Animal Farm, George Owell’s dystopian novella portraying Stalinist Russia is a passable allegory for what has happened in the United States under the Obama administration. Orwell’s Farm is transformed from a productive, well functioning political enterprise into a fear-driven authoritarian state. The farm’s pigs, obsessed with obtaining power, use propaganda, constitutional slight of hand, secrecy and a reign of intimidation to seize power and rule over the farm. President Obama and his appointed bureaucrats are similarly strong-arming our political system. Admittedly, this transformation to American authoritarianism has been brewing for thirty years and Obama’s New Left is using a softer form of threat and intimidation than Animal Farm and Stalinist Russia. Nevertheless, the results are rapidly evolving toward a similar Orwellian conclusion. We continue to deny this reality at our own peril.
The Orwellians in the current regime have crept off the pages of Animal Farm and into every facet of American governance and the general culture. The observable evidence supports a reasonable conclusion that Obama and his army of authoritarian appointees are the slightly more moderate descendants of the socialists who gave the world the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and Cuba. Who can honestly deny that Obama, his senior administrators and his supporters in the Congress have, for all practical purposes, declared the Constitution irrelevant, dispensed with the rule of law, and voraciously looted the public treasury to payoff public employee unions and corporate cronies. These new Orwellians routinely and unashamedly use the Federal bureaucracy to frighten and intimidate politically disagreeable citizens. Government agencies target citizens holding different political views, conduct politically motivated tax audits, intimidate and threaten citizens who attempt to ensure integrity at the polls, and abdicate law enforcement in favor of politically motivated prosecutions, raids and investigations.
Citizen’s complaints of intimidation, threat and punishment at the hands of Obama’s Federal Government are vetted on TV and in newspapers with regularity. Government whistle blowers are severely punished by the administration being summarily demoted or fired. The frequency, consistency and apparent veracity of these complaints establish a worrisome and convincing body of evidence against Obama and his people. Secret VA doctor’s appointment lists, IRS interrogations of conservative organizations (often demanding the organizations provide the content of any prayers, thousands of key evidentiary emails being destroyed, Senior Obama management officials invoking their fifth amendment rights before Congress to hide crimes, phone taps on journalist James Rosen and his parents. The evidence accumulates virtually everyday. The sheer weight of the information and the growing number of horror stories speak for themselves.
These unsettling events and the facts surrounding them make Obama’s summer of 2008 pronouncement “we gotta have a civilian national security force just as powerful as the military, just as strong and just as well funded” all the more frightening. Careful analysis of these words would be prudent indeed. The impact of all this is precisely the one I think Obama and his administration intended: Citizen fear of the Federal government and the creation of a soft Stalinism.
We can pretend that the American Animal Farm does not exist and that Obama is just another hyper-liberal democrat. We can put our head down in fear and hope that the new Orwellians in the authoritarian administrative state will leave us alone. Or we can admit the reality unfolding before our very eyes, rise up in widespread opposition and eradicate it. The choice is, for a brief time, ours to make.
