How Orwellian Newspeak and Doublethink are used to justify murder in Gaza
In all the weeks of Israel’s bombing and besiegement of Gaza, the leaders of America and Britain have continued to set new standards in distortion and deception. Cliche though it may be, one cannot help but be reminded of George Orwell’s warnings about how language could be used to degrade people’s faculties of communication, clarity, and compassion.
“Political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible,” Orwell declared in a 1946 essay, Politics and the English language. In it, Orwell wrote: “Things like the continuance of British rule in India [which had ended the previous year], 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.”
Fast forward to 2023 and Orwell could have written almost exactly the same essay, albeit with different examples, about the political defence of the unceasing horrors that have been visited on the innocent people of Gaza in recent weeks, in full view of a watching world.
Orwell’s masterpiece, 1984, penned two years after Politics and the English Language, examined the role of truth and manipulation in a then future authoritarian society, where those in power employed concepts such as newspeak and doublethink. The former seeks to invert reality by turning words on their head, as in the Ministry of Truth, which promotes lies and the Ministry of Peace, which makes war. The latter tool of manipulation subverts truth by the simultaneous acceptance of two contradictory ideas, such as the command that citizens must believe that two and two make five if the party commands it, but remember that they make four when designing an engine.
The distortion of language is no less egregious today than it was in 1946 or 1948.
Read on at https://tamooda.com
