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But what does regime change really mean? The censors in the US Ministry of Information are intent on the public knowing that the term refers to the unseating of the terrible, horrible, unspeakably awful Saddam Hussein and replacing him with a new administration that will democratically govern Iraq for all Iraqis. This particularly juicy piece of jargon really refers to the removal by military force the Hussein administration and replacing it with a new regime, as the victorious United States sees fit, one that will cater to the American oil interests in the region and help a bitter American President facing economic downturn remove from his side the thorn that is the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and replace the cartel with a much more easily-stomached system of controlling the flow of oil: US hegemony. The needs of Iraqis, if they are indeed catered to after the war's conclusion, will be minded only to please cameras and soothe the American public.
Much more frightening about the concept of regime change, is the power of the media that conveyed that expression to the public to focus its attention on specific targets, and to make other events almost completely unknown. No CNN coverage has so far been devoted to the Cuban government's rounding up and confiscating the papers of members of domestic non-violent opponents that began immediately after the United States and Great Britain went to war. No ABC reporter has covered the story of the hundreds of suspected members of opposition groups that were arrested or beaten by Robert Mugabe's government in Zimbabwe since March 19th. CBS has so far been mute on a similar situation in Belarus. Regime change, too, may meet the same media fate as these atrocities. It will likely be swept under the table as soon as the war in Iraq is over and the Bush administration has found a new target. Regime change, such a popular topic for coverage leading up to and during the present conflict, is likely nothing more than yet another piece of doublethink jargon produced by an administration with no real intention of keeping its word on the subject. How much have we, the public, and heard on the progress of US-instigated regime change in Afghanistan?
Almost immediately after September 11th, the Bush government established the Department of Homeland Security, charged with ensuring that the attacks of 9-11 would not happen again. In reality, homeland security has taken on a meaning only remotely related to the Department’s originally prescribed mandate. Never mind that, according to Harper's magazine, only one in eight Americans believe that the new Department of Homeland Security makes the nation ''a lot safer'', the Department has made it its crusade to protect the American people and their way of life at all costs, including the sacrificing of American civil liberties. Why are these attacks on fundamental constitutional guarantees going unnoticed? Because their damning identities have been successfully smothered by the term homeland security.
The paternalistic ''it's for your own good'' seems to be particularly appropriate for the approach the government has chosen with the use of the term. Increased scrutiny of the American public has been shielded behind the term and as a result the weeding out and removing from the crowd of those who stand to pose a threat to Big Brother George has not been brought to the attention of those who could be next. Instead, the American public has been kept transfixed, as were Orwell's paroles, by shallow entertainment, pleasures of the flesh, and images of death to those who ''deserve it''. This last diversion is particularly Orwellian: in “1984”, Smith recollects a scene from a flick shown to the paroles, ''There was a middle aged woman who might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms. Little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms around him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself. All the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him. Then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood.'' It's this type of entertainment being flashed across our television screens, to divert a public eager to be diverted. The US government has also promulgated the sense of hysteria and anger focused on the perceived threat to homeland security by repeatedly broadcasting the faces of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein on television and in the media.
The public's quasi-Pavlovian response is reminiscent of the two minutes' hate in “1984”, during which Orwell describes a video segment with the face of the enemy within, Goldstein, superimposed over images of the enemy without. In our modern world one cannot read the passage without being reminded of the images flashed across our society's television screens, the television media, whose evening broadcasts are fast becoming our culture's ''thirty minutes hate'': ''And all the while É behind [Goldstein's] head on the television screen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army row after row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam up to the surface of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others exactly similar. The dull, rhythmic tramp of the soldiers' boots formed the background to Goldstein's bleating voice''. Once again the Orwellian thesis that the best way to prevent a public from questioning its leadership is to keep its energies focused on an external enemy has been proven frighteningly accurate by the current US administration.
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Nadia
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