Jon Reisman

A Few Choice Orwell Quotes:
“There is no swifter route to the corruption of thought than through the corruption of language.”
“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”

THE PRINCIPLES OF NEWSPEAK
(Appendix to 1984)
Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing. The leading articles in the Times were written in it, but this was a tour de force which could only be carried out by a specialist. It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050. Meanwhile it gained ground steadily, all Party members tending to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions more and more in their everyday speech. The version in use in 1984, and embodied in the Ninth and Tenth Editions of the Newspeak Dictionary, was a provisional one, and contained many superfluous words and archaic formations which were due to be suppressed later. It is with the final, perfected version, as embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary, that we are concerned here.
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.

I arrived at UMM in the fall of 1984 and was assigned as part of a faculty team teaching “Futurism”, which included “1984.” Retiring in the Fall of 2022, I am struck by how much of Orwell’s dystopia, including the control of language and thought, thoughtcrime, the two-minute hate and the Ministry of Truth have come to pass. Biden, Harris, the clown car cabinet and shameless media cheerleaders are destroying freedom and prosperity at an astonishing pace.
Tempestuous toddlers are still told to “use your words” instead of lashing out. Power hungry progressives have turned that upside down, choosing to shamelessly redefine and spin language as a means of gas lighting, lying to and controlling the American people. Thus, we have the Orwellian Newspeak of the definition of “recession,” the “secure” southern border, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Putin price hike, the (non) definition of “woman,” “Equity,” “Anti-racism,” “men can get pregnant,” “reproductive health care”, “assault weapons,” the January 6th “Insurrection,” the climate “emergency” and the well-planned, implemented and successful Afghanistan exit.

To borrow a concept from the environmental left, the Brandon/Progressive Dystopia project does not appear to be sustainable, and I hope and pray that Brandon will be out of office by September 1, 2023, even if that means President Kamala Harris. But it may be too late. Enough of the American public may have been sufficiently indoctrinated and brainwashed so that they will willingly surrender their freedom and prosperity to the woke liberation army. I am pretty sure Dr. Fauci, AOC, Susan Rice and the climate alarmists think so. Between Big Tech, the National Education Association, the Democratic Party and the corporate media, Newspeak may have succeeded.
When Iran gets a nuclear weapon and uses it on Israel, I’m sure President Harris will have some choice Newspeak words for why the apartheid Israelis deserved it, this is only a transitory distraction, and it’s all Trump’s fault anyway. Then she can launch a ritual two-minute hate on every American who refuses to kowtow to this woke dystopic nightmare.

Effective September 1 2022, Jon Reisman is retiring from the University of Maine at Machias after 38 years.  Mr. Reisman’s views are his own and he welcomes comments as letters to the editor here, or to him directly via email at [email protected].