Creature From Jekyll Island by G. Edward

Orwell described the world of our future as being divided into three regions called Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. Oceania consists of the Americas plus England, Australia, and the Pacific Islands; Eurasia is Russia and continental Europe; Eastasia comprises China, Japan, Southeast Asia, & India. These superstates are constantly at war with each other. The wars are not fought to conquer the enemy, they are waged for the primary purpose of controlling the population. The people in all three territories tolerate their misery and oppression because sacrifices are necessary in time of war. Most of the stratagems outlined in The Report from Iron Mountain are to be found in Orwell's narrative, but Orwell described them first. The think-tank was even willing to credit Orwell as the source of some of its concepts. For example, on the subject of establishing a modern, sophisticated form of slavery, the group at Iron Mountain said:

1. " O c c a s i o n a l Paper N o . 1," G e n e r a l E d u c a t i o n Board, 1904.

A PESSIMISTIC SCENARIO

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Up to now, this has been suggested only in fiction, notably in the works of Wells, Huxley, Orwell, and others engaged in the imaginative anticipation of the sociology of the future. But the fantasies projected in Brave New World and 1984 have seemed less and less implausible over the years since their publication. The traditional association of slavery with ancient preindustrial cultures should not blind us to its adaptability to advanced forms of social organization.1

From this we see that Orwell's work is far more than anentertaining novel. It is relevant to our present journey in time. Ourwould-be masters have studied him carefully. So should we. This iswhat he wrote:

These three superstates are permanently at war, and have been so for the past twenty-five years. War, however, is no longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades of the twentieth century.... This is not to say that either the conduct of the war, or the prevailing attitude toward it, has become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On the contrary, war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries, and such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals against prisoners which extend even to boiling and'

burying alive, are looked upon as normal....

The primary aim of modem warfare ... is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. [The

"machine" is society's technical and industrial capacity to produce goods.] ... From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations....

But it was also clear that an all-around increase in wealth threatened the destruction—indeed in some cases was the

destruction—of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motorcar or even an airplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction.... Such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and 1. L e w i n , Report, p. 70.

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THE CREATURE FROM JEKYLL ISLAND

when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance....

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking into the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent....