War As Freedom, And Fraud As Fact

[Echo In Light]

The media anesthetizes our minds

War As Freedom, And Fraud As Fact
By Greg Felton

“Things like… 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… Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” George Orwell, from Politics and the English Language, 1946

09/28/07 "ICH" -- - -In his famous novel 1984, George Orwell introduces us to “Newspeak,” the pseudo-language by which the Ingsoc (English Socialist) government of Oceania, led by Big Brother, sabotages independent thought and imposes a repressive conformity on the public.

“The purpose of Newspeak,” wrote Orwell, “was 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… would be literally unthinkable.”

For example, in Newspeak, “liberty and equality,” are reduced to “crimethink”; “free” only has the sense of “without” as in “free from” something; “dissent” is “thoughtcrime.” Syme, a senior editor of the 11th edition of the Newspeak Dictionary proudly describes the purpose behind this linguistic destruction: “The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

When Orwell wrote 1984 the year was 1948, and Ingsoc was understood to be a metaphor for the communist régime of Stalinist Russia, but the origins of Newspeak can be found in an essay Orwell wrote two years earlier called Politics and the English Language, in which Orwell calls for wholesale language reform to rid the language of the generica, clichés, pretentious diction and other forms of lexical dross that obfuscate meaning and inhibit honest speech:

“All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.…But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.”

One would expect people in the media to know better, but the vast majority are in the thought-corruption business and either too lazy or intimidated to use language honestly. It doesn’t take much imagination to see that “lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia” typify the language of “Big Bush.”

Although the debasement of English obviously did not start with Bush and his zionist junta, the last five years of endless war against Arabs and the pending unprovoked attack on Iran have given added import to Orwell’s warnings about the abuse of political language and how it serves as a thought-control mechanism.

Here are some of the more egregious, loaded terms in our modern political argot that, as Orwell would say, anesthetize our minds and inhibit critical thought:

Anti-Semitism
This all-purpose epithet of opprobrium is designed to conflate Israel with World Jewry, thereby implying that to attack one means to attack the other. In truth, the term is meaningless, as I wrote in an earlier essay: “Strictly speaking, ‘semitic’ is a linguistic term denoting a family of Afro-Asiatic languages, of which we have today Arabic, Hebrew, Maltese, and the South Arabic languages of northern Ethiopia. Ancient semitic languages included Akkadian, Canaanite, Amorite, Ugaritic, Phoenician, Punic, Aramaic, as well as ancient Hebrew and Syriac.”

The unique association of Jews with Semites serves to reinforce the cult of Jewish victimhood and shut down condemnation of Israel.

Faith-based
This expression dates to the Reagan era and is a euphemism for “Christian.” Because religion has both positive and negative connotations and is often an instrument of repression, radical Christians cannot openly advocate their religion against the secular law or other religions. Also, the U.S. officially has no religion, and the separation of church and state is integral to U.S. democracy.

But “faith” affords the illusion of inclusiveness and absolute virtue. Even science has a faith component, albeit a rational one. Thus, expressions like “faith-based schools,” and “faith-based entertainment” covertly and innocuously serve the agenda of anti-democratic Christian religious exclusivity.

More...
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18472.htm

[Echo In Light]

1. Must-See doc: Orwell Rolls in His Grave

Orwell Rolls In His Grave:
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=orwell+rolls+in+his+grave

And...

Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media:
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=manufacturing+consent&hl=en

[tailwind]

2. : P

Authoritarian governments and economic depressions go together ...

[EST]

3. Welcome to DU!

Thanks for posting this.
I have, for many years, advocated the notion that precision in language leads to precision in thought, or more accurately, imprecision in thought or language cannot promote precision in the other.

This particular passage caught my eye:
"But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.”

People who resent the occasional suggestion that the overuse of "freeperisms" degrades appearance, language and thought should do a bit of investigation into some of the superior work of linguists. I'd initially championed the internet, erroneously thinking that a little personal pride or desire to communicate accurately would improve both language and intellectual curiosity.

I was wrong. Or, if not wrong, then overly optimistic.

[Echo In Light]

4. One man's cynicism is another's realism

Likely, many won't know what they had with the internet until its current form is obliterated by those elements who, due to its open form, have lost some footing regarding management perception.

Attempting to sell mainstream tell-a-vision viewers the notion that the internet is largely filled with "crazy conspiracy theorists," and thus any material/information/news not espoused by the state's corporate megaphone media is suspect remains a crucial talking point of the state's propaganda effort. But, for example, that Hillary Clinton isn't nearly as popular as the corporate/state nexus wants/needs her to be, or, that, conversely, Ron Paul is indeed doing much better than the corporate/state nexus wants him to be, are but a few examples of how truthful, objective information found online, and not in the MSM, is gaining prominence within larger segments of the populace.

However, I understand your sentiment: it's a wonderful world of colonized minds, to be sure.

[tom_paine]

5. This guy was interesting up to this point.

To question is not to deny, yet anyone who doubts any part of the received zionist version of what happened to Europe’s Jews is immediately deemed to have committed crimethink. Nowhere is the brainwashing intent of political language more overt than in this nonsense expression. The Lobby demands unconscious acceptance of its orthodoxy, and its use of this and other biased expressions is clearly designed to make a heretical (independent) thought unthinkable.

:wtf: :wtf: :wtf:

Am I reading correctly? A "received zionist version of what happened to Europe’s Jews"?

Perhaps we should also doubt African-American accounts of slavery for their self-serving falsehoods. :sarcasm:

There are a number of reasons the extent and existance of the Holocaust are established facts:

1) The camps were broken open by the victors, and millions of eyewitnesses lived for decades afterwards to tell their personal stories (or are they lying too, out of self-serving attention-seeking, eh?).

2) For the one of the first times in history, mass media existed to record the atrocities to an extent unprecedented. Millions of photos, recordings, and even movies, laying around in archives.

3) The Nazis, driven pathologically insane (as Amerikans are being driven by the Bushies), were also compulsive record-keepers, so they felt compelled to record their atrocities on paper and film, too. Did you know that many German Concentration Camps had the kinds of records that say that, on a given day, something like 50,000 Jews of all ages died of "heart attack", and on the same day another 50,000 died of Flu? Day after day after day, the Germans dutifully recorded lunacy such as this (again, comparisons to these lunacies can be found through Bushie Records, I have no doubt).

Or perhaps I am falling for the "received Zionist version of what happened to Europe’s Jews", eh? Perhaps people just got really really REALLY sick ALL THE TIME at these German Halliburton Homeland Security Camps. Maybe the propaganda films of Thriesenstadt and the Happy Jews there are true, eh?

:puke: :puke:

Even if this "gentleman" makes a few valid points (already made hundreds of times over by DUers, Conason, Rall, Krugman, et al.), they are nullified by his clear inability to recognize hard data when he sees it, this assertion is not only a crock of sh*t but a lie of Bushie Magnitude, a REALLY BIG LIE.

:puke:

FULL DISCLOSURE: I am Jewish, but I have very serious reservations about Israel's policies, and since they have aligned themselves with the Royal Bushies on the side of what may well be some Nazi-like evil, I have additional sadness and anger at what Israel has done and what we have become, and how so many Amerikan Jews seem to be Bushies these days (maybe as many as one-third), which is as grotesque as to say that they were Nazis (for the two are variations of the same mental disease, and click on my sigline link to see the scientific truth behind that).

[tuckessee]

6. Murderers as heroes. n/t