Manipulation of Language
Current day comparison to Orwell's 1984 - Part
In his treatise Politics and the English Language1, Orwell argued that even in 1946 the English language was ‘in a bad way’. He further asserts that the ongoing decline of language has undeniable political and economic causes. Orwell cites several issues as examples, including a lack of precision, ever-changing and forgotten terminology causing the meaning of words and phrases to become vague or lost entirely, and the overuse of jargonistic, meaningless or superfluous words. He describes these issues which are frequently seen in the prose of both common man and academic, as swindles and perversions that make language slovenly, vague and deceitful.
Importantly, Orwell makes a special distinction for political writing which due to its constant adherence to ‘party line’ and prevailing orthodoxy, he found to be lifeless, repetitive, unengaging and almost always delivered in an unfailingly robotic manner. He asserts that political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind (Orwell, 1946). These issues, coupled with his observations of Nazi and Stalin-era political propaganda, led Orwell to explore the development and implications of political language in Nineteen-Eighty Four. In his book, much of the government’s effort in developing their controlled language known as Newspeak is intended to control the speech and thoughts of individual people and through this control, to limit wrong thinking; which Orwell describes as thoughtcrime. Orwell’s Newspeak simplifies and restricts the vocabulary to deliberately limit an individual person’s ability to think critically and articulate dissenting concepts. Further, Newspeak intentionally makes self-expression difficult, constraining as distasteful all discussion of free will or independence. It does this by limiting the number of available words2, and in some cases by giving words differing meanings depending on who it is that is speaking. Orwell’s government promulgates Newspeak ostensibly to produce clarity, while intentionally constraining all colour of thought and expression.
While language naturally changes over time3, in recent years we have seen increasing effort focused by individuals and groups on identifying, labelling and then manipulating the meaning of words to suit particular politically motivated narratives. Of these, none are more overt than proponents of the equality, diversity and inclusivity (EDI/DEI) movement which intentionally seeks to limit what they believe to be our inherent heterodox thinking4. Proponents have invested heavily to construct and promote the nebulous concept hate speech such that, should the individual wish it, hate speech cannow encompass some or all what had previously been described as: (i) offensive, violent, and discriminatory speech or gestures that in many jurisdictions already enjoyed legislative protection; (ii) expressions of animosity, disparaging comments, ridicule or sarcasm; and (iii) offensive language and terms that have often passed into the common vernacular as swears, and which another person may claim to find hurtful (Jay, 2023). The latter two groups are often collectively mocked as hurty words. During the last two years this Newspeak term hate speech has become enshrined in legislation and, sans definition, features in the online safety legislation of both Australia and the UK. The absence of a concrete definition in these Acts may suggest legislators intend hate speech as a movable feast - a malleable concept that can be shaped at will to suit ever changing social moirés and, where activists, courts or the police might wish it, perhaps even the circumstances of any particular situation.
While examples of language manipulation are numerous and many are included in Professor Peter Boghossian’s YouTube series Woke in Plain English5, none better demonstrates the confused and misguided attempts to simultaneously construct and suppress language that some disingenuously call hate speech quite like the now infamous Stanford University Harmful Language List6. For a short time anyone could download the 13-page document from the now shuttered Stanford IT website that begins by presenting readers with its own self-deprecating trigger warning7 (D’Agostino, 2023). Even though the Stanford CIO Council and the activist group they developed and promulgated the list with intended it as a serious response to language they wanted internet users to abjure as harmful, it was frequently ridiculed and likened to poor quality parody (Cu, 2023; D’Agostino, 2023; WSJ Editorial Board, 2022). The list’s authors express goal was to eliminate this harmful language from websites and computer code, yet incongruously they state they are not attempting to assign levels of harm to those very same words included in their list. They also ask those using words in the list to consider the possible impact, or harm, these words can have. Their list includes the following examples:
(i) seminal
They say this word reinforces male-dominated language, having arrive at this conclusionthrough mental gymnastics that deliberately conflates the meaning of seminal (noun), of or related to semen, with its more typical use (adjective), to describe important and influential works8. They encourage readers to use the words leading or groundbreaking instead.
(ii) brave
They say this word perpetuates the stereotype of the ‘noble courageous savage’, again by conflating the meaning (noun), a young native American man, with either the more common meaning (adjective), someone who is willing to do things that are dangerous9, or less common (verb) to deliberately expose yourself to unpleasant or dangerous conditions10. The list’s authors offer no alternatives and say the word brave should never be used. In this way and after more than four centuries of use, if the list’s authors had their way it would simply be dropped from the English language.
