A Secret Handshake?

I had intended to comment on the unwinnable contest between the U.S. and Russia in Iran, Ukraine, and elsewhere – but there was something in this week’s cartoon that caught my attention. It was the comment by one of the cartoon observers of the arm-wrestling match between Obama and Putin. He says, “It’s their secret handshake.”

I don’t know if the cartoonist realized how profound that is, but it touches the long-standing debate over the extent to which the world’s greatest conflicts are genuine vs. being orchestrated, as in Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Orwell described a world divided into three constantly warring regions, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. Although they were enemies of each other, their regimes were quite similar. All of them ruled their subjects mercilessly. There was no conflict over ideology or religion or disputed territory. They fought, not for conquest, but simply to wage perpetual war.

The leaders of each region understood that their ability to keep their subjects from rebelling depended on having a dreaded enemy. It was only the fear of being conquered by such enemies that the people remained content to bear the burden of tyranny from their own leaders. It was an unspoken agreement between the heads of these states that they should wage perpetual war against each other, because it was in their mutual interest to do so.

All of this flashed through my mind as I contemplated the possibility of a secret handshake (or an unspoken agreement) between Obama and Putin as they pit themselves against each other in today’s cartoon.

G. Edward Griffin
2015 October 2