Winston Smith(s) Anonymous: The Fascism Is In The Words
The Circle
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to
narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make
thought-crime literally impossible because there will
be no words in which to express it.
The revolution will be complete when the
language is perfect.”
- Syme, Resdep(Research Department) from Minitrue (Ministry of Truth)
The term “doublespeak,” it is well known, does not exist in the world of Oceania depicted by Orwell.
Doublespeak is a word that came into usage as early as the nineteen fifties, a hybrid of
Orwell’s words Newspeak and Doublethink, and which was given it’s own classification as a
dialect of sorts by author William Lutz in his 1987 book about this language device which
is so popular with advertisers and political groups.
It would be a mistake however, to confuse doublespeak as it has functioned
historically, with Orwell’s Newspeak. In fact, doublespeak has frequently had
more in common with what is called Politically Correct language than with
Newspeak. In other words, the traditional use of this “dialect” has been
more to water down the meanings of ideas rather than invert them outright.
The Pentagon, when they used to report the casualties that occurred during
an act of war, called innocent civilians in the line of fire, “collateral
losses.” Teacher Education accrediting programs will question the qualifications
of any applicant who refers to students as “handicapped” instead of “differently-abled.”
Clearly these two uses are not the same thing, but they serve as a tool whose
use is ultimately the same: the reduction of the unpleasantness of labeling or
judgment of circumstances that are implicitly tragic. They may not be the same
tool, in the sense that a screwdriver and a wrench are not the same tool but a
lot closer to each other than say, a wrench and a saw.
The irony of course, is that conservatives earn their stripes railing
against the so-called liberal language of Political Correctness, but is
in fact the use of such labels which has allowed them to create their own
language which can be spun to mean many things at once which is the purpose
of Doublespeak. Wikipedia states that “Doublespeak may be considered, in
Orwell's lexicography, as the B vocabulary of Newspeak, words ‘deliberately
constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had
in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable
mental attitude upon the person using them.’"
In the era of the Bush administration, we can say that we are now
witnessing the first morphing of Doublespeak into Orwell’s dreaded
Newspeak. Consider the largest, and already most forgotten aspect of
this phenomenon: the launch of Operation Enduring Freedom on October 7, 2001.
This represents the beginning of the much ballyhooed “War on Terror” on neither
OEF not the War on Terror have any end in sight, primarily because they are not designed to have an end.
Now if you believe that Saddam Hussein, presiding lavishly over a
crippled economy and infrastructure, absorbed as he was with writing
mystery novels and screenplays, posed a genuine threat to your way of
life, than this likely won’t make sense.
On the other hand, if you are like most citizens who believe Osama bin
Laden poses a much greater threat to our way of life, then it is no great
stretch to replace the word “freedom” in OEF with “terror”; Operation Enduring Terror.
And if you belong to a growing number of Americans who believe bin Laden was allowed to
escape by “outsourcing” his capture to Afghani warlords, then we are full in the realm of
Big Brother. According to Orwell in his treatise “The Principles of Newspeak”:
“No word in the B vocabulary was ideologically
neutral. A great many were euphemisms.
(Some words) displayed a frank and con-
temptuous understanding of the real nature of
society.”
Examples of this would be the infamous phrases “Compassionate Conservatism” or
“No Child Left Behind.” Certainly one must wonder in a political administration
that has demonstrated the execution of policies, which benefit the top five percent
wealthiest individuals in this nation if Compassionate Conservatism means compassion
for conservatives only. Or when they imply your child won’t be left behind, if all
else fails, there will be plenty of room for your loved ones in a federal penitentiary.
Yet even these distortions of meaning point more towards hypocrisy.
For more egregious examples, we have domestic policy such as the “Clear Skies Act”
which allows for huge increases in pollution, the “Healthy Forests Act” which sounds
as if Smokey the Bear advocates for clear-cutting. This is the embryonic state of Orwell’s Newspeak:
“Such words for instance as joycamp (forced labor camp) or Minipax (Ministry of Peace,
i.e., Ministry of War) meant almost the exact opposite of what they
appeared to mean.”
Straddling Doublespeak and Newspeak are phrases like “Ownership Society.”
Does this mean a society composed of owners? Or does it mean a society controlled by
owners? The term functions as a distortion and a cruel joke simultaneously.
Perhaps most telling of all is the source of Orwell’s principles for Newspeak,
which do not derive from Stalin’s reign but from the concept of the “Big Lie” as
outlined by Adolph Hitler in “Mein Kampf:”
“the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of
their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive
simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie,
since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to
resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate
colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to
distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be
brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think
that there may be some other explanation.”
Perhaps you think I go too far in linking the rhetorical practices of the Bush
Administration with the propaganda machine of Hitler and Goebbels. Yet consider this choice quote:
“Never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that
there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never
accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that
goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it
frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”
This sounds as if it could be Noam Chomsky analyzing the playbooks of Karl Rove or
Donald Rumsfeld. In fact, it is the psychological profile of Adolph Hitler that
was drawn up by The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the World War II forerunner
of the CIA, which coincidentally, represents the U.S. intelligence agency that has
most resisted the cherry picking intelligence practices of the Bush Administration.
From sudden upgrades in “terror alerts” to The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,
the propagandistic devices described by Mein Kampf are alive and well and somehow
are in charge of our nation’s waning democracy.
If you call living with this absurdity of political language “freedom” then go ahead
and call me a “freedom hater,” but while you’re at it make sure to swear your
allegiance to a king named George and his inherited throne while singing a bar
from Deutschland Uber Alles, because plainly, that’s where your sympathies lie.