i-sako.com

By way of the DAJ mailing list comes this article from the Washington Post.

Ugly Truths About Guantanamo

The term “Orwellian” is much abused, and back in the actual year 1984 I thought Orwell himself overrated. The essential novelist of the 20th century, I thought then, was Kafka, who realized that there is no more efficient murder weapon than what the critic George Steiner called “the lunatic logic of the bureaucracy.”

Orwell, however, was off by only 20 years. With immense satisfaction, he would have noted the constant abuse of language by the Bush administration—calling suicidal terrorists “cowards,” naming a constriction of civil liberties the Patriot Act and, of course, wringing all meaning from the word “torture.” Until just recently when the interpretation of torture was amended, it applied only to the pain like that of “organ failure, impairment of body function, or even death.” Anything less, such as, say, shackling detainees to a low chair for hours and hours so that one prisoner pulled out tufts of hair, is something else. We have no word for it, but it is—or was until recently—considered perfectly legal.

The administration’s original interpretation of torture was promulgated by the Justice Department, under John Ashcroft, and the White House, under its counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales. The result has deeply embarrassed the United States.

…

In the audience, unseen but nonetheless present, Orwell and Kafka look on.

It reminds me of something I was trying to explain to a Bush supporter before last year’s election:

There are two kinds of people involved in politics today: those who read Orwell’s 1984 as a warning and those who read it as a playbook. I don’t think I need to explain which of those groups the Bush administration belongs to.

Perhaps the term “Orwellian” is much abused, but then again perhaps it wouldn’t be if the folks in the Bush camp didn’t seem to draw inspiration from Orwell’s dystopian vision.