December 20, 2003

1984 is Arriving about 20 Years After Expected.

This is madness:

Be polite to Mr Saddam

BARMY BBC bosses have banned reporters from calling tyrant Saddam Hussein a former dictator.

Instead, staff must refer to the barbaric mass murderer as the deposed former President.

The astonishing edict was seized on by MPs last night as more proof of a Left-wing bias inside the BBC against the Iraqi war.

Labour MP Kevan Jones, of the Commons Defence Select Committee, said: This shows the crass naivety of the BBC. Such political correctness will be deeply hurtful to many of our servicemen serving in Iraq.

This goes way beyond political correctness. It’s nothing less than Orwellian Doublespeak.

In his novel 1984, George Orwell predicted a development in politics in which language itself would be redesigned to serve the intentions of those who would rule over others:

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 [English Socialism – ed.] , but to make all other modes of thought impossible. ... This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words…

See? The BBC is eliminating the undesirable word “dictator” from the language they permit to be used on their airwaves—at least when it actually does refer to a dictator. They do it because calling a thing by its true name shows that their political position—opposition to the war in Iraq—is false!

Now we must refer to Orson Scott Card’s fantastic recent article. As you may know, Card is one of our pre-eminent science fiction writers, whose work includes Ender’s Game. Check this out:

...Our national media are covering this war as if we were “losing the peace”—even though we are not at peace and we are not losing. Why are they doing this? Because they are desperate to spin the world situation in such a way as to bring down President Bush. ...

We are being lied to and “spun,” and not in a trivial way. ... the national media, instead of holding the liars’ and haters’ feet to the fire (as they do when the liars and haters are Republicans or conservatives), are cooperating in building up a false image of a failing economy and a lost war, when the truth is more nearly the exact opposite.

Compare this to George Orwell’s description of how DoubleThink is accomplished, by refusing to call things by their true names. From the definition of the DoubleSpeak word “blackwhite:”

blackwhite- The ability to accept whatever the party tells you. Orwell described it as ”...loyal willingness to say black is white when party discipline demands this. It also means the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know black is white, and forget that one has ever believed the contrary.”

See? There it is. Per the media, we’re not at war, we’re losing the peace. We’re not succeeding in the war against terror—we’re losing. And Saddam Hussein, the mass murder, isn’t a tyrant—he isn’t a dictator—he’s a former President. It’s DoubleThink just as George Orwell defined it.

We must call things by their true names. Here is the definition of doublethink from the novel:

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.’”

“To forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again”—compare that to my recent post, “How to Be Liberal: Forget Half of Everything You Know.