The Evil Empire Revisited
August 26, 2008
Philip Giraldi
In George Orwell's 1984 there is a memorable scene when the speaker from Oceania's Ministry of Truth is addressing a rally, the culmination of Hate Week against the enemy, Eurasia. He receives a message mid-sentence, then smoothly shifts gears to deliver the remainder of his speech excoriating Eastasia. The crowd responds enthusiastically, and the narrator, Winston, notes that, of course, Eastasia had always been the enemy.
The alliances in Orwell's nightmare world had shifted, but the concept of the enemy remained the same. There always has to be an enemy. So too the neoconservatives always need an enemy to justify the huge defense contracts that in turn spawn the think tanks and academic chairs in security studies that provide them with their sinecures. A world without "Islamofascism" or another enemy lurking is a world without employment for the likes of Bill Kristol and John Bolton.
Post-1992 Russia has given every indication that it desires to be a friend to the United States and that it has no desire to recreate the Cold War. It allowed itself to be looted by the oligarchs, who presented themselves as the bearers of Western-style modernization with hardly a complaint. It saw its place in the world shrink and its voice in international fora diminished. President George W. Bush even famously looked Russian Premier Vladimir Putin in the eye in Crawford, Texas, in June 2001 and announced positively that he had gotten a "sense of his soul." But the neoconservatives were never on board the Russian project. Their reading on Russia was that it was and always will be the enemy. They would argue that Bush misjudged his guest and Russia was even then preparing to rebuild its empire.
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Philip Giraldi
In George Orwell's 1984 there is a memorable scene when the speaker from Oceania's Ministry of Truth is addressing a rally, the culmination of Hate Week against the enemy, Eurasia. He receives a message mid-sentence, then smoothly shifts gears to deliver the remainder of his speech excoriating Eastasia. The crowd responds enthusiastically, and the narrator, Winston, notes that, of course, Eastasia had always been the enemy.
The alliances in Orwell's nightmare world had shifted, but the concept of the enemy remained the same. There always has to be an enemy. So too the neoconservatives always need an enemy to justify the huge defense contracts that in turn spawn the think tanks and academic chairs in security studies that provide them with their sinecures. A world without "Islamofascism" or another enemy lurking is a world without employment for the likes of Bill Kristol and John Bolton.
Post-1992 Russia has given every indication that it desires to be a friend to the United States and that it has no desire to recreate the Cold War. It allowed itself to be looted by the oligarchs, who presented themselves as the bearers of Western-style modernization with hardly a complaint. It saw its place in the world shrink and its voice in international fora diminished. President George W. Bush even famously looked Russian Premier Vladimir Putin in the eye in Crawford, Texas, in June 2001 and announced positively that he had gotten a "sense of his soul." But the neoconservatives were never on board the Russian project. Their reading on Russia was that it was and always will be the enemy. They would argue that Bush misjudged his guest and Russia was even then preparing to rebuild its empire.
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