Orwell’s Warning: The Insidious Nature of Political Language / “The Cargo Cult of Woke” Christian Parenti (doublespeak, doublethink “History has stopped… Party is always right.” – Orwell)

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime 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. . . . 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 thought-crime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t be any need even for that. . . . 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?”

― George Orwell

16:44

Newspeak was specifically designed to create a reality the state considered desirable. Newspeak also had the added benefit of making the expression “doublethink” possible: the act of holding two opposing ideas in the mind and believing both of them.

The most important point in 1984 is that power grows not out of the barrel of a gun or the rule of the Thought Police by terror. Instead, it grows out of the power of language. In that novel, what is reality? Reality is not external. Reality exists not in the mind of the individual, which soon perishes, but in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. What the Party says is reality becomes real.

How else can the Party achieve this except through language? The Party has taken control of language and stripped it away from the individual. That is its power, because those in power who control language control how we see the world. As Orwell wrote:

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancel each other 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.”

4:34

“Smug, greedy, well-fed people have invented a language to conceal.

It’s as simple as that. The CIA doesn’t kill anybody anymore — they neutralize people or depopulate the area. The government doesn’t lie; it engages in disinformation.

The Pentagon actually measures nuclear radiation in something they call Sunshine units.

Israeli murderers are called Commandos. Arab Commandos are called terrorists. Contra killers are called Freedom Fighters.

Well, if crime fighters fight crime and firefighters fight fire, what do Freedom Fighters fight? They never mentioned that part of it to us, do they? They never mention that part.”

 -George Carlin

47:02

“I think some of this relates to the whole question of conspiracy theory. This was something that animated my father a great deal—perhaps even more in private discussions than in his writing.

He was deeply concerned with questions about the co-optation of the left and the nature of ruling class power—what it is and how it operates—and the nature of the state itself. But as soon as you start suggesting agency, forethought, and planning among elites, you are immediately attacked as a conspiracy theorist. That term, almost perfectly—though not entirely—emerged in prominence after the Warren Commission Report.

The Warren Commission, headed by Allen Dulles, played a significant role in popularizing the dismissive use of the term “conspiracy theory.” Dulles, notably, was the only person on the commission who actually attended the meetings, unlike Chief Justice Earl Warren. Dulles had been fired by Kennedy, who inherited the Bay of Pigs debacle. When it blew up in his face, Kennedy reportedly told people, “When I’m reelected, I’m going to smash the CIA into a thousand pieces.” He saw the CIA as out of control and incredibly dangerous, and he wanted no part of it.

There’s also a kind of right-wing reinterpretation of Watergate that I find interesting. It suggests that Nixon—though not for ideological reasons, but more for his own thirst for power—wanted to get dirt on the CIA. Nixon sought to control the CIA and even removed a CIA director. Nixon’s desire to dominate and control the agency shows how presidents often struggle with these bureaucracies.

Returning to Dulles, he was instrumental in embedding the term “conspiracy theory” into the media discourse. Today, if you suggest the existence of a “Deep State,” people scoff. But the concept, as described by Peter Dale Scott, refers to the permanent bureaucracies that implement policy. Scott wrote about how politicians often face resistance from these bureaucracies. The official policy might be one thing, but the apparatus tasked with implementing it doesn’t always comply and sometimes actively undermines the elected officials’ ability to execute their agenda.

There’s immense hostility toward even discussing these ideas. This phobia has been incredibly detrimental. It has shifted the focus away from mass politics to more academic and intellectual spaces. It has also stunted the development of Marxist state theory. Marxist understanding of the state essentially stalled with the Poulantzas-Miliband debate, which, in my view, was a sterile and abstract discussion.

If we’re going to study state power seriously, we have to study the intelligence services and their actions. But if discussing these matters publicly leads to accusations of reducing everything to a conspiracy, then we’ll never fully understand how the system operates.”

Again we hear about Allen Dulles. People like Allen Dulles, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski all with Rockefeller’s behind them created this world.

“What we’ve seen is that you can achieve the same power of thought control and compression of language—along with the elimination of argument—through the compression of speech. We live in an age of social media, particularly Twitter, where this phenomenon is most frighteningly evident. The only people who can effectively manipulate these means of communication are those with an autocratic or authoritarian vision.

You may have heard of a prominent politician from the country I flew from last night, who uses Twitter exclusively as his means of communication. This is because, within the limited number of characters allowed on Twitter—our own version of Newspeak—it’s impossible to have what’s essential to liberal democracy: a developed argument.

