George Rebane
[A slightly edited version of this piece appeared in the 29jan22 op-ed pages of The Union, titled ‘Democrats’ ‘Newspeak' a radical ideological agenda’. As you can see from the comment stream under article, once again none of the leftwingers understand the message and simply play their strong suit in attacking the messenger – ‘twas ever thus. All are profoundly ignorant of not only the civil, but also the legal, pre-Newspeak meaning of ‘alien’ which was in common usage across the land to describe the non-citizen class of people in America.]
George Orwell and Mao Zedong both knew that a person can only think thoughts supported by his language, a cogito-linguistic principle first introduced as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Orwell introduced it to broad audiences in the form of Newspeak in his 1984 classic. Newspeak was a continuously revised and government mandated English that systematically removed/revised words that supported thinking about rebellion or anything antigovernmental. It worked very effectively in the novel, and motivated Mao's attempt to replicate a Newspeak version of Chinese to a large illiterate population after communists took power in 1949. Mao began by reducing published Chinese to 2,000 carefully chosen ideographs (out of more than 800,000), the recognition of these would make a citizen compliantly literate and able to read government issued dicta and ‘news’.
Democrats and other would-be autocrats worldwide have been envious of this method of thought control effected by the bureaucratic elites of collectivist governments. And in the last few years we have seen America’s progressives begin implementing the 21st century version of Newspeak. A more sophisticated and harder to detect aspect of Newspeak is to reduce the information carrying capacity of the language. This is achieved by contracting authorized word usage and making the meaning of surviving words more ambiguous. (Languages expand their information carrying capacity by introducing new words to identify new things and capture more nuanced meanings so as to efficiently communicate them – think of ‘the cat caught a mouse’ vs ‘the domesticated furry, four-legged predator with claws caught a mouse’.)
A recent ratcheting of Newspeak is found in Gov Newsom’s new spate of laws for California, as described in Terry McLaughlin’s column in the 13jan22 Union (here). Starting this year, the word ‘alien’ will be struck from government materials (as already picked up by the lamestream media), to be replaced by ‘non-citizen’ and ‘immigrant’ to describe people in America who are not citizens. With these newly restricted usages, the reader cannot distinguish between, say, a legal tourist or business-person, and anyone illegally in the country; or a recently arrived person under a legal two-party agreement, and anyone who came here in violation of our laws.
Again, the Democrats’ motivation here is clear – not only make it hard to distinguish but also to think about illegal aliens flooding through porous borders to weaken America’s traditional culture, its sovereign nation-statehood, and to ensconce a growing electorate that will ultimately guarantee a one-party monopoly in the United States. And Newspeak, promoted widely through our government and academic institutions, co-operating corporatists, and unionized public schools, makes it all possible. As an exit exercise, consider also the new meanings of ‘racist’, ‘white supremacist’, ‘insurrection’, ‘the rich’, ‘nazi’, ‘socialist’, ‘violence’, … . To confirm the success of this insidious program, just have a conversation with anyone under 30 years old.
As former Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Gerard Baker observed in ‘The News Media Becomes Fluent in Newspeak’, “We are facing nothing less than a concerted, sustained and comprehensive effort to re-educate Americans in service of a radical ideological agenda.”
[31jan22 update] The comment stream under The Union’s online post of the above article is populated by almost all leftwingers with a totally predictable illustration of polarization beyond futility. They have focused on my inclusion of ‘illegal alien’ as one of today’s proscribed words that makes very difficult or impossible understanding and discussing immigration policy or our border situation. And, of course, that is the whole purpose of the Democrats' radical progressive wing to reduce the information carrying capacity of everyday language. However, most noteworthy in today’s America is that there now is a huge cohort of our electorate that demands to be ignorant of the issues, and unable to communicate anything about them beyond the approved slogans in abbreviated semantics. In response to that comment stream, I posted the following.
Illegal Alien: Federal law employs the term alien, which it defines as “any person not a citizen or national of the United States”. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) uses the term in its program descriptions. As a legal term of art, illegal alien has been a part of US Code, our body of laws, for generations. From BallotPedia, “Those in favor of using the term illegal alien argue that it is a legally accurate term used in federal law and other formal documentation. They also argue that its alternatives, such as undocumented immigrant, are euphamisms used to distract others from considering whether someone has violated U.S. immigration law. … Those opposed to using the term illegal alien argue the use of the word illegal dehumanizes people and does not fully consider the exceptional cases of refugees.” More specifically, according to H.A. Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation, “ 'Undocumented immigrant' is a politically correct, made-up term adopted by pro-illegal alien advocacy groups and liberal media outlets to obscure the fact that such aliens have violated U.S. immigration law and are in the country illegally…If we are going to discuss and debate the issue of immigration and what our public policy should be, we should at least use accurate, precise terms, and talk about, for example, legal aliens vs. illegal aliens.”
The comments herein do an excellent job of illustrating the point/thesis of my column. To further underline my thesis, The Washington Post reports, “The Biden administration has ordered U.S. immigration enforcement agencies to stop using terms such as ‘alien’, ‘illegal alien’, and ‘assimilation’ when referring to immigrants in the United States, a rebuke of terms widely used under the Trump administration.” Obfuscation über alles.
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