LIKE 1984, U.S. NOW ENGAGED IN A POLICY OF PERPETUAL WAR

By Juan Montoya
Remember reading George Orwell's 1984 in high school?
In it Orwell tells the story of a futuristic society set in the year 1984 which was ruled by Big Brother, an omnipresent entity which we find out as the novel goes along, may not even exist at all.
There is a scene in the story where the veterans of the perpetual wars waged by the superpowers spend their days drinking and reminiscing about their experiences.
No one wins the wars since this would upset the balance of power and that is the one thing that the superpowers don't want. Instead, the society ids fed contrived narratives of history that is manipulated to keep the masses of "proles" submissive to the state.
Some say that life imitates art, and in our current state of perpetual war, we are coming closer and closer to the status of the superpowers in 1984.
Each state is so strong it cannot be defeated, even with the combined forces of two superstates – despite changing alliances.
To hide such contradictions, history is rewritten to explain that the (new) alliance always was so; the populaces accustomed to doublethink to accept it. Winston Smith, the hero of 1984, is in the division of History Revision where he makes the changes to history that allows the lie to flourish and be accepted by the population.
Once upon a time, the United States installed the Shah of Iran because the then-leader of Iran, was doing things that were inimical to the interests of the multinational oil corporations from this country and England. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was the Shah of Iran September 1941 until his overthrow by the Iranian Revolution on February 1979 after England and the Soviet Union forced the abdication of his father Reza Shah, who had allowed his minister Mohammad Mosaddegh to nationalize the Iranian oil industry. Mossaddegh was appointed to the position by a democratically-elected Iranian congress before a U.S.-backed coup d'etat deposed him and brought back foreign oil firms.
Today, we consider Iran our mortal enemy and have been indoctrinated by the government with the assistance of media to change our hates.
Much like 1984, where Big Brother staged a Hate Week, and the name of the enemy is changed in mid-sentence, we are now in a de facto alliance with the Mullahs in Iran and the Syrian despot Assad in a unite effort against ISIS, the Islamic state. Has anyone noticed we have changed allies?
Once the Iranian Revolution upset the plans of the superpowers, we armed their neighbor, Iraq, with the weapons of mass destruction to be used against their Iranian enemies. In fact, we sold arms to both sides to make them bleed.
Then, in an unjustified invasion of Iraq by the United States claiming they Saddam was producing Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs), we toppled the Sunni minority and opened the floodgates to the rule by the Shiite majority which were supported and allied with Iran, our mortal enemy.
Today, we are coordinating the war against the Islamists with none other than Iran, the main supporter of terrorism in the world whose stated aim is the destruction of the State of Israel, who they see as the origin of the Palestinian Diaspora and  the exodus from their lands.
And we also have become the allies of Assad, the Syrian despot, who has not only used WMDs on his people, but who has sheltered Hezbollah and maintains a state of terror. Millions of Syrian refugees are now living ins refugee camps in Lebanon and neighboring states because of his indiscriminate bombing of civilians and cities.
In 1984, Big Brother's guidebook explains that the purpose of the unwinnable, perpetual war is to consume human labor and commodities, hence the economy of a superstate cannot support economic equality (a high standard of life) for every citizen.
By using up most of the produced objects like boots and rations the "proles" are kept poor and uneducated so that they will not realize what the government is doing and they will not rebel.
In fact, Big Brother is just as Edward Joseph "Ed" Snowden, the American computer professional who leaked classified information from the National Security Agency, said it was. The NSA has collected massive amounts of information of American citizens here and abroad justifying their spying on us as critical to national security. Virtually everyone is a target for data "collection."
hat's even more suprising is that we have been convinced that it is a good thing and that we should accept it, just as we have accepted the wars.
As thousands of veterans from our "perpetual wars" against Al Queda and the Islamists fill out hospitals and rehab centers, have we, too, resigned ourselves to live the rest of our lives in this state of war without end?