Some 55 years ago, George Orwell was near death and his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was being prepared for publication in the U.S. On being informed of plans to present his book in North America as an attack on socialism, Orwell dictated a statement to his English publisher, Fredric Warburg.

"The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasize that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else, and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere," Orwell rasped to Warburg from fluid-filled lungs through a throat that had been damaged by a bullet in the Spanish Civil War more than a decade before, when Orwell was fighting alongside anarchists.

"Specifically the danger lies in the structure imposed on Socialist and on Liberal capitalist countries by the necessity to prepare for total war....But danger lies also in the acceptance of a totalitarian outlook by intellectuals of all colours." Orwell predicted the coming totalitarian ideologies of our age would be careful to avoid association with those that had just caused so much destruction in the Second World War and would come up with new names for themselves.

"The name suggested in Nineteen Eighty-Four is of course Ingsoc [English Socialism, in the 'newspeak' of the novel], but in practice a wide range of choices is open. In the U.S.A. the phrase 'Americanism' or 'hundred per cent Americanism' is suitable and the adjective is as totalitarian as anyone could wish."

It really is too bad that Orwell never had the opportunity to alter his novel in order to make it more understandable to the people of the U.S. by changing "Ingsoc" to "Amercorp", but his provisional designation of "hundred per cent Americanism" still resonates after more than half a century and likely would have no trouble getting an endorsement from U.S. President George Bush. There is plenty of evidence that the U.S. government conforms to the philosophy of Orwell's Ingsoc and sees the purpose of power as being to perpetuate, increase, and exercise power for its own sake.

That is not exactly the way Bush sees it, of course. He is trying to create economic opportunities for the world's people under the misapprehension that the same economic smoke and mirrors that subsidized his privileged way through Yale University and a rather disastrous high-level business career can also provide clean water and medical care for the shanty dwellers on the fringes of cities in Asia and Africa. The rationalization behind such nonsense comes from the intellectual demon that laid waste to a quarter of a billion human lives in the 20th century: ideology, which is the belief that there is a single, indivisible, and final answer to all questions.

Ideology is hard to distinguish from religion, and it is no surprise that the ideology of "hundred per cent Americanism"--usually termed these days as "free enterprise" or "the market system"--has (after some groping following the fall of the complementary ideology of Stalinism) found an enemy among the Islamists. Without enemies, ideologies always look a bit silly. Islamist extremism is a fine example.

So we are either with Bush or against him, and we are all supposed to ignore the simple facts that exclusive ideologies have never been long-lasting nor just, that things change, life goes on, and that the U.S.--with 10,000 or so gun-related deaths per year--is hardly the acme and culmination of human progress so far. We are supposed to believe this is an action movie, or a World Wrestling Entertainment match, that will be over soon. Here is good, there is evil, and when the evil villains are properly pounded and disposed of, the world will be a happy place, with plenty of guns for all. And the widely available weapons will only be used on irretrievable criminals, never by them. Oh, yeah.

I hesitate to charge that the U.S. government has become so influenced by its country's entertainment industry that it thinks it can solve all terrorism problems forever before the final reel rolls. But it certainly did not anticipate Iraq becoming such a source of difficulty after Saddam Hussein was overthrown. It also was surprised to encounter a lot of trouble with free, democratic people saying they don't think their principles are being upheld when thousands of their civilians are killed or maimed.

The U.S. has declared war on poverty, and on drugs, and lost both times because it was fighting aspects of human existence without addressing the roots of the human experiences it considered problems. It can win the war against terrorism only by preventing the birth of potential terrorists among the disadvantaged, the dispossessed, the dissatisfied, and the disenfranchised for a generation or two, and it is not likely the U.S. will stumble on the concept of granting advantage, possession, satisfaction, and meaningful democracy to those people it despises. We have to hope that the U.S. soon, rather than later, learns the limits of ideology. As Orwell pointed out, the English-speaking peoples are not innately better than anyone else.