This is a guest post by reader Heinrich on newspeach and the power of language. If you have any questions about the piece or would like to get in contact with Heinrich he can be reached at hvonfrankfurt (at) gmail (dot) com. He currently doesn’t have a blog but his insight is great. So sit down, dig in, and enjoy. Heinrich has a lot here for you.
Let me introduce the subject. So most of you certainly know that in the „West“ (which to me is the Anglo-saxon sphere + Western Europe), the mainstream narrative most people think to be the truth is directly coming from the complex interconnection between mass media, giant corporations, and the political elites. If one thing is certain, it is that plurality of opinion is not the norm, nor is it wanted by our rulers.
You may however wonder about what Newspeach is. Did you ever notice how so many supposedly different newspapers or TV channels phrase their headlines with the exact same words? That the content of three or four different articles on a given subject sometimes sounds like a copy-paste void of deep analysis? That the same very few „politically correct“ terms get spitted on your screens day in and day out?
Newspeach is a term created by George Orwell, who became famous after writing the science fiction book 1984, in which he describes a totalitarian society ruled by technological surveillance. Newspeach, which could also be called „doublespeak“, consists of distorting reality by deliberately chosing words to twist the perception of it, and mostly is about restricting the language to a very little number of terms that then become so vague that the original sense they had gets lost. In doing so, Newspeach is both about creating a new speach and about creating or justifying a new reality.
Let me give you an example. Let us imagine that if you make a little innocent graffiti on a wall, I arrest you and say you are a terrorist. I twist reality by using a very strong word („terrorist“) to define an act of very little importance (a simple graffiti). Or conversely, you kill random people with a gun on the street, I arrest you and say you were just „expressing yourself“. Doing this, I use language to normalise an act of very important consequences. Now imagine everytime someone kills someone else, I write in all media that „it was just some expression of unprocessed anger, no big deal“. After reading this kind of reports multiple times, if that is the only information you get, you will slowly start to see homicide as „a mere expression of some anger“, conversely you could start to believe every graffiti is a terrorist act and the criminal who did it must be punished accordingly with the level of his crime.
Orwell’s book is famous for doublespeak sentences used by its fictional government : „liberty is slavery“, „ignorance is strength“ and „war is peace“ being the most known.
Words have power
Okay, so now that we have a clear idea of what Newspeach is, let me then explain why I think this is a very important subject. Language is one of the most powerful tools one can have at disposal. I would go as far as saying it is more powerful than physical strength.
The French Ancien Régime (the monarchy) wasn’t thrown in a few waves of revolts starting in 1789. It was already collapsing under its own weight due to a war of words led by philosophers and intellectuals, that made popular their own definition of what then became the motto of the Revolution, liberté, égalité, fraternité (freedom, equality, fraternity). The armed Revolution was just the last torpedo that sank the already damaged ship. This has always been and will always be : who controls the words controls the thoughts, and therefore controls the behaviour.
Let us say that now only the word „colour“ exists to name any colour. How then can you make a difference between say a red car and a white one if you name them „coloured“ and words like „white“ and „red“ do not exist? The Greeks of Antiquity had a very well developed civilisation that was for hundreds of years the dominating influence in the Mediterranean world. Their language was very complex, with sometimes many different words to designate what we now define with a single word.
Language tells a lot about how people who use it view themselves and the world around them, it is at the same time an expression of their culture and a mold for it. In Medieval times for example, there were many different words to say „horse“ depending on whether it was a battle horse, a travel horse, and so on. The less words a language possesses, the less intellectual power the person who uses it has. Notice how until very recent history we had „those who know how to read“ and „those who don’t know how to read“. Like a character of the old film Duck you sucker says (for those who don’t know it, it is about the Mexican Revolution), Revolution is about people who can read sending those who can’t to death to then sit at a table to share the country handed over to them.
Let me say it again. Language is power, who controls it controls the thoughts.
Because thoughts are nothing more than sentences you tell yourself in your head. If you have a limited ammount of vague words, then your thoughts become vague too, and if you have no way to think precisely, you have no way to define what surrounds you and to adapt to it.
Also, to add to the power of language, let me say this. I have known people who experienced traumatic abuse for a long period of time. Usually what is not gotten over, and what distorts the person’s thinking, is not the physical abuse per se but the verbal abuse that came with it. Notice how two men can fight each other with fists and then become near best friends ? But how in the past an insult used to be a motive for a duel ? Words have power, and Western people are taught that « violence is bad » but that if someone insults you « it was just words ».
Words have meaning. They are not used by hasard.
Why they have power
Ancient Egyptians thought that words were so powerful, that the mere saying (or writing) of something made it become reality. For example, they would never represent nor write the names of certain entities, like the neighbouring enemies of Egypt, certain Gods like
Seth (God of destruction) or people believed to have come back from death to haunt the living, except doing so barring the word, writing it in red (a magical colour thought to repel nefarious forces), or saying it was cursed or dead. Why do I go into such esoterical fantasy you may ask? Because this view has a lot of truth in it.
