Robert David

Presidencies Through the Lenses of Orwell, Huxley, Bradbury, and Mae Brussell

George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World together highlight the loss of freedom, authoritarian rule, and manipulation of truth. These tales, penned during the middle of the 20th century, are dire warnings of what is to come for those who read them. Mae Brussell's critiques, often overlooked, remain as relevant today as they were when she first voiced them. They provide a unique perspective on the erosion of democracy in the United States.

The American experiment used to be an exemplar of democracy and justice; however, it has staggeringly resulted in a brutal caricature of itself where truth is nebulous, history is rewritten, and people are subjugated under the wealthy elite peering down to entertain them through their spectacles.

You can trace this decline back to Richard M. Nixon and George W. Bush, under whose rule the foundations of the Orwellian state we inhabit today were laid. The surging use of fearmongering characterized the Bush era during and after 9/11, which transformed into the catalyst for a series of civil liberty infringements and revamping executive overreach.

The Patriot Act undermined the Fourth Amendment through blanket surveillance and bypassed habeas corpus, making sure the Orwellian handbook was put to good use. The emergence of Homeland Security and the intensification of the surveillance state in the name of "national security" were nothing but indicators of the jaw-dropping Orwellian world we live in. The Bush administration's circumstances-themed "intelligence" surrounding the Iraq invasion proved the world to be a truly Orwellian world where double thinking is the new normal.

At the same time, even this minimal sort of action is hardly comparable to the total militarization and unconscionable practices that operate in other parts of our world.

For example, the Lavender AI genocide saw an entire population of marginalized people hunted down and destroyed by an AI-automated military regime. The tempting array of technological endeavors initiated after Bush's War on Terror only widened the gulf between the surveillance state and the masses. 

The prophecy provided by Orwell relating to totalitarian regimes controlling their people through available technology translated itself through unmanned drones, artificial intelligence, and global surveillance systems. If Bush's reign ushered in the age of spectacles of mass surveillance and gaining unjust wars, then such technologies marked the dawn of an even more ominous future in which no stone would be left unturned as regards looming authoritarianism.

Cheney and Rumsfeld, puppet masters behind Bush, did not hesitate for one moment to disobey democratic norms. Militarized, corporatized America was a vision right out of Animal Farm pigs, after overthrowing the farmer, gradually became indistinguishable from their former oppressors. 

The privatization of war through no-bid contracting to companies like Halliburton, the use of torture at black sites like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and the normalization of extrajudicial killings contributed to the nation's moral decay. By the time Bush left office, the American Republic had become a nation in which the power of the whims had run above the rule of law, a theme hauntingly self-reflective of Orwell's warning that "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

Barack Obama, often portrayed as a progressive savior, did not do much to reverse this trajectory. His presidency perpetuated many of the worst excesses of the Bush era. By expanding drone warfare, pursuing whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, and, finally, failing to close Guantanamo Bay, all of these actions denoted a continuation of policies of Orwellian nature that he had inherited.

Although the ACA was a small step forward for healthcare access, it also cemented the power of insurance companies, moving the goalposts of the discussion of the divide between government and corporate interests. With mass surveillance and a cozy relationship with Silicon Valley, Obama's administration set the stage for the technocratic dystopia we now inhabit. In this context, Huxley's Brave New World, emphasizing control through pleasure and distraction, seems more and more right. The American public was pacified under Obama with the fiction of progress, even while the gears of the surveillance state became tauter.

The ACA makes you a slave of Medical Eugenics Big Pharmaceuticals. Haven’t you noticed their Authoritarian Mannerisms with your cough their health?

Outside U.S. borders, the situation grew worse. In Gaza, civilians continue to live in a living hell, suffering from state-sanctioned violence and blockades that transform life into a daily test of existence, all inside the world's largest open-air prison. 

Unmoved and impotent, the world looks on as children are buried under the rubble, their very future already blown apart before their eyes. Here were the refrains of Orwell's 1984, where people were being brainwashed with the propaganda of those in power while individual freedoms were quite literally obliterated in the name of nationalistic goals.

Then Donald Trump came along, a grotesque convergence of decades-long democratic erosion. As fever dreams of authoritarianism, corruption, and incompetence all rolled into one, Trump became a clear embodiment of the worst fears conjured by any imagination - Orwell, Huxley, Bradbury. The same trajectory into disarray the dystopian regimes pointed to, consisting of attacks on the press, weaponizing social media to incite disinformation, and highhandedly breaking the law - all indications and tendencies reminiscent of 1984 and Fahrenheit 451.

