Word of the Day - Newspeak

[Joanne98]

The Republicans have taken the principles of George Orwell's fictional language in the book 1984 to help win elections since Ronald Reagan and even earlier. Swiftboating John Kerry was probably the low point - taking a war hero, who was running against a draft-dodger and turning his heroism into a lie. That's precisely the sort of thing that Newspeak, Orwell's future language of thought control, was designed for, to turn truth on its head.

From the Newspeak Dictionary:


The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought -- that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc -- should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever.

To give a single example - The word free still existed in Newspeak, but could only be used in such statements as "The dog is free from lice" or "This field is free from weeds." It could not be used in its old sense of "politically free" or "intellectually free," since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless.


The Republicans have taken Madison Avenue marketing techniques and applied them ruthlessly and effectively to presidential politics. Part of their campaign was to take all the words that Democrats used to describe themselves and to turn them into pejoratives. Their biggest achievement was to essentially take away the word liberal as a positive label. Feminists were converted to feminazis. When the Democrats tried to get rid of racist and sexist terms, they were vilified as promoting political correctness. . The Republicans even took to calling the Democratic Party the Democrat Party and linked "tax and spend" to the word Democrat. It became hard to talk about being a Democrat without using words that had been poisoned. I suspect they consciously attempted to use the principles of Newspeak - "making other modes of thought impossible" - to make talking about traditional liberal issues impossible. Sarah Palin tried to do this with the term 'community organizer' when she mocked Obama in her acceptance speech.

On page 4 of the online copy of 1984 Winston sees the Ministry of Truth which has three slogans of the Party painted on it:


WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH


This was the goal of the Swiftboating campaign. In this election we see it in the stealth campaign that says Obama is a Muslim. If you tell a lie often enough, people believe it.

The Two Minutes of Hate begins on page 10. The Republicans have multiplied this into nearly 24 hours of hate on talk radio and Fox News. The image below comes from books.google.com.

Continued>>>

http://whatdoino-steve.blogspot.com/2008/09/word-of-day-newspeak.html