A very good read is The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind from French author Gustave Le Bon. In it, he says why to him words have so much power : because the word’s litteral meaning itself is not important, rather, what is important is the emotional meaning the word has, ie the image that pops out in one’s mind when he or she hears said word. That is why, Le Bon says, the vaguest words have the most power (like „freedom“ and „socialism“), since thanks to their vagueness they make spawn in your mind a great variety of feelings you unconsciously associate with them, and those words such as freedom have a generally very positive emotional weight.
Furthermore, as Le Bon says, most people, and especially masses of people, women, and children, do not want (or maybe simply cannot) make logical links between facts, so they rely on apparent links between what they feel (the image that pops in their mind) hearing about a fact and the said fact. All this to say that depending on which words you use to describe the exact same thing, you can get people to totally dismiss it or conversely to become enraged about it.
Let us take back the example of the graffiti. If you tell one person today that „someone made a graffiti“, you will get a drastically different reaction than if you say (even if it was untrue) „one person made a racist graffiti“. Because with the recent context, the word „racism“ is charged with a great deal of bad emotions. In this regard, truth doesn’t matter, using a word associated with bad emotions will make the event bad, just like using words associated with good emotions will make it appear good.
Now, granted, the chasm between reality and the emotions you want to get suggested must not be too great right? Just that it can be very great. Then, you will just have to repeat again and again and again that said bad thing is a good one (or conversely), until people have heard it so many times they take for granted that the bad thing is in fact good. As an old teacher of mine once said, the best paedagogy is repetition. Repetition, and affirmation without proof.
The average mind doesn’t want to be bothered with deep reasoning and roots of events. That is why rumours have always had, and will always have, so much power.
We live in an era where Newspeach is already the norm
Now you can clearly see where this is leading us : if words can make good things bad and bad things good, it is the necessary tool for nefarious people who need to conceal reality from you, even the reality of your own daily life you have under your sight all the time.
As I said earlier, most people by now have at least some awareness about the fact that
Western media control the view given on every subject be it news, politics, education, cinema, etc. Said media are held by a very few very rich people who have gotten used to being in the position of „masters“ for at least the past two centuries in countries like France, the USA and the United Kingdom. Just that power is never enough. You can be disgusted (or at least exhausted) if you had too much sex. You can throw up if you ate too much. You can feel dizzy if you overslept. But power is a never-ending appetite. It has no „satisfaction“ threshold. And the ones that lead the Western societies are very hungry.
They are willing to do anything, whatever it can cost random people like you and me (be it Death or torture) to realise their utopia (what their utopia is being an other subject). But to do so, they have to act against your best interests, and noone wants to get betrayed or cheated on right?
That is why Newspeach comes into play. What best than to make the slave think he is the master so that he doesn’t ever think about rebelling? To make people you want to destroy see invasions as „enrichment“? To make them fight imaginary enemies or between themselves so that they don’t fight you? The whole mass media, from the press to TV news to cinema to history books to advertisement are all using Newspeach on a daily basis to twist reality and pave the way for more control from the „masters“ (the top of the elite) on the „slaves“ (everyone else).
Imported criminals are being called „migrants“. Racism linked to the worst eugenistic theories is being called „antiracism“. Nazi-like groups are calling themselves „anti-fascist“. Welfare parasitism is being called „solidarity“. Saying men and women are different is being called „misogynistic“. And the list could go on indefinitely. To the point terms like „facist“, „misogynist“, „racist“ etc become synonyms, since they invoke in one’s mind the exact same emotions of disgust, fear and hate.
Now, not everyone who uses Newspeach uses it willingly. A lot of „ordinary people“ use it because they never had any other experience than being taught all they know in that language since childhood. This is where it gets the worst : Newspeach, once unleashed, nourrishes itself. Like mantras repeated in sects, Newspeach terms used repeatedly enough disable one’s ability to think. Because the reality associated to them then becomes what we could almost consider as a religious belief. And try to make say a Catholic and a Prostestant, who both believe the other one to be the heretic, to come to agreement. If you do not share Newspeach reality, you become for the „ordinary person“, what a Protestant is to a hardcore Catholic.
But to go back to the main point, let me end by a last historical example. Julian was a Roman emperor who had a very short reign between 361 AD and 363 AD. He was the last emperor who fought to reinstate the pagan traditions of the Empire. When he died in battle against the Persians, he was labelled by the now ruling Christians as „the Apostate“, his writings were destroyed and his short reign almost fell into the abyss of History. Erasing the memory of something or someone is what is called in latin damnatio memoriae („memory damnation“). What we currently see with the use of Newspeach (among other things that would need an essay by themselves, like the destruction of statues, which has high historical symbolism) has the double goal of limiting one’s ability to think and see reality, and to erase what the masters do not like about History.
The best example is the use of „gender neutral“ Newspeach. The double goal is to prevent one from seeing the existing differences between males and females, and to erase the mere fact those differences have ever been considered existing in the past.
Conclusion
To summ everything I said here up, let me just repeat again some of the most important ideas I hope to have conveyed.
Words have power, they are never used by hasard. Who controls the words controls the thoughts. Thoughts shape behaviour.
We live in an era where Newspeach is the norm, and its goal is to prevent you from thinking, to prevent you from seeing reality, and to erase from History what the ones who use Newspeach do not like.
Whatever your language is, never let people lure you into thinking with say-it-all, ready-for- use words that dismiss the big picture. If you erase something’s name, it is as if it had never existed.
H.B.
