Red Flags

Yesterday, I blogged about how the Obama administration was trying to control the language describing Muslim jihadism (see: Wouldn't It Be Nice).  Now our President, in a graduation speech at Annapolis, has tried to remove the term “war on terror” from our political vernacular (see: Reuters Article).  I am quite certain that many news outlets will now dutifully fall in line with his suggestion.

Once again we see despotic leaders trying to control the body politic by dictating the language that is deemed acceptable to them.  President Obama’s Naval Academy speech is yet another attempt at thought control … and is straight out of George Orwell.  This should be another gigantic red flag to us all.  Orwell warned us when he said:

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

and

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. 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 meaning 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 stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever.

For more and better expressed thoughts on this same subject see: The American Thinker Piece.  

George Orwell was right on the money in his novel “1984,” but his timing was off by about 30 years