Coming along and kicking over the cart has had most unwelcome attention drawn to the shabby view the Establishment has of whatever values went to make up the American Ideal. The territory once known as “the United States of America” has become just another piece of real estate to be bartered away in exchange for the next move in the Monopoly Game played on the world state.
Throwing out “undesirable” local strongman rulers, in an exercise of a sort of faux-democracy revolution, to be replaced with an even more autocratic authoritarian regime, that backs up its “legitimacy” with some kind of veneer of an equally faux-religious rationalization. is held to be good politics by some.
George Orwell, in the novel “1984”, simply used what were then obvious markers of how the world was being transformed subsequent to the Second World War, when the entire planet would be engaged in a sort of three-handed game, with the participants shifting from ally to opponent, and the resulting displacements and instantaneous revisions to “history” that rationalized the sometimes abrupt shifts.
Big Brother is watching you. Time for the next Two-Minute Hate.
Orwell was so far ahead of his time. He had a keen understanding of human nature and the lust for power. This passage from 1984 always struck me as what I would hear if I read the minds of the autocrat:
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”