From: orwell@reg.triumf.ca (BALDEN, RON)
Subject: Memories longer than two weeks (Was: Re: Usual Libels Against Chomsky)
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41    
Organization: TRIUMF: Tri-University Meson Facility
Date: Thu, 3 Sep 1992 23:12:00 GMT

John McCarthy [SAIL], commenting on my previous posting:
>It was the Soviet Union not America that Orwell had as a model.  He
>feared that the whole world would turn out like the Soviet Union
>under Stalin.  He conjectured that the actual personality of the leader
>didn't matter.  He conjectured that it didn't actually matter whether
>there really was a Big Brother.  Fortunately, he was mistaken, and
>things got a bit better in the Soviet Union after Stalin died,
>and the West didn't go that way at all.

>Should I accuse you of lying for this misleading quotation?

Well, no.  Orwell himself explicitly disavowed this interpretation.
(If memory serves, see Vol. 4 of his "Collected Essays, Journalism,
and letters" (1968, in Penguin paperbacks).
His portrayal of the "Ministry of Truth" was based on his 
personal experiences working on wartime propaganda for the BBC.
The U.S. neo-conservative effort to posthumously recruit Orwell
as an intellectual soldier in the Cold War, and the distortions
this effort requires, is discussed in an essay by Christopher
Hitchens (in "Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and
Minority Reports, 1988).  

As for the quotation I gave, I had in mind the following: One of the
fundamental premises (only for the last 45 years or so, John, so
perhaps you went out for a coffee break and missed it) of  what is
laughably called the U.S. "Defense" Department was that the
monolithic/totalitarian Communist Warsaw Pact (their armies manned by
heavily indoctrinated suicidal human robots) might decide at any
moment to roll over Western Europe. Among other things, short-range
nuclear weapons were supposed to be an absolute necessity for U.S.
NATO forces (as late as 1988) because of the alleged enormous
numerical superiority of the Warsaw Pact forces. Various criticisms
(grounded in elementary rationality) of this thesis were summarily
dismissed by the U.S. powers-that-be  --- e.g. such criticisms as that
it was **extremely** unlikely (to say the least) that troops from
Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, etc. would fight enthusiastically
beside Soviet troops (themselves mostly unenthusiastic young
conscripts who were drunk when they could get the alcohol --
see, e.g. Andrew Cockburn's "The Threat: Inside the Soviet Military
Machine", circa 1983) to "occupy" Western Europe --- and to what
purpose? 

In the period 1990-91 we saw the complete collapse, in a
total of about 40 weeks, of the Communist governments of the whole
Warsaw Pact, and we see, beyond any doubt, that (just as people like
Tom Gervasi and his predecessors claimed all along, but quite contrary
to U.S. D.o.D. propaganda) there was not the slightest possibility
that troops of the Warsaw Pact would participate in an invasion of
Western Europe. 

But now, without the blinking of an eye, the U.S. military-industrial
complex has already developed a complete new rationale.  Now it
turns out that without the "stability" provided by the Cold War
the world is actually a more dangerous place, and if anything,
they need more resources.

See Richard J. Barnet's essay, "The Uses of Force", appearing in the
April 29, 1991 issue of "The New Yorker" (pgs. 82-95).  Barnet, pg. 84
(my ** emphasis): 

"... The nation's [U.S.] military services immediately set about 
rethinking their roles in the post-Cold War world.  By mid-1990, each 
service had published its analysis of the new national-security 
threats to the United States, and, not surprisingly, these provided 
little support for the obsolescence-of-war thesis.  Three months 
before the invasion of Kuwait, General A.M. Gray, the commandant of 
the Marine Corps, wrote that the "underdeveloped world's growing 
dissatisfaction over the gap between rich and poor nations" and the 
development of "regional power vacuums that could result in 
instability and conflict," together with "our growing dependency on 
Africa's strategic mineral resources" and the need for unimpeded 
access to "developing economic markets throughout the world," were 
creating more difficult and extensive military requirements than had 
existed during the Cold War.  Indeed, he echoed the warning of
Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger that Americans would 
**soon feel nostalgia for the Cold War days.**  After noting that
"no longer will we have the **luxury** of focussing the majority of 
our defense efforts on a single threat or a single region of the 
world," General Gray declared that the United States must now 
maintain "a credible military power projection capability with the 
flexibility to respond to conflict across the spectrum of violence 
throughout the globe."  Because the interests of the United States and 
it Cold War allies could be expected to diverge, the United States
would have a greater need "for forces capable of responding
unilaterally." ..."

[Richard J. Barnet, quoting Marine Corps CO General Gray above in
his essay "The Uses of Force".  

>**I expected you wouldn't actually answer the question but would turn
>it around.**  But you don't realize the extent to which I see things
>differently from you.  In my memory of the last 46 years, the
>American left has lied far more consistently than the Pentagon.
>One of the most prevalent forms of lie was distorting what the
>Pentagon said.

Well, John, the division of labor here is rather unfair.  You can
repeat one of the "standard lies" in a sentence or two ---
something which "every American knows" (because it is promulgated
with all the power of the government/mass media brainwashing
apparatus) -- but which is quite false. For me to refute in detail
one of the standard lies requires a mini-essay at least.  The
ratio of effort expended is something like 25-50 to 1.

As for the Korean War, read Phillip Knightley's account
(a chapter) in his "The First Casualty" (1975, updated edition circa 1986)

Ron Balden 
Xref: sparky alt.activism.d:2921 alt.news-media:1031 alt.rush-limbaugh:3997