Bush's words cast an Orwellian shadow across America

Thomas Hobbes, the 17th-century English political philosopher, felt that the lives of human beings were naturally "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." He maintains that, in order to survive this grim reality, humanity engages in continual warfare, "every one against every one."

Three hundrred years later, in 1949, George Orwell published his chilling, anti-utopian novel, "Nineteen Eighty-Four," in which the brutish ruling party of Oceania rules society on the basis of slogans such as "War is Peace." In both Hobbes' "Leviathan" and Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" the frightening image of a never-ending war is evoked.

Enter America's unelected president, George W. Bush, and his "War on Terrorism." This war that Bush presents to the American people is a war that will not be over until he says it is. "The prospect of a war without end," writes historian Howard Zinn, in a March 2002 issue of The Progressive, is unlike the wars of any previous administration. "Indeed," writes Zinn, "presidents have been anxious to assurre the nation that the sacrifices demanded would be finite" with an eventual "light at the end of the tunnel."

With the macho bluster of an Old West lawman -- telling America that Osama bin Laden is "Wanted Dead or Alive" -- Bush says his administration will show no mercy toward anybody who harbors terrorists or plans to develop weapons of mass destruction.

Never mind that presidential brother Jeb Bush is governor of Florida, which has long harbored anti-Castro terrorists who've hijacked aircraft and boats without being charged with any crime. Or perhaps the president might explain why one of Pol Pot's chief terrorists now lives confortably in Mount Vernon, N.Y.

Indeed, George Bush's "War on Terrorism" is in many ways a reincarnation of America's "red scare" of the 1950s. It too was used to justify the growth of a war economy, suspension of democratic rights and the silencing of dissent.