Afghanistan history and George Orwell

John Heelan of the UK comments on my observation: "In the Western Hemisphere, the US must assume almost total responsibility. In Africa and Eurasia, except for East and Southeast Asia, the EU should assume the leadership, with the strong backing of the US. Whether the EU has reached a point where it can assume that responsibility remains to be seen". John says this reminds him of George Orwell's 1984 in which"Eurasia", "Eastasia" and "Oceania" (with the UK being the US' 'Runway One' ) loom over the political horizon! John explains that "Orwell foresaw a world ruled by a PR driven "Big Brothers" who revise history, keep the masses quiet with porn and the occasional bomb, the latter on the pretext of the ongoing ' overseas' war between Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia. This has some striking and frightening similarities with the contemporary world". Indeed it does, but I had not thought of Big Brother (the U.S.?). Orwell also said "He who controls the past controls the future". This applies perfectly to our history textbook project and takes us to Afghanistan and its history. The commander of Kabul Military Academy, Ziauddin, says that Afghan children are taught legends like the one about a 19th century gun-toting hero, Wazir Akbar Khan, who supposedly killed the general of a British invasion force with a blast from his pistol. Ziauddin says "If you study the history of Afghanistan, you will only study the history of war and fighting and foreign intervention". The question is: Who will write the history textbooks for the new Afghanistan ? There is one thing Orwell did not foresee: the decline in the importance of libraries. For sixty years it has been a concern of mine. Libraries around the world could not accumulate all the books being published, so I started at Stanford a project, The International Archive of Book Analyses. Students would write a careful summary and analysis of a book; it was then deposited in the archive. Copies were available to anyone in the world. With the development of computers and the web, the project became redundant, and I abandoned it. The San Francisco Chronicle has published an article about the library at San Francisco State University. The shelves are abandoned. The students are doing all their work on line. This makes more and more sense. I have a large library, including the huge Oxford English Dictionary. It is simpler to use the online version, so the printed book just sits there. It is hard to realize how much information in available on line. I checked Google for George Orwell, and up came 143,000 entries!! Would Orwell have been happy?

Ronald Hilton - 2/11/02