fallujah during the recent American assault on the city.
      Bellon and others are quoted extensively in the Boston Globe article.
     
I could see myself relating on a personal level to the content of the Boston Globe piece, since my very personal fingerprints have been deposited in the U.S. database at Logan International Airport in Boston.
      I was not guilty of any greater misdemeanour than that I happened to travel to the United States during the era of the War-on-Terror, for which "WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH" is admirably suited as a motto.
      A few goose-pimples of astonishment were raised by the fact that there appears to have been no significant fall-out over the Fallujah plans in the United States.
     
One or two Internet bloggers and discussion groups have made rumbling noises, but if one scans through the article databases of sites such as Nexis, Factiva, or the open-access news.google.com, there has been precious little said or written about Fallujah’s becoming a modern-day North Korea - and the Boston Globe itself has not been quoted on the subject.
      It is almost as though the Orwellian Ministry of Truth (or Minitrue in "Newspeak") would have begun its task of painstakingly reconstructing the past in its vast corridors of archives and filing shelves, and would in so doing have neatly air-brushed out the snippet of information that the United States had previously opposed exactly the sort of actions it is now planning for Fallujah.
     
The citizens' processing centers in Fallujah are of course only a natural progression from the Guantánamo Bay camp for detainees and the scandals at the Abu Ghraib prison. These have come and gone without unduly influencing the popularity or policies of the Party leading the United States.
      Some weeks ago, The Lancet, the weekly British medical journal, published a body count estimate suggesting that as many as 100,000 civilians have died in Iraq, but even this has not become an everyday topic for grievance in a country that otherwise loves to gripe.
      On the other hand, people are going into bat over the claim that the civilian casualties might only total slightly more than 10,000. It is almost as if this smaller number would show once more how warped all negative comments about the war must be.
      Rather than the number of Iraqi casualties, many Americans who swear by the name of the Party found a greater source of irritation in the fact that singer Janet Jackson's nipple appeared briefly on prime-time television.
     
It is hard to imagine any longer what would suffice as the ingredients for a scandal in the age of the War-on-Terror, or why the quality media in the U.S. seem at times to regard the Party as though it were able to read ungoodthinkful thoughts and wreak its revenge on those who doubt the good intentions of the Party.
      Before the Presidential elections, the TV stations were noticeably quiet about events in Iraq, in order that the news coverage should not be perceived as looking like it was taking political sides.
      By some mechanism, Osama bin Laden's re-appearance just before the poll also managed to be ignored into oblivion.
      At the same time, one should not forget the hundreds of American journalists who have risked life and limb to report significant information about Iraq. But for some reason the important topics - rather like people in an Orwellian world - seem to vanish into thin air.
     
For example, nearly every day there are stunning revelations, but the Party is able to spin them in such a way that reports based in fact are made to look like ideologically-charged unpatriotic black propaganda.
      It is not that none of the information is getting out there, so much as that nobody is listening to it or believing it.

How many recall that in May of this year the U.S. State Department held up for twelve days the publication of its second annual report on supporting human rights and democracy around the world?
      The delay was caused by the fact that with the Abu Ghraib human rights violations very much in the spotlight, the U.S. feared for an instant that it would no longer have the international credibility with which to criticise others.
      This was noted with much Schadenfreude in the Ministries of Truth in China and North Korea.
      Applications sought from a benevolent, dominant tribe.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 12.12.2004
     
Quotations from Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, Penguin Centenary Edition, with an introduction by Thomas Pynchon. Penguin Books, 2003.


Links:
  Returning Fallujans will face clampdown (Boston Globe, 5.12.2004, may require registration)

PEKKA MYKKÄNEN / Helsingin Sanomat
pekka.mykkanen@hs.fi