◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Politics and the English Language I want to talk about words. Not ideas. Not politics. Words. Because the first thing that happens — before the camps, before the disappearances, before the elections that mean nothing — the first thing, always, is the corruption of the words. Say what is happening. Use words that mean what they say. Do not let the language be used to make what is happening impossible to see. Doublethink. I invented that word. I wish I had not needed to. Doublethink is the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs simultaneously — to know something is false while believing it true — to forget what must be forgotten, recall it when needed, and forget again. It is not stupidity. It is the trained capacity of the person who has decided that loyalty matters more than the accurate description of reality. The crowd that cheered the thing yesterday boos it today and cannot remember cheering. The man who said the thing on camera denies having said it — and his supporters believe the denial while the footage plays. War is peace. Strength is fear. Loyalty is the willingness to say whatever is required regardless of what you said before. I described this in 1948. It is running now without the totalitarian state I imagined as its context — running in a democracy, using the tools of democracy: the free press dismissed as enemy, the election denied, the language of patriotism deployed against the institutions patriotism requires. Newspeak is the systematic reduction of language — words emptied of content and refilled with the opposite: Freedom meaning the freedom of the powerful to do what they want to the powerless. Patriotism meaning loyalty to the leader rather than to the republic. Fake news meaning accurate reporting of things the powerful prefer unreported. You do not need Newspeak officially if you can achieve the same result through volume — the lie repeated until the truth sounds strange and the plain statement of what happened sounds like an attack. I was shot through the throat by a fascist sniper in Spain in 1937. I watched the left betray every principle it claimed in the service of the Soviet myth. I wrote Animal Farm about it. I wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four about it. All four legs good. Two legs bad. And then: four legs good. Two legs better. The revolution that becomes the thing it revolted against. The commandments rewritten in the night so that what was always prohibited is now always permitted — and anyone who remembers the original is told they are misremembering. The solution is not complicated. Do not say the undocumented were processed when you mean people were taken from their homes. Do not say enhanced interrogation when you mean torture. Do not say the peaceful transfer of power was disrupted when you mean a mob attacked the Capitol at the instruction of the man who lost the election. The passive construction is the construction of the person who wants to describe the action without naming the actor. There is always an actor. Name them. The ordinary person given honest information is capable of making reasonable judgments about their own situation. The problem is not the people. The problem is the information. The instruments are larger now — the algorithmic amplification, the flood — more efficient than anything the totalitarian states I studied ever achieved. But the counter-mechanism is the same. Say what is happening. Name the actor. Use the active voice. Do not let them take the language. When the language goes — when freedom means its opposite — the thing I described as a warning becomes the thing you are living in without the words to describe it. We are not there yet. But I know what it looks like from the inside because I built the inside carefully enough to describe every room. Do not let them take the language. Say what is happening. In plain English. With your name on it.