Forget 1984, think 2003. This year is the centenary of George Orwell, the author of 1984 and Animal Farm and merciless critic of the debasement of language by politicians and ideologues.

If you walked past his grave in the English country churchyard in Oxfordshire, I suspect you could almost hear his typewriter clacking as he expostulates about the world today.

There is no doubt that in Pyongyang and Baghdad, the regimes have done their best to implement the working principles of Big Brother's administration in Orwell's 1984 , where the success of the regime was epitomised by persuading Winston Smith that if Big Brother says that two plus two equals five, then it does.

But while his two most famous books were about totalitarian states, we should remember that he drew much of their inspiration from working in a democracy during wartime.

Orwell worked for the BBC World Service broadcasting to India. The personal strain of defending a war for democracy and against fascism to several hundred million people under colonial rule surely contributed to the concepts of "doublethink" and "thoughtcrime" every bit as much his experience of the apologists for the purges in the Soviet Union.

In 1984 the "Ministry of Truth" had inscribed on its side "war is peace." It specialised in announcing increases in the chocolate ration, when in fact the ration was being reduced.

Both concepts sprang to mind when on the last day of 2002, a New York Times front story quoted Mitchell Daniels, Bush's budget director that a war with Iraq would "only" cost US$50 billion to US$60 billion. This convenient estimate corrected a previous estimate of US$100 billion to US$200 billion from Lawrence B Lindsey, the president's former chief economic adviser, who should be glad we live in a democracy rather than a dictatorship. He was only fired, not shot, for being overgenerous with the inconvenient truth or perhaps for not recognising that sometimes a hundred plus a hundred equals fifty.

Who's the squanderer?

But to some extent, what is fifty billion dollars or so between friends in a country that cannot afford universal healthcare, has thrown thousands of unemployed off benefits and claims it cannot afford to pay social security for its citizens when they retire? Ironically, Colin Powell, who, we must remember, is the good guy in the administration the one that has a hot line to the real world lambasted Iraq for squandering its oil money on weapons instead of using it build up infrastructure.

As the US economy dives towards recession, the dollar to devaluation and the budget to deficit, one wonders whatever happened to the peace dividend promised with the end of the Cold War?

Indeed, there is something chillingly Orwellian about the administration's constant emphasis of its commitment to a peaceful and diplomatic solution to the problem of Iraq, even as hospital ships and aircraft carriers set off for the Gulf and thousands of troops are mobilised. It makes the recent silence from the usual belligerent "White House officials" seem quite ominous. Their statements were designed to promulgate a war. Their silence implies that they are satisfied we are getting one anyway.

In Iraq and North Korea, we can understand why local officials, asked how many nuclear or chemical and biological weapons they can see, will, with apparent sincerity, not be able to see any at all. The consequences for them and their families are, after all, great persuaders. Why die under torture for someone's else preconceived ideas of arithmetic?

Thoughtcrime internalised

But Orwell was trying to show, from his experience in Britain and Spain, how far too many people, intellectuals and officials, internalised the concept of thoughtcrime, without the excuse of external compulsion, dungeons and rubber truncheons.

As he wrote about a period now almost 70 years ago, "In the general hardening of outlook that set in round about 1930, practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages, and deportation of whole populations not only became common again, but tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive."

Well, we have not yet gone quite that far. War prisoners are not being used as slaves. But it could be argued that the use of targeted assassinations by the US and Israel amounts to public execution without even the formality of a show trial.

Learned jurists in the democratic US and Israel have argued for torture, and thousands of people in America, not to mention Guantanamo Bay, have been arrested and imprisoned without trial.

In Israel and America, respected politicians have argued for the deportation of Palestinians from the Occupied Territories.

Silent democracies

And the really sad thing, that would have had Orwell typing away, is not that totalitarian dictatorships do these things, because that is in their nature, but that people in democracies, without threat of torture or death, would stay silent, or even condone such practices.

Orwell, during a war with the Nazis that threatened the very survival of his own country, sought to expose the hypocrisies of his own government and its allies (like the Soviet Union) and to make sure that the war was worth winning. He managed to do so without making apologies for the enemy.

In Orwell's centenary year, it would be good to see more of that critical spirit. But it seems that the ration of critiques of Little Brother Bush in the mainstream media has been pared to almost nothing. GVNN/Net Crisis Capsule