The administration's invocation of alternate facts, attacks on science and expertise, and the employ of fear and divisive politics left with a direct projection from human imagination to permalink the dystopia that Orwell suggested. Trump reminded us that democratic erosion does not always go hand in hand with the violent takeovers of regimes; sometimes, it is a gradual normalization of absurdity and corruption.

The parallels between these presidencies and Orwell, Huxley, and Bradbury's dystopian visions are not coincidental. These underlying positions stem from a deliberate and systematic attack on the tenets of democracy by a political and economic elite obsessed with power. From fearmongering in the Bush administration to watching over the Obama administration to unconstrained attacks on truth in the Trump administration, they have created a milieu where freedom is an illusion and power is concentrated in the hands of the few. It is now more important than ever for the public to reclaim their freedoms and fight against this erosion of democracy.

Furthermore, the current predicament of over 600,000 disappearing Americans each year without any apparent accountability--an invisible disaster overshadowed by the media's insatiable craving for salacious exploitations--strikes a warning bell on how low society has actually fallen.

The individuals, frequently viewed as marginalized or the forgotten, suffer under a system that gorges itself on their invisibility, in the same way as the millions who go missing in China in the Uyghur camps. This vision renders a horrible possibility of the future, a whole ethnic population being put under forced labor, indoctrination, and, to make things worse yet, cultural erasure. It is more than just repression of individual freedom in these camps; it is its whole destruction. People lose their very identity; they are vaccinated with some banal stereotype, assimilating them into a mechanical system of control. The silence of the global community regarding such atrocities only confirms the extent to which authoritarianism has become entrenched on the world stage.

In contemplating the condition of America, it is increasingly apparent that the United States is not the thriving democracy it pretends to be but instead a failed one. The ideals of liberty, equality, and self-governance have lost their power and purpose while creating a system for aiding the few at the expense of the many. The American people, divided and disheartened, stand on the brink of revolutionary awakening or passivity, resigned to be mere spectators in a system that no longer plays out their interests.

Orwell, Huxley, Bradbury, and Orwell speak with chilling precision about the realities of today's world. The dystopian futures they once imagined-where truth is malleable and false, and a few hold sway over all-feel less and less like fiction and more like a representation of where we are headed. The United States stands at a crossroads with its founding principles hanging in the balance. Politics based on fear and division, lack of transparency, and leaders accountable to no one led us to this brink.

The once-promised and hopeful American experiment is on the verge of becoming a morbid caution. History and literature testify that the road we are taking does not lead to better days but rather to a course that abandons the very essence of democracy. The pertinent question is whether this will raise the consciousness of the American people anew or if the nation will continue to walk in slumber, oblivious or uninterested in facing the grim reaper of its demise. The choice, though, always lies with the people. Only they could bring themselves to see themselves not as cattle but as the shapers of their destinies.

In Orwell's words, "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever." Whether that boot belongs to a government, a corporation, or a faceless AI-driven system is up to us to decide. We are on the precipice of something monumental. What happens next depends on whether we dare reclaim our truth, dignity, and freedom before they are lost.

Mae Brussell's work remains a stinging indictment against actions by those vested with power in the U.S., especially in considering the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. Brussell's forthright critique of executive overreach, her avowals against the encroaching military-industrial complex, and her stout-eyed analysis of civil liberties render her historical insights pertinent to these presidencies' commonalities. However, their political rhetoric and public personae have been sorely different, and the core structures of power and control meticulously dissembled by Brussell remained in place to control American governance profoundly and disturbingly.

This fear, lest no one could check on such powers, especially after a national security crisis, was central to Brussell's critique. After the attacks of 9/11, George W. Bush made the presidency a far more unobstructed institution than it had been before. He consolidated executive authority to shockingly new degrees but exercised a shameless contempt for the public's right to know. The existence of CIA black sites-a glaring hidden-and-unknown reality exemplifies that new era of secrecy, during which actions taken in the name of national security were indeed neither accessible nor subject to scrutiny.

Barack Obama, though acting in a campaign of transparency, inherited from Bush policies that he conspicuously expanded would include airstrikes since Edward Snowden's disclosure of mass surveillance while bombarding whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning. By the time Donald Trump entered the White House, the concentration of power had reached new depths. There was the unyielding continuation of executive usurpation, evading Congress and the courts and conducting itself with a level of secrecy and opacity that ventured into being authoritarian-witness Trump's dealings with Russia and concealment of his personal finances.

Across these presidencies, increases in executive power and engagement in secrecy submit to subvert precisely those democratic processes that Brussell fought so hard to press, thereby reasserting her warnings about the unsustainability of democratic accountability.

