Trump and Orwell’s Newspeak

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  • March 26, 2020 at 1:04 pm #112990
    Billy_T
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    (It’s baked in that you guys already know this stuff, most of this stuff, or some of this stuff, etc. etc. But some of us gotta rant, regardless, ya know?)

    I have no idea how much of this is intentional, and how much is just a matter of Trump’s obviously limited vocabulary. But it strikes me that Orwell’s idea of Newspeak in 1984 — a riff on the worst potential aspects of the “Basic English” movement, carried forward into a totalitarian setting — is manifest in every off-the-cuff speech he gives.

    In Orwell’s novel, which is further developed in Joanna Kavenna’s excellent Zed, the Powers that Be want to radically simplify language to the point of eliminating even the potential for dissent. As in, manipulate the range of possible vocabulary, so folks stop even thinking in terms of that dissent, cuz the terms themselves are being “disappeared” over time . . . along with the history.

    Trump adds his own riff on this, via endless repetition, which Hitler did as well. Repetition of that stripped down lingo, which all too often leads to stripped down thinking. It’s generally more difficult to go from the near-absence of useful content to effective deductions, than from too much info to those effective critiques. Both create more difficulties than we should have, but Trump’s sing-songy repetitions of no-things effectively limit the range of those deductions.

    People are dying as a result.

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