Dystopia Uber Alles. Newspeak: a perfect language. Its a world where those who wish to retrieve their freedom are subjected to humiliation, loss of identity, and in the last resort, pain. “We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,” O’Brien tells Winston Smith, as he tricks him into disclosing himself as a rebel. This promise utopia turns out to be the torture chambers of the windowless Ministry of Love.
In Orwell’s dystopia the proximate agent of control is language. The myths of freedom and peace are kept alive by hollow language that has totally lost its meaning. In Newspeak, Orwell’s brilliant and culturally incisive creation, language, like personality, has been purged of all flavor. It is objective, without the subtlety or irony that reflects experience. Newspeak is a caricature of C.K. Ogden’s Basic English, in which the inventor hoped to compress the English language to under 1000 words. Orwell at first became interested in it as a possible corrective to official euphemism and as a cleansing agent at a time, when, he said, most political writing consisted of phrases glued and taped together like a child’s craft project. Orwell later realized its sinister possibilities when the British government bought the world rights.
Syme, a compiler of a Newspeak dictionary in 1984- he is a tad too clever and is vaporized- knows what it is all about. His team is destroying words by the hundreds every day: ‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we’re not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,’ he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction. ‘Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?’ Read More:http://www.george-orwell.org/1984/4.html a
Newspeak accomplishes this by divorcing language from thought. Such words as remain express acceptable ideas or condemn unacceptable ones out of hand. Even by 2011, the process has not been completed, but it is well under way.Would Orwell have been pleased:
Getting the Visuals Right. When Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the UN, his background “visuals” consisted of blue draperies neatly trimmed by a row of flags. Few knew the draperies had to be installed that morning to cover over a work of art that normally stands there — a massive tapestry reproduction of Picasso’s famous anti-war painting “Guernica.” Speaking in defense of the cover-up of Picasso’s images of dying women, children and animals was UN spokesperson Stephane Dujaric, who stated, “We needed the right background that would work on television.” (If only Picasso had painted happy faces.) Unbeknownst to himself, Powell was presenting the world with a perfect metaphor of how our policies and language of “collateral damage” cover over the realities of human suffering. Read More:http://www.scn.org/news/newspeak/
In truth, everything in 1984 is controlled, ordered, managed. But who shall guard the guardians? In 1984, as ever, no one. Although the concept of an Inner Party can be traced to Plato, Orwell’s central source was American writer James Burnham, and his book The Managerial Society. It provided the ideological stalking horse for 1984 by predicting the rise of a new managerial class that would not be different from one superstate to another. Burnham foresaw the world divided into power blocs of Europe, Asia and America. These managers are described in the theoretical center of 1984, the book-within-a-book that describes the principles of Ingsoc. Naturally, it is forbidden, as in any truthful book:
…The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the uppe
ades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government. As compared with their opposite numbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition.Read More: http://www.george-orwell.org/1984/4.html
In the wake of the financial crisis, and the bailout, no names are really needed here. The essence of Orwell’s quarrel with Burnham, is not that Burnham is incorrect , but having worked it out, he has become fascinated by it and has accepted it as inevitable and therefore even desirable. Orwell labeld this “realism”. The realists who rationally submit. Burnham for a time accepted Nazism as a plausible social order. Until it began to lose. In England, Orwell found that the middle-class managers accepted the Soviet regime, but only after it became totalitarian:
That is, they are not managers in the narrow sense, but scientists, technicians, teachers, journalists, broadcasters, bureaucrats, professional politicians: in general, middling people who feel themselves cramped by a system that is still partly aristocratic, and are hungry for more power and more prestige. These people look towards the USSR and see in it, or think they see, a system which eliminates the upper class, keeps the working class in its place, and hands unlimited power to people very similar to themselves. It was only after the Soviet régime became unmistakably totalitarian that English intellectuals, in large numbers, began to show an interest in it. Burnham, although the English russophile intelligentsia would repudiate him, is really voicing their secret wish: the wish to destroy the old, equalitarian version of Socialism and usher in a hierarchical society where the intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip. Burnham at least has the honesty to say that Socialism isn’t coming; the others merely say that Socialism is coming, and then give the word ‘Socialism’ a new meaning which makes nonsense of the old one. But his theory, for all its appearance of objectivity, is the rationalisation of a wish. There is no strong reason for thinking that it tells us anything about the future, except perhaps the immediate future. It merely tells us what kind of world the ‘managerial’ class themselves, or at least the more conscious and ambitious members of the class, would like to live in. Read More: http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/burnham/english/e_burnh
ADDENDUM:
George Orwell: 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 meanings 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 by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single example. The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This 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. Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum. Read More:http://www.ecoglobe.org/nz/ecostory/newspeak.htm
Father Knows Best Dept. The U.S. Justice Department broke new ground with its crafting of the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003. Among it’s finer encroachments on civil liberties, revealed by the Center for Public Integrity, is Section 501. It would allow the government to strip U.S. citizenship away from anyone giving “material support” to any group designated as terrorists. Some of you may recall the U.S. Constitution forbids depriving Americans of their citizenship. A minor point. Justice Department lawyers adroitly found a loophole — the Constitution allows to voluntarily give up their rights. The bill’s authors then reasoned that, “an intent to relinquish nationality need not be manifested in words, but can be inferred from conduct.” Thank god, we have enlightened people making those inferences. Read More:http://www.scn.org/news/newspeak/
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ZAKARIA: But it’s very personal. I mean, he talks about you as a 14-year-old boy and he accuses you of — of essentially helping to round Jews up — you’re Jewish yourself. You’ve lost –
SOROS: Yes.
ZAKARIA: You lost many, many people in the holocaust. How did you feel when you heard that?
SOROS: Well, look, FOX News makes a habit — it has imported the methods of George Orwell, you know, newspeak, where you can tell the people falsehoods and deceive them. And you wouldn’t believe that at an open society and a democracy these methods can succeed.
But, actually, they did succeed. They succeeded in Germany where the Weimar Republic collapsed and you had a — a Nazi regime follow it. So this is a very, very dangerous way of deceiving people, and I would like people to be aware that they are being deceived.
Now, I — because I saw it as a child, I immediately react that way. But people in America, they are innocent. They — they haven’t had the experience. But having the experience now, and I hope they wake up and they realize that they are being deceived.
ZAKARIA: What do you think of this broader movement of the Tea Party, of — of what’s going on on the right?
SOROS: Look, I think the people in the Tea Party are very decent people, hard-working. They’ve been hit by a force that — that comes from somewhere which they can’t fully understand, and — and they are being misled. And they are misled by people who are using it for their selfish purposes, namely to remove regulations and — and reduce taxation. So reduce taxation and regulation, and they are being used and deceived. Read More:http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread665443/pg1