Oranges and lemons

It's time to read Nineteen Eighty-four again.

I started looking for my yellowing Signet paperback when Antifa became a Designated Enemy of the administration last summer.  Antifa -- short for "anti-fascist" -- has launched a thousand tweets and burned the topless towers of Portland, it seems, despite being a descriptive rather than an actual organization.  We're supposed to fear it.  I closed my eyes and remembered that for a brief but eventful period in history, anti-fascism was not just tolerated but official government policy.  Millions of Americans were supplied with weapons and training and sent far away to kill fascists.   Thousands died in the effort.

This did not please the "America First" isolationists who had no problem with fascism and even less, if possible, when the Third Reich invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.  To them it looked like the right people were being killed.  When Pearl Harbor was bombed, and then Hitler declared war on the United States, they had to swallow their disappointment and pull on their patriot pants.  Anything else would have been bad for business.   The antifa window was open from December 7, 1941, until the German surrender on May 8, 1945.  After that, business as usual.

The House Committee on Un-American Activities had been around since 1938 but after the war it fell into Republican hands.  Americans were supposed to regret their support for "Uncle Joe" Stalin and his evil empire an hour after the war in Europe ended; Hollywood forgot it ever produced propaganda like The Red Star or Mission To Moscow.  For those who refused to erase history there was a stupefying term of art:  "prematurely anti-fascist."  If you marched in a May Day parade in 1938 or went to a meeting or signed a petition, you could renounce your past and denounce your friends or face a blacklist.  Across the ocean, a dying journalist saw what was happening and wrote "Oceania is at war with Eastasia.  Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia."  He invented the terms "Newspeak" and "memory hole" to describe the massive intellectual dishonesty that appalled him.  The enemy is the enemy until he isn't anymore, because the nations with the loudest ideals can abandon them when they become inconvenient.  (Even if they're terrible ideals -- see Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.)

Perhaps only George Orwell could fathom American involvement (what a bland word) in the western parts of Asia.  He wasn't a humorous man but he might have read with a wry smile that US Air Force drones are assisting the Taliban to fight Islamic State in Afghanistan.  Of course it would have to be Afghanistan, where back in the 1980s we helped the mujahideen (and Osama bin Laden) fight invading Soviet forces.  When the Russians left the Taliban took over most of the country, so American troops had to drive them out.  Now, apparently, the Taliban are the good guys because they are fighting Daesh, or ISIS, or whatever their name is today.  And we're helping them!  And Afghan people are still dying, and nobody seems to have a plan.   Terrorism, counterterrorism, counter-counterterrorism, the Great Game has dwindled into tic-tac-toe.   

Note:  The Trumpers want tonight's Nashville free-for-all to concentrate on foreign policy.  I want to hear the words "drone" and "Taliban" at least as frequently as "Ukraine" and "laptop."