Today's Orwellian (Fascifist) Update

"And as to America, whatever its faults, I do not think he [Orwell] would have seen American policy, anywhere in the world, as symptomatic of an emergent "Oceanian" Big Brother. No doubt he would often have been critical, but the current fashionable anti-Americanism, denigrating America and whitewashing its opponents, would have seemed to him, I think, either perverse or dishonest. Of course, America is not as good as it ought to be, but to say that it is therefore no better, or is even worse, than totalitarian China or Russia would probably have reminded him of a similar argument used by both pacifists and communists in the 1930s. He described it as the argument that "half a loaf is the same as no bread." --Richard Rees"