Sobran: Tyranny, imagined and real.

(Note: The link above will take you to Joe's current on-line column. The archive is here. Not all of his past columns are available in the archive.)

Mr. Sobran is among the few reasonable men offering us a cautionary tale of his own. Personally, I think he's too late. But what do I know?

Orwell envisioned a super-Stalinist socialist society, efficiently ruled by an “Inner Party” of diabolical cunning. Winston Smith, the book’s hapless hero, runs afoul of the Party when he begins to dissent from the lies of the Party line, and his torturer, O’Brien, explains how the system really works with Machiavellian intelligence. It turns out that the Party has engineered even Winston’s dissent! Not only political freedom but free will itself has been abolished.

It’s a nightmarish idea, all right, but not even Kim Jong Il’s North Korea has managed to approximate it. Orwell himself was too sensible to believe his comprehensive dystopia could ever be realized in fact.

If we mistake the melodramatic fable for literal prediction, as too many of Orwell’s readers have done, we’re apt to become too complacent to recognize the forms tyranny actually takes, or to recognize the tyrants we actually face. In fact it sounds overwrought to call the contemporary U.S. Government tyrannical, since President Bush isn’t even a reasonable facsimile of Stalin, Kim, or Mao, let alone Orwell’s O’Brien.

Bush, in fact, claims to have delivered us from tyranny by toppling Saddam Hussein before we reached the mushroom cloud stage. He now complains that the Democrats in Congress who voted for war with Iraq are dishonestly withdrawing their support and trying to “rewrite history.”

But as E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post reminds us, Bush himself capitalized on post–9/11 hysteria and the imminent 2002 elections, using dubious military intelligence (which he also distorted), to bully critics and political opponents into compliance. Now that the Democrats, like most attentive Americans, are having second thoughts, he accuses them of making “baseless attacks” in suggesting that he “manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people” in order to get his war.

No, Bush doesn’t much resemble the villain of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Nor does his “brain,” Karl Rove. But their campaign to demonize Saddam Hussein and engineer a virtually unanimous public opinion can only remind us of Orwell’s “two-minute hate” against the phantom enemy Goldstein, who also turns out to be an invention of the ruling Party; their huge apparatus of “homeland security” reminds us of Party institutions like the Ministry of Truth; and of course their language has much in common with Newspeak. All this is alarming enough; we needn’t press the analogies too far. Bush isn’t Big Brother.

What Orwell’s great fable omits is the gradualism of actual tyranny. He shows us an imaginary tyranny that is already complete. And for the purposes of a cautionary fable, this is fine.

But in the real world, tyranny comes on tiptoe, by stealthy steps and often clumsy improvisation, and it’s usually exercised by men who, unlike the cold-blooded intellectual O’Brien, don’t even realize what they’re doing. They may sincerely think of themselves as enemies of tyranny rather than its agents. And instead of devising new institutions of mass control, they may merely take advantage of arrangements they find already in place.