We have ALWAYS been at war with East Asia

The excited gentleman above is the Honorable Robert Mugabe, President of Zimbabwe.

Life in any modern totalitarian police state is characterized by a disjunction between reality and day-to-day life. There are those things ordinary citizens know perfectly well to be true, as well as those modes of behavior they know to be perfectly ordinary, and then there are those things they must officially believe, and those modes of behavior they must follow when The State might be observing them. Which might be anywhere, any time.

One may with profit consult either Mr. Orwell or Mr. Solzhenitsyn.

One might have thought that with the fall of the Soviet Union, the emergence of Eastern Europe into the light, and the retreat from respectability of Stalinism among Western "men of the Left," this conflict of official reality with objective reality would begin to dissipate.

Not so.

Here in the West we know perfectly well that Muslims, principally but not exclusively Arabs, wish to see us dead or, at the very least, are wholly indifferent to our survival so long as we submit to the Caliphate. Yet we officially and publicly recoil from directing the attention of security and intelligence forces at those poor misunderstood fellows. As he was shot and then butchered by a Muslim fanatic, Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh's last words are reported to have been “Don’t do it . . . we can still talk about it.”

I think not.

So to Mr. Mugabe. When Zimbabwe was known as Rhodesia it was the breadbasket of Southern Africa. Since it has come under Mugabe's management its people have been reduced to starving beggars, its farmers displaced from their land by criminal thugs in Mr. Mugabe's pay. Out of a population of about 12 million, it is variously estimated that as many as 5 million Zimbabweans will need food aid this year.

So to Mr. Mubabe's appearance at a ceremony marking the 60th anniversary of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. An intersection any editor of fiction would reject as wholly implausible.

There Mr. Mubabe, a brutal dictator, head of a police state responsible for the starvation of its own citizens, relieved himself of the following opinion:

Must we allow these men, the two unholy men of our millennium, who in the same way as Hitler and Mussolini formed (an) unholy alliance, formed an alliance to attack an innocent country? The voice of Mr Bush and the voice of Mr Blair can't decide who shall rule in Zimbabwe, who shall rule in Africa, who shall rule in Asia, who shall rule in Venezuela, who shall rule in Iran, who shall rule in Iraq. Is this the world we desire? The world of giants and international terrorists who use their state muscle in order to intimidate us? We become the midgets.

This, of course, is the complaint from the alternate reality of the criminal thug, who protests that the police are coming onto his turf, and disrupting his business. What right have they to seek to free his victims from his violent exploitation? Do they not understand that the peasants, the common people, exist only to serve the greater vision of the President for Life?

And recall -- note well -- that this is not the rant of John Gotti, but a speech by the executive of a sovereign nation, delivered to the applause of a United Nations audience.

In a world political structure rooted in reality, Mr. Mugabe would be laughed at, placed under arrest, and removed to some locale where he could do no more harm. And the people of fertile and potentially rich Zimbabwe would be encouraged and assisted in setting themselves free.

But we live in a different world, the one where we are at war with Eurasia. The one where we have always been at war with Eurasia.