George Orwell, President Obama, and Numbers

George Orwell, aka Eric Arthur Blair, was a renown anti-authoritarian writer of the 20th Century. Animal Farm and 1984 are likely his most remembered and appreciated texts. In a lesser known, but still widely appreciated, essay entitled Politics and the English Language he asserts

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. 

 Barack Obama is POTUS.

Numbers does not refer to counting 1, 2, 3 in this context. Numbers is the 4th book of Torah (instruction), the 4th book of Tanakh (law, prophets, writings), and thus the 4th book of the Holy Bible.

President Obama and indeed many regimes of the 21st and 20th centuries are called Draconian and/or Orwellian. Either attribution of a functionally similar archetype that President Obama fulfills in his role as Commander and Chief of the US Armed Forces is accurate. Additionally, I propose that whether President Obama came up with a specific ploy or one of his subordinated did, the redefining of a specific word (explained below) is rooted in but is a distorted application of procedure found in the holy book of Numbers.

Numbers is not a stand-alone text in the One, Holy, Universal, and Apostolic Church. I find this application of Numbers egregious given President Obama's professed and alleged adherence to Christ Jesus who summated Torah and indeed Tanakh in the love of God and the love of the neighbor, which is incompatible with targeted drone strikes backed by a judge's warrant let alone indiscriminate and warrantless drone strikes.

In order to purposely, indiscriminately, and less precisely drone strike (rain murder from the skies) on brown bodies in territories outside the jurisdiction of the US regime (ie. Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan etc.), President Obama changed the definition of "militants". It used to refer to people who have declared war on the US and are armed and dangerous. The ever-erudite writer Glenn Greenwald apocalypses (uncovers/reveals) the redefinition's / euphemism's ugly truth

any human being whose life is extinguished when an American missile or bomb detonates

This should not convince moral people, but this includes 16-year-old natural born American citizens.

Read the biblical text in question now, and later in its entirety for your edification.

The Lord spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the tent of meeting, on the first day of the second month, in the second year after they had come out of the land of Egypt, saying, “Take a census of all the congregation of the people of Israel, by families, by fathers’ houses, according to the number of names, every male, head by head; from twenty years old and upward, all in Israel who are able to go forth to war (Numbers 1:1-3 RSV)