...Truth must go too. Nazis embraced the "Big Lie." Soviets denied that honesty, per se,
mattered. In Orwell's Oceania, the Inner Party members learn to even
lie to themselves and to hold utterly contradictory beliefs at the same
time. Truth and honesty have little meaning to Orwell's Children in
our world. All truth is relative, all honesty a sham.
Language
must be brought to heel. The Nazis did this by inventing meaningless
words like "Aryan science." Marxism foisted upon us words like
"capitalism," which means nothing at all but which has so infected our
minds that we reflexively use this silly nonsense word instead of
freedom. Politically correct language is rampant. We come to view
words like "discriminate" as inherently evil, and other words like
"viable fetal mass" have replaced the reality of murdered babies.
Image
and symbols replace words. Hitler, whose disciples seldom recalled
what Hitler said, always recalled the raw imagery of their leader.
Stalin's portrait was as inescapable in the Soviet Union as the
portrait of Big Brother in Oceania. We live in a word of symbols and
images. Conservatives succeed in books and talk radio, media that deal
in words. Orwell's Children live in the realm of symbols and images.
The books of the Nazis and Soviets were unreadable tomes like Mein Kampf, The Myth of the Twentieth Century
(the two Nazi "masterpieces") or vast empty volumes of
Marxist-Leninism. Is it an accident that the giant who most resisted
this evil, Solzhenitsyn, was a devout Christian who mastered the
written word better than any stooge of Hitler or the Politburo ever
could?
Immutable
oppressors are the final nasty element in dystopia. Hitler blamed Jews
for everything. Stalin blamed kulaks and his enemies in the party for
everything. Subjects of Orwell's Oceania saw Emmanuel Goldstein as
the eternal, immutable enemy of the party. Today there is a drearily
predictable list of oppressors. Christians, men, white people, the
"rich" (whatever that is supposed to mean), America, and Israel are
oppressors and nothing can ever change that.
Orwell even told us, by name, the professionals who would lead us into the nightmare of 1984: "sociologists,"
"teachers," "bureaucrats," "journalists," "professional politicians,"
"scientists," "trade union organizers," "publicity experts," and
"technicians." (The term "community organizer" was unknown to him.)
Those who enslave were those who taught students, who created the news,
who sat in the halls of government power, and who defined official
"truth" (at least truth de jour.)
Orwell's
Children live among us now, not in tiny numbers in weird Marxist cults
like Jim Jones' People Temple, but as leaders of Congress, as the
establishment of academia, as the producers of news and entertainment,
as the administrators of public schools, as the "experts" in a thousand
myriad and odd fields of putative "expertise." They infatuate our
bored children with the only reality and the only diversion that many
can find. They wait for the rest of us to grow older and to die.
From American Thinker: Orwell's Children
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