Brussell was deeply skeptical about the power of the military-industrial complex, which she perceived as the force leading the way to perpetual wars and the siphoning off of the wealth of the public. For her, the fact that a nation could always remain at war was not an ugly by-product of national security fears. Instead, it represented a deliberate invention to accumulate riches for elite interests.

The Iraq War of 2003 under George W. Bush was another product of such manipulations based on false intelligence and the possibility of weapons of mass destruction. Defense contractors like Halliburton were positioned to profit hugely, interweaving government policy and corporate profiteering again. Despite his campaign promises to end the war in Iraq, Obama escalated drone strikes, broadening military involvement in Libya, Syria, and Yemen, exactly proving how his administration also found itself stuck in the web of military interventionism.

While Donald Trump began by criticizing the "endless wars" and continued indeed with military operations in the Middle East, he also stoked tensions with Iran. His administration did openly pump military spending up, which, fashioned as a national defense move, beneficially led to bang-on feeding the very military-industrial complex that Brussell so vehemently opposed. 

Each president added to the mechanics of endless war, favoring corporate interests to profit from the zenith of consumptive conflict and carrying forward Brussell's critique. Corporate influence, too, played a crucial role in the consolidation of power during these administrations. Brussell consistently argued that government and corporate elites colluded to manipulate politics for personal gain, undermining the public interest.

Under George W. Bush, the Iraq War was widely perceived as serving the interests of oil and defense companies, with key figures like Dick Cheney tied to firms like Halliburton. Despite his efforts at financial reform following the 2008 economic crisis, Obama was heavily criticized for his administration's close ties to Wall Street. 

The decision to bail out major banks without holding executives accountable for their role in the crisis underscored the power of financial elites in shaping government policy. In Trump's case, corporate influence reached new heights, with industry insiders occupying key regulatory positions and tax cuts benefiting the wealthiest corporations. In its way, each administration demonstrated the outsized influence of corporate interests on governance, validating Brussell's warnings about the rise of oligarchy.

Brussell's analysis also focused on declaring counter-publics and manipulating conformity and freedom of information. She had one deep suspicion regarding ways the mainstream media could work to reinforce public perception through propaganda and psychological manipulation. The government manipulated intelligence to legitimize Iraq; Something made worse by turning the media into a partner because the media acted in total complicity with government narratives. For much of it, there was no exercise of critical scrutiny.

While Obama portrayed his image as a reformer, he spun sophisticated messaging and public relations tactics, often shrouding controversial actions behind a nicotine-stained veil of legitimacy. Although his aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers like Manning served to intimidate the press and repress dissent, the Trump administration's war on the media was relentless. 

Call it "fake news," while at the same time, the president used social media to circumvent old channels of issuance. The Trump administration regularly reported misinformation, allowing it to erode public trust in media and government institutions. In their way, each president attempted to control the narrative using methodologies congenial to Brussell's concerns regarding manipulating information to serve powerful interests. Joe Biden has the blood of sixty-seven thousand Gaza dead on his hands. People watched it on TV like it was a circus show.

Brussell's concerns about the erosion of civil liberties under the guise of national security were facts corroborated by each presidency that followed him. The Patriot Act, passed under Bush, greatly expanded surveillance powers, undermining privacy rights and civil liberties under the aegis of combating terrorism. Obama promised to reverse the worst excesses of the Bush administration, nevertheless, maintained and even expanded surveillance programs, as is evident from the leaks made by Edward Snowden. 

The Obama administration continued the use of indefinite detention in Guantanamo Bay. Under Trump, civil liberties took a significant turn for the worse, mainly his crackdowns on immigration, including family separations and ramped-up surveillance of activists, especially those involved in racial justice movements. In every one of these instances, the erosion of civil liberties followed the blueprint of executive encroachment on people's rights.

Are you not entertained? You have your heavily censored, spying Internet and 1000’s of TV and XM Stations, all CIA-approved. You are both manipul-tained and spied upon by mind-control Artificial Ignorance Algorithms. What more is there to this life?

The question is, will America, like George Orwell's nightmare, ever wake up from the nightmare of creeping totalitarianism and hyper-surveillance? The clock is ticking. Time for a fight-back is nigh. It is simple mathematics. Wait for your turn to disappear, to become the Moammar Khadafy of your neighborhood, or fight back in any way that you can.

Trump is not special, all Presidents should have had, and henceforth should have, vast seas of screaming, angry people in the streets. Or you can just watch 30 Rock Re-Runs. Think of the politician you detest the most of all. What have you done contrary to them? We are the next Gaza.

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