In a liberal democracy, you need to lay out a premise, present evidence, and then allow for revision. On Twitter, however, all you can do is make authoritarian assertions, and in return, others can only make counter-assertions. In the act of making a counter-assertion, you inadvertently conform to the nature of authoritarian discourse. There’s no room for extended, reasoned argument on Twitter; it devolves into shouting matches. This is precisely what Orwell understood about the corruption of language and how it leads to the impossibility of real political argument.

The second thing Orwell understood, which he projected forward to us beyond the specific details of 1984, is the power of hatred—and, more subtly, how this power depends on the manipulation of memory. There always has to be an “other” to hate. Whether it’s Eastasia, Eurasia, Islam, or the “bad hombres” coming from Mexico, the authoritarian imagination thrives on focusing everyone’s attention on a threatening “other” rather than on the powers that be or the structure of power itself.

This manipulation is only possible, Orwell understood, if the past itself becomes meaningless. We can only continuously shift the object of our rage and fear if we lose a stable grasp of our own history. In 1984, Winston is certain that he’s seen a newspaper clipping with a photograph of three purged Inner Party members—now declared non-persons who never existed at all.

He believes that if he can hold on to this one piece of evidence, this simple fact, he can prove that the past did happen in one way and not merely as authority decrees. If he can cling to that truth, he can preserve his sanity and his sense of self. Yet even with Julia, the woman for whom he has risked everything, he finds himself unable to convey how crucial it is to have a secure grasp of what once happened.” -Adam Gopnik

I have lived in this Orwellian world for almost 20 years. “In 1984, Winston is certain that he’s seen a newspaper clipping with a photograph of three purged Inner Party members—now declared non-persons who never existed at all.”  For me that photograph was 9/11 and “he believes that if he can hold on to this one piece of evidence, this simple fact, he can prove that the past did happen in one way and not merely as authority decrees. If he can cling to that truth, he can preserve his sanity and his sense of self. Yet even with Julia, the woman for whom he has risked everything, he finds himself unable to convey how crucial it is to have a secure grasp of what once happened.”

“Who doesn’t respect and value his past, is not worth the honour of the present, and has no right to a future.”

― Józef Piłsudski

There always has to be an “other” to hate: “The entire U.S. ruling class, ruling elite, comes to see terrorism as the preferred means, indeed the only means, to provide social cohesion, to provide an enemy image for the society, to keep it together. According to neocon theory from Carl Schmitt, you have to have an enemy image in order to have a society… This is a very dangerous thing because now it means that the entire social order—political parties, intellectual life, politics in general—are all based on a monstrous myth.”

—Webster Tarpley (Historian), Zeitgeist movie

We live in a real-world version of Orwell’s 1984:

“What are the stars?’ said O’Brien indifferently. ‘They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it.’ Winston made another convulsive movement. This time he did not say anything. O’Brien continued as though answering a spoken objection: ‘For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?”

― George Orwell, 1984 & Animal Farm

Richard Wolff & Michael Hudson: Karl Marx and the Fall of the West (MUST WATCH!!! If you didn’t watched this you don’t understand real world)

2:52:09

“Capitalism is no longer industrial capitalism; we are in a whole new world. What do you call it? Neo-feudalism? The road to perdition? And what would you call the discipline that studies this new system? If universities started teaching courses on it, what department would handle them? I don’t know.

Richard had a niche position teaching Marxism specifically, but I stopped teaching and went to work as a government advisor 50 years ago. Governments—and even Wall Street—offered freedoms I didn’t have in academia. At the New School, all that mattered was what you believed. The question was always, “Are you one of us?”

On Wall Street, however, they didn’t care about my politics. When they found out I was a Marxist, it didn’t matter to them. All they cared about was whether my forecasts were accurate and whether I could tell them what was going to happen. Because of that, I became very successful. They weren’t concerned with ideology.

That’s the key difference between Wall Street and academia. The business community was free from the economic categories and ideological constraints that prevented economists from playing a productive role in the American economy. It all sounds ridiculous, but that’s how it was.”

We live in the real Orwelian world with Doublespeak and Doublethink.

Consider why Wall Street would hire a Marxist to make forecasts based on Marxist economic theory. Just like in 1984, people were required to simultaneously believe that the Earth was the center of the universe (Marxist economics doesn’t work) and yet, when we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun. (hire a Marxist to make forecasts using Marxist analysis).

How is it possible that Marxist economics "doesn’t work," yet an analysis grounded in Marxist theories allowed someone to build a career? This is an example of doublethink. Think about why Wall Street employs a Marxist to make forecasts using Marxist theory if Marxism supposedly doesn’t work. It’s like 1984: people didn’t question how the Earth could be the center of the universe while simultaneously using calculations based on the premise that the Earth is not the center.

Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy(economy)? The stars can be near(Marx can work) or distant(Marx might not work), according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians(economists) are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

― George Orwell, 1984