The Orwellian Abuse of Language
What I have seen over the years, and how it seems to be getting worse.
My introduction to George Orwell’s work was reading Animal Farm in eighth grade. But it sailed way over my head (other than the Soviets were evil, which was the intended effect on my young mind). Even if I had read the book’s censored preface, I doubt that I would have understood much of it. The idea that my society habitually lied to me was probably beyond my ability to comprehend when I was 13.
Even when I met Dennis Lee when I was 27, I did not understand that idea. But the next three years comprised the education of my lifetime. When I heard a talk radio show that promoted Lies of Our Times, I was ready for its message, at age 31. It was only then that I began to understand what Orwell wrote about. Ed Herman discussed Orwell and Orwellian language regularly in his work, as did Noam Chomsky. I really wonder how much I would have awakened if I had not met Dennis.
Looking back, I can see how my family’s changing its diet to whole food when I was 12 and my mystical awakening when I was 16 were important events, and they helped prepare me for what was coming, but if I had not met Dennis, I would have likely become some kind of naïve overgrown Boy Scout who had rising cognitive dissonance over the years. I might have just poured myself into a bottle each evening and be dead by now. I have met people over the years, free-energy and fringe-science enthusiasts, who reminded me of how I might have turned out: well-intended but naïve.
Over the years of study, I began learning of the various political stripes, such as liberals, conservatives, neoliberals, paleoconservatives, populists, neoconservatives, radical leftists, and other designations. While those terms could have a certain usefulness, I noticed how they could become distorted beyond recognition. I see Orwellisms daily, and this post is spurred by seeing Elon Musk’s attack on the “radical left” in recent weeks (1, 2, 3, 4), when what he attacked was not the radical left at all, at least what it meant when I became familiar with the term. In short, Noam and Ed represented the radical left, and USAID was doing the opposite of what they advocated. To call USAID a bastion of the radical left is bizarre.
As Noam and Ed often noted, American foreign policy hawks and doves (“conservatives” and “liberals”) were united on their imperial ambitions. They just had different ways of going about it. A radical would reject the imperial goals altogether, calling their pursuit a crime, and would not get involved in the best strategy to achieve them. Noam and Ed remarked on the American ideological system, which provides the illusion of debates of substance, as the imperial assumptions are invisible boundaries on acceptable discussion (now called the Overton Window).
Ed wrote a book on the myth of the liberal media. The American media is not liberal at all, but it serves elite interests while trying to appear to be liberal and a challenge to power. If it was actually liberal, Noam would be a major media figure. The documentary on Noam’s life was the most popular documentary in Canadian history to its time, and it has never aired on American network TV. That shows how truly “liberal” the American media is.
Orwell was not being particularly inventive when he called out Western propaganda and censorship, but his critiques just came from watching it in action. The Nazis called killing Jews “special handling" and called the subjects of their human experiments “large pigs” (the Japanese human experimenters called them “logs”). Those kinds of euphemisms abound to this day. Sterilizing and mutilating propagandized and confused children is called “affirmative treatment” in the trans craze’s lexicon, and I see that obscene term daily as the media defends that medical atrocity. The trans craze is not “left” in any meaningful sense. It is a normalization of postmodernist insanity, and the medical racket feasts at the trough once again.
Anything contrary to Establishment dogma became tagged as “misinformation” and other terms, and was censored. It is a huge black mark against the Democratic Party that Donald Trump became the voice of reason on the trans craze, the First Amendment, and some kind of feminist champion. As Kara Dansky accurately stated, the Democratic Party abandoned women and children. Virtually none of the leading organizations in retail politics are “left” at all.
I avoid jargon in my work, even my scientific writings, and this Orwellian mangling of English has been something to behold. We’ll see if it gets any better.