Posted on 05/15/2003 8:55:50 AM PDT by Darkshadow
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ON WAR # 16: Fighting For A Brave New World By William S. Lind A recent exchange between an Iraqi demonstrator and an American soldier went something like this:
Welcome to Brave New World. When I was in school, Roehm Junior High School to be precise, everyone had to read two books that described two alternate totalitarian futures. One was George Orwell's 1984 , the other Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. 1984 portrayed the totalitarianism of Stalin's Soviet Union, where state terror dominated everyone's life all the time. With the Soviet Union's fall, that threat largely evaporated; only in North Korea does 1984 still hold sway, and no one seems to be rushing to emulate the North Korean model. Brave New World, in contrast, portrayed a totalitarian world whose first and greatest commandment was, you must be happy. Happiness, Huxley understood, was potentially a more effective control mechanism than fear. In Brave New World, happiness was enforced by materialism, consumerism, sex (sex was available for the asking, though love was strongly discouraged), drugs, and, above all, conditioning: endless psychological conditioning, of the sort that now saturates American and other modern societies through the television set, plus the ultimate conditioning, genetic conditioning. Perhaps you begin to get the picture: with genetic engineering, the last piece falls into place. Far from being a lesser totalitarianism than that in 1984, Brave New World's is greater, because it is impossible to escape. People did rebel against Soviet state terror. But how do you rebel against genetic conditioning? As modern America attests, it is difficult to rebel against even psychological conditioning. After all, who doesn't want to be happy? Why should anyone want to rebel? If they do, it just means they need more conditioning (we call it "sensitivity training") or perhaps a drug: Ritalin is soma for kids. In the end, Brave New World represents the abolition of man: man loses the characteristic that makes him man, free will. What does all this have to do with the war in Iraq? A great deal, I think. As the exchange between the Iraqi demonstrator and the American soldier reveals, the ultimate war aim of the crowd now running American foreign and defense policy is to export Brave New World to Iraq and everywhere else. Most of the time, American popular culture is a sufficient carrier for the virus. But if Brave New World needs some muscle behind it, well, why not just go to war? After all, isn't it a good thing that we want to make everyone happy? It is difficult for most Americans, and particularly for American conservatives, to realize that those who pushed us into making war on Iraq (just the first of the wars they want) are not "us." Of course, they do not call their objective Brave New World. They use code words such as "freedom and democracy." In fact, the ideology of Brave New World dares call itself "democratic capitalism," though in the end it is neither. Brave New World counts on average Americans thinking of "us," as in "our troops," "our victory," "our country." But for Americans who want a republic, not an empire; freedom, not conditioning; and beatitudine, not felicitas; this was not our war, nor our victory. The troops, indeed, are ours, and we feel it every time one is killed or wounded. But they do not know what they are fighting for. Brave New World is not on the reading list at the staff colleges, and I am quite sure it is no longer required in the public schools; it would cut too close to home. For those of us who do know, there is, as I have written before, no exit. Military victory in Iraq and elsewhere is victory for a totalitarianism that would enslave the world -- a happy slavery, but slavery nonetheless -- and abolish man. Defeat is disaster for America and casualties among our troops. Is defeat still possible in Iraq? Yes, because what happens there next is Brave New World finds itself up against, not Saddam's poor copy of 1984, but the forces of Fourth Generation warfare, led by Islam. Unlike the remnants of Christendom, Islam does understand what Brave New World represents, and is willing and able to fight it. William S. Lind is Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation. |
So because Islam is willing to repress, rape, behead, torture, maim, etc., they have the moral high ground to us?
Define the coming NWO.
It's an Athenian-style utopia with a trace of Marxist flavoring.
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