Reality Control by Sarah Honig January 27, 2005 Jerusalem Post Today's Jewish state - though hardly a precise replica of the nightmarish "Negative Utopia" of 1984 - would have struck George Orwell as uncomfortably familiar. There's no all-seeing Big Brother, no official Ministry of Truth or totalitarian mind control. Yet opinion-molders - all trendily of one inclination - engage in subtler forms of brainwashing. Whatever they champion is gospel. Their postulates become infallible doctrine, which they condition the masses not to examine by any yardstick for objective validity. Downplaying, deriding, and denigrating opposing convictions, and denying them resonance, they then portray their own viewpoints as the majority's article of faith. They haughtily parade as democracy's spokespersons and contend that a minority can never be right. And just as in Orwell's world, where the concept of reality-based truth is abolished, anyone the perception manipulators consign to minority status must be insane. Just look at the Newspeak that Israeli Doublethink has produced. Here are sample standby slogans and much-mouthed mantras: The sane majority. Anyone who disagrees with it is perforce numerically inferior and of no account. Dissent renders him democracy's foe. He's also weird, if not altogether a demented menace. Mad-minority electoral triumphs constitute outrages against Goodthink. Such upsets, however, lend no legitimacy to ideological rivals and only increase the impetus to overcome them. Territories for peace promotes the theory that peace must be purchased and that Palestinians are fighting for independence on a parcel of real estate. It strenuously obscures the fact that, more than they hanker for their own state, they yearn to destroy ours. There's no military solution is the defeatists' refrain to shirk responsibility and justify the cop-out of appeasement at a time when the powers-that-be haven't done their utmost to thwart existential threats and safeguard the populace. The limitations of power seeks to convince the citizenry that after pinpoint targeting, low-intensity response, and selective surgical strikes fail to impress the enemy, there's nothing left to do. Getting down and dirty is out of the question, as is the realization that we're at war and not pursuing socially isolated criminal bands. Enough with occupation inculcates in the listener's mind the notion that Israelis willfully, with no provocation, crossed the blessed Green Line one sunny June morning in 1967, snuffed out Palestinian sovereignty (nonexistent though it was), and sadistically subjugated the ancient Palestinian nation (which never existed before the advent of Zionism). It neglects to mention that the territory in question isn't foreign but directly contiguous to our incredibly narrow-waisted state - an integral part of our ancestral homeland - yet we made no move until forced to defend ourselves against attempted genocide and ethnic cleansing. Occupation corrupts. It indeed does if the occupier a priori relinquishes his deterrent potential, making do instead with containing his adversaries and reacting to their initiatives. Occupiers who don't utilize the force they possess, don't seek quick victory, and acquiesce to a prolonged conflict embolden their antagonists to introduce deadlier means and escalate terror. Half-hearted responses strengthen enemy resolve and increase noncombatant casualties and suffering. Territories are a liability. Really? Every nation on earth regressively regards them as assets, which none ever voluntarily ceded. Unilaterally divesting ourselves of strategic assets ("disengagement" in Newspeak) will render us more vulnerable and allow the enemy to import more sophisticated, more accurate, more destructive, and longer-range weaponry. When our self-preservation instincts belatedly kick in, bloody warfare will ensue as a direct consequence of moves to unload the liability. You make peace with enemies. True, on condition that they've become former enemies who dread your might more than they perceive your weakness. History is replete with examples of peace contracted with enemies, but only after they were unequivocally vanquished and the fight taken out of them. No one ever made long-lasting peace with a side that continued to fight and press irredentist demands. Shady dubious deals with tyrannies never work - remember Chamberlain's Munich disgrace and the Ribbentrop- Molotov fiasco. Such gambles bring bloodshed, not peace. These are facts incontrovertibly borne out by human experience throughout the ages. Only Israelis are expected to deviate from precedent and deny history. With sufficient brazen absolutism, however, Doublethink can persuade our public that the historical norm and factual truth signify that aggressors deserve another chance on Square One and that peace is always made with enemies. But why bother with facts? In "the labyrinthine world of Doublethink," the end goal is to get folks not just to say the opposite of what they think but to think the opposite of what's tangibly obvious, to surrender intellectual integrity and cease distinguishing between common sense and nonsense. Doublethink, Orwell elucidates, is "reality control." The "lie that is passed into history becomes the truth" because "whoever controls the present controls the past." This matters hugely, since "whoever controls the past controls the future."