The real, existing "reality-based" world

I was struck by the title as well as the content of this article: The Actually Existing Occupation by Tom Engelhardt and Jonathan Schell, Andtiwar.com 06/17/05.  Also at TomDispatch.com 06/15/05, but with a different title.

The Antiwar.com title recalls the phrase "real existierender Sozialismus" (real, existing socialism), which was the phrase that the Communist regime of the German Democratic Republic (DDR, in the German initials) use to describe itself.  The idea was to counter criticism from dissidents who argued that the DDR wasn't living up to its own socialist ideals.

It's long since entered the German language as an ironic phrase.  Because most people understood it more as, yeah, this is the "real, existing socialism" we're getting from this regime, and its best we can expect, and it ain't the workers-and-farmers paradise the regime claims it is.  (In the article, Schell says that the phrase came from the Soviet Union.  He may be correct; but I've seen the phrase associated mainly with the DDR.)

So Englelhardt and Schell are writing about the real, existing occupation of Iraq.  Not the fantasy one on FOX News and in the words of the generals and administration spokespeople.  Engelhardt writes:

Welcome to Iraq… but call it Vietnam.

If we haven't all gone down the rabbit hole in Baghdad and come out in the Saigon of another era, you can't prove it by recent news from catastrophic Iraq. "Eerie" doesn't do it justice. In Washington, our leaders plead for patience; they insist, as they've been doing for a year or more, as the president has done recently, that this – the latest bad news, whatever it may be, from the urban battlefields and bomb-implanted highways of Iraq – is "progress." They swear that the most recent upsurge in violence and death (49 dead American soldiers in the first 14 days of this month and scores upon scores of dead Iraqis) represents, in Dick Cheney's recent phrase, "the last throes" of the insurgency, which will, the Vice President predicted, end within the president's second term in office.

Schell writes:

The American occupation of Iraq is something new, but the fundamental error of the United States has a long pedigree. It is the imprisonment of the human mind in ideology backed by violence. ...

Once the mind is in the grip of such a system, every "actually existing" horror can be seen as a mere imperfection in a beautiful larger picture, every defeat a stage on the way to the glorious future. The simpler and more coherent an ideology, the better it can withstand the assault of fact. So today in Iraq, every act of torture, every flattened city, every gushing sewer, every car-bombing and beheading, is presented as a bump on the road to "freedom" for Iraq, or for the Middle East, or even for the whole world, in which our President has promised an "end to tyranny." (It's apparently a rule of ideology that the more sordid the reality, the more grandiosely splendid the eventual goal must be.)