Orwell’s Dystopia
Hortwitz’s chapter about Baghdad is legitimately scary. Baghdad, as described by Horwitz is completely alienated from the rest of the world. Plagued by fascism and governed by fear, the city (the rest of Iraq as well) is seen by Horwitz as one big lie. Horwitz says that to him, Iraq was the most frightening country in all of the Middle East. The country’s fear is brought on neither by violence nor poverty like in Yemen, but by the prison like isolation that the Iraqi government has created. Saddam Hussein’s face is everywhere and he is “loved” by the people because he is feared by the people. Anything before Saddam is irrelevant, and anything going against Saddam might as well not exist. The Iraqi people are shut off from everything. Every story they hear, every broadcast that is reported, is broken down, twisted, and reshaped to show that Iraq is the greatest country in the world. What shocked me even more than the idea of this deceitful society was that Baghdad is not a run city made of mud huts. Baghdad has restaurants, fancy hotels, skyscrapers, and entertainment. In a way, this makes sense. The government intends for their citizens to view the country as a utopia. The government hopes to maintain complete loyalty and uniformity through its citizens by not letting its citizens know anything else. Horwitz alludes to George Orwell’s 1984, and clearly draws the similarity that in Iraq, someone is always watching. One cannot in any way act freely.
What I wanted to know while reading this chapter was what the Iraqi people wanted. That seems to be a universal question in current events today. How did the Iraqi people feel about their government when Saddam was in power? Unfortunately for the Iraqi people, they seem to be forced to hate something. Either they hate the West, and Western ideas like they were trained to do by the government under Saddam, or they hate the fascist regime which suppressed them for years. If one can draw any sanity to what is going on in Iraq presently, it could be to help those who want freedom from the backwards Iraqi society.
BCD
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I completely agree with BCD on his views of the chapter about Baghdad. It is very scary. The idea that the government has virtually full control over the people is unbelievable. Earlier this year I read the novel 1984 by George Orwell. The novel is about the Government, Big Brother, and how it exerts its power over practically every aspect of life. In the novel there are ministries much like in Baghdad that are used as a tool by the Government to both protect their leader and to seek and kill those that defy him. After reading this novel, 1984, I thought nothing like this could ever happen in real life. I thought that it is too extreme and in this day and age it would never be possible. But, after reading the chapter about Baghdad I am completely shocked at how wrong I was. Baghdad is essentially run by the same government in 1984. In fact in this chapter Saddam Hussein is compared to Big Brother. In Baghdad Saddam’s face is hung everywhere to give the allusion that he is always watching just like Big Brother in 1984. There are songs constantly playing telling the people to support Saddam and love Saddam to the point where it becomes engraved in their minds. The government twists and edits all aspects of history and information to make Iraq look a certain way. Nothing against Iraq or Saddam is ever published or spoken. Even facts about war that would show Iraq as weak are kept secret. Any one that dares to speak out is punished in unbelievable ways. Horwtiz explains in this chapter the ways the government’s enemies are punished such as slow-acting poisoning, children tortured into ratting out their parents, teenagers often returned to their parents with no fingernails and eyes gauged out. The people of Iraq are blindfolded even today. They are clueless as to know exactly how their country is being run. BCD brings up a good point, what exactly do the people of Iraq want? Unfortunately, no one truly knows but I hope one day they succeed in gaining or accomplishing whatever it is they truly want. MLD
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