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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAmerica Is More Terrifying Than Orwell’s Fiction
http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/america-more-terrifying-orwells-fictionIn an increasingly phantasmagorical world, heres my present fantasy of choice: someone from General Keith Alexanders outfit, the National Security Agency, tracks down H.G. Wellss time machine in the attic of an old house in London. Britains subservient Government Communications Headquarters, its version of the NSA, is paid off and the contraption is flown to Fort Meade, Maryland, where its put back in working order. Alexander then revs it up and heads not into the future like Wells to see how our world ends, but into the past to offer a warning to Americans about whats to come.
He arrives in Washington on October 23, 1962, in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a day after President Kennedy has addressed the American people on national television to tell them that this planet might not be theirs or anyone elses for long. (We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth, but neither will we shrink from the risk at any time it must be faced.) Greeted with amazement by the Washington elite, Alexander, too, goes on television and informs the same public that, in 2013, the major enemy of the United States will no longer be the Soviet Union, but an outfit called al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and that the headquarters of our countrys preeminent foe will be found somewhere in the rural backlands of Yemen.
Yes, Yemen, a place most Americans, then and now, would be challenged to find on a world map. I guarantee you one thing: had such an announcement actually been made that day, most Americans would undoubtedly have dropped to their knees and thanked God for His blessings on the American nation. Though even then a nonbeliever, I would undoubtedly have been among them. After all, the 18-year-old Tom Engelhardt, on hearing Kennedys address, genuinely feared that he and the few pathetic dreams of a future he had been able to conjure up were toast.
Had Alexander added that, in the face of AQAP and similar minor jihadist enemies scattered in the backlands of parts of the planet, the U.S. had built up its military, intelligence, and surveillance powers beyond anything ever conceived of in the Cold War or possibly in the history of the planet, Americans of that time would undoubtedly have considered him delusional and committed him to an asylum.
Such, however, is our world more than two decades after Eastern Europe was liberated, the Berlin Wall came down, the Cold War definitively ended, and the Soviet Union disappeared.
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America Is More Terrifying Than Orwell’s Fiction (Original Post)
xchrom
Sep 2013
OP
Kinda makes me wonder what a traveller from 2063 would have to say to us...
First Speaker
Sep 2013
#5
orpupilofnature57
(15,472 posts)1. Stranger than fiction .
" Ronald Reagan the actor ? " Dr. Emmett Brown
bemildred
(90,061 posts)2. Mr. Englehardt seems to have a lot of fans. nt
Octafish
(55,745 posts)3. Kick for Truth.
The Dark Matter of Global Power
First Speaker
(4,858 posts)5. Kinda makes me wonder what a traveller from 2063 would have to say to us...
...whatever the world of half-a-century from now will be like, I know one thing--it'd shock the hell out of us, if we knew...