Psychological Warfare

The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects.
-- Emmanuel Goldstein (George Orwell)

Besides invading Iraq, the Bush administration has conspired to run a psy-ops campaign against its own people. All fascist regimes do it.

The plan is to keep Americans whipped up in a frenzy of war fever so they won't notice their pockets being picked by the regime.

In "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism," the book within a book in Orwell's "1984," the arch-enemy of Oceania, Emmanuel Goldstein, notes that "Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war...is going well or badly."

Sounds like a great way to keep ordinary citizens from thinking through the implications of massive tax cuts for billionaires.

Similarly, at his trial at Nuremburg, Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering testified, "All you have to do is tell them that they're being attacked, denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

It may not be working here. The most recent polls show the American public turning against the war. They may have been dumb enough to re-elect Bush (he ran virtually unopposed anyway), but they haven't yet descended to the level of social idiocy that the current regime assumed and Orwell predicted.