(iii) master
They say historically, masters enslaved people, didn’t consider them human and didn’t allow them to express free will. Irrespective of the actual use case, their definition is limited to the more modern use case derived from slavery and ignores its true derivation from maistre, magister, and maister - which are all middle English honorific titles for a scholar or teacher; and magnus, which is Latin for ‘greatest’. Master is yet another word the list’s authors say should generally be avoided.
Within current day politics, corporations and universities, the woke movement has a well-established foothold, pushing in all directions to shape language in much the same way as Orwell’s Newspeak in Nineteen-Eighty Four. The manipulation of language is only one piece of a much larger jigsaw that we will be exploring together. That jigsaw incorporates pieces that include the use of never-ending conflict and manipulation of the news stories being broadcast to us. The reason I have started with language is because it is the basis for all of the other pieces of the puzzle; language is the way by which people communicate with one another, build relationships, and create a sense of community.
Finally, as Orwell suggested this destruction of language is intentionally limiting our ability to communicate thoughts and ideas with each other. It is creating an environment where the small group in control of our language can manipulate and control the thoughts and actions of everyone else. While some argue that rather than politicians or government it is the print and broadcast media, internet and social media causing the destruction of language11; they blindly, or perhaps wilfully, ignore that it is politicians who are making the legislation that now controls the language we can use on those fora.
Manipulation of Media
Current day comparison to Orwell's 1984 - Part 2
Part One of my Curent day comparison to Orwell’s 1984 can be found here.
In his book Homage to Catalonia (Orwell, 1938), Orwell recounts first-hand how the mainstream media in Spain became an instrument of political censorship and propaganda during the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War. He describes how the Spanish press were publishing information at odds with the reality of his own observations, and concluded that both sides of the political spectrum were capable of using the mainstream media to manipulate truth and mislead the public. What disturbed Orwell was that what he was witnessing wasn’t just censorship where information is removed or redacted. The truth of events was being created and replaced for political reasons so that the general public were being misled, and the replacement was only noticeable by those like Orwell who had directly observed the reported event.
Six years later when writing Nineteen-Eighty Four, Orwell drew on this real-world experience when describing how his fictional totalitarian government’s Ministry of Truth (MiniTrue) were rewriting the content of newspapers and historical texts to suit the goals of current day political agendas. MiniTrue control every source of information in order to maintain control over both history and people, and shape the narrative. Orwell’s government’s philosophy is that controlling the narrative in the present enables control of the past, and control of the past allows them to justify all actions taken in the future1.
A key reason for the manipulation of language and meaning discussed already is that it distorts events and concepts by calling them something else, and in doing so creates a completely different inner picture of them for the reader. For example, consider the image created in your mind when you read the September 12, 2018 headline from the Rotherham Record newspaper shown below that was published at the height of the Telford child sexual exploitation scandal.
During this period, and even though police, social workers, teachers, youth workers and the mainstream media knew the offenders grooming and committing sexual crimes against young girls were a small group of men all of the same middle eastern ethnicity; fear of being called racist for rightly arresting and prosecuting the men overshadowed protecting vulnerable young white schoolgirls (Johnson, 2022). By saying that one particular girl ‘slept with’ over 100 men before the age of 16, the mainstream media gave the impression that the girl had the ability to consent2, and completely avoided acknowledging these acts for what they were - the commission of carnal knowledge and rape of an underage girl, some of whom were as young as 12 years of age. With these carefully worded headlines the mainstream media blamed the underage white victim for the harm visited upon her by middle-aged brown men, and promulgated the narrative that police and key agencies4 had been using to avoid prosecuting the perpetrators for many years; that these events should be viewed as consensual acts of ‘child prostitution’, rather than the far more politically damaging truth that for fear of being labelled racist every responsible authority had turned the other way to avoid seeing the child exploitation that was occurring right in front of them.
As professional organisations were created and set about the task of codifying journalistic ethics in the early 20th century, impartiality and accuracy in reporting began to matter (Fabry, 2017). For this reason, well before the separate job title of fact checker existed, credible mainstream editors and reporters sought to ensure the imputations made in the media were accurate and supported by evidence (Fabry, 2017). However, it is now clear that this historic appeal to objective professionalism is a far cry from the disingenuous paid-for5 propaganda6 we have seen during the most recent political campaigns and elections inter alia America, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada; and since the start of the global Covid-19 response. In return for significant ‘donations’, fact checker organisations have promulgated ideological narratives, censored dissenting voices and defended from legitimate criticism those with the resources to pay for it (Parker, 2020). The mainstream media has become obsessed with claiming anything up to and even including rigorous scientific analysis whose results oppose the opinions or political narratives those funding fact checkers is misinformation. The operation of fact checking today is no different to Orwell’s MiniTrue working 24/7 to ensure retroactively continuity after The Party arbitrarily changed which of the other nation states they were and had been engaged in permanent war with. Analysists and researchers have shown that many fact checks misrepresent, lie, or even disingenuously reference other fact checksas their primary evidentiary source material7. Further, it is difficult to take fact checkers seriously when there are even examples of fact checker organisations fact checking other fact checker organisations and claiming those organisation’s fact checks to be disinformation (Romero, 2022).
