August 10, 2005
Newspeak
In the novel “1984,” Newspeak is the official language devised to meet the ideological needs of the governing political system. Its purpose is not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the Party, but to make all other methods of thought ultimately impossible.
Its vocabulary is 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 is done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly through eliminating undesirable words by stripping any that remain of all unorthodox meanings whatever.
Now that this is perfectly clear, Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” recently did a great piece on this change of language and pointed out how much more nuanced it is. For example, a “struggle” is much more noble than a “war.” It also cannot be won or lost, so you don’t really have to strive to bring it to an end. A struggle can go on and on and on justifying all sorts of things that a war cannot justify. And then there is “extremism,” a word so much broader than “terrorism” and permitting so many more targets.
Just as it has been said that the present Party doesn’t ever intend to lose another election, they also don’t intend to give up on fear, the best PR device they’ve ever had for gaining and holding onto power. The “global struggle against extremism” engenders fear ever so much as the “global war on terrorism,” but it is just likely to have better legs and be far more lasting.