While defending a potential six- or seven-figure civil defamation judgement8, a fact checker organisation admitted that fact checks and the resulting labels they use to proclaim content as ‘altered’, ‘missing context’, ‘partly false’ or ‘false’ were not themselves factual representations - but rather a statement of opinion (Stossel, 2021). Even the editors of top-tier medical journals are asking whether the commercial interests funding some fact checker organisations are the reason they are misleading and trying to control how people think under the guise of fact checking9.
Finally, we have seen when anyone referring to the Covid-19 mRNA injections as ‘experimental gene therapies’ was de-platformed and became the target of polemic and ad-hominem attacks. Covid-19 vaccine manufacturers and the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy (ASGCT)10 have all at some point used the term gene therapy to describe the Covid-19 mRNA injections. Even while the FDA sought to quietly carve out an exception for the Covid-19 injections from their own rules on gene therapy products, documentation and slides from meetings held within the FDA showed that their own experts and staff considered them to be gene therapies, and that the FDA were purposely not acknowledging their gene therapy nature in a vain attempt to increase public confidence in and acceptance of these novel technologies11. Information recently placed before a Senate inquiry in Australia has also seen the Australian Office of the Gene Technology Regulator (OGTR) admit that the mRNA injections did meet the definition of a gene therapy, which meant that under Australia’s Gene Technology Act12 they should have required an application to and regulation by the OGTR prior to manufacture13. At the same time it appears journalists employed by mainstream media organisations as fact checkers were either blinkered to all this information, or perhaps considered themselves the public face of the FDA’s propaganda efforts. Fact checkers have been the primary proponents of the not a gene therapy response. Their fact checks almost always open with a social media post that correctly states that mRNA injections are gene therapies. The fact checkers then disparage or humiliate the person posting this statement and use self-referential and circular reasoning to deny the gene therapy status while promulgating that the reason mRNA therapies are set apart from gene therapies is because they don’t change a person’s genes14.
Political and private funding has taken control of mainstream media and fact checking organisations to promulgate ideological narratives and censor dissenting voices. Headlines, news stories about events, and even facts themselves are being selectively altered and manipulated. This is, as Orwell suggested, a means of controlling what people think, how groups of people respond to events and each other, and is being used to justify acts that without this censorship and misinformation would be seen as repugnant by most people.
Today, the power of the press is not to share the truth about everything; it is the power to control what everyone thinks about everything.
The next part in my Current day comparisons to Orwell’s 1984 can be found here.
https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-covid-vaccines-gene-therapy-806280914802 and https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-covid-mrna-gene-idUSL1N2PH16N
Orwell, G. (1938). Homage to Catalonia. Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd: London.
Fabry, M. (2017). Here’s how the first fact-checkers were able to do their jobs before the internet. Time. Last accessed: November 1, 2023. Sourced from: https://time.com/4858683/fact-checking-history/
Johnson, K. (2021). Instagram taking its toll on teen girls’ mental health: report. NBC Connecticut. Last accessed; 7 October, 2023. Sourced from: https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/local/instagram-taking-its-toll-on-teen-girls-mental-health-report/2582713/
Romero, L. (2022). How a purported fact-checking site spreads Russian propaganda. GIJN. Last accessed: November 1, 2023. Sourced from: https://gijn.org/war-on-fakes-fact-checking-pro-russia-propaganda/
Parker, T. (2020). Gates Foundation funds Facebook fact checkers that defend it from allegations. Reclaim The Net. Last accessed: November 1, 023. Sourced from: https://reclaimthenet.org/gates-foundation-funds-facebook-fact-checkers
Stossel, J. (2021). Here’s where the facts about me lie - FaceBook bizarrely claims its fact checks are opinions. New York Post. Last accessed: November 1, 2023. Sourced from: https://nypost.com/2021/12/13/facebook-bizarrely-claims-its-misquote-is-opinion/
Part Two of my Current day comparison to Orwell’s 1984 can be found here.
SIDE NOTE: see Father Walter Ong, Language as Hermeneutics, and Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato, both books are very difficult to find in your local library.
