9/25/2011, "Who controls the language controls the culture." Crusader Rabbit, kg
"Who controls the culture wins the war."
‘This capture of the language for political ends was exactly what George Orwell warned us of more than 60 years ago……This complacency is fatal. Great civilisations do not die from the sudden arrival of the barbarians at the gates. They succumb much more slowly than that, from the death-by-a-thousand-cuts permitted from within by those who have forgotten why their traditions and cultural values are worth defending…’
James Delingpole. 1984 by George Orwell was published in 1949. Orwell opposed totalitarianism.
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9/26/2011, "How the BBC fell for a Marxist plot to destroy civilisation from within," James Delingpole, Daily Mail
"The implication of 'in line with modern practice' is that anyone who disagrees with the change must be reactionary, backward, fuddy duddy. Note, too, how the phrase is careful to evade responsibility for the decision. Nothing to do with us, it's 'modern practice'.
And so yet another small part of our tradition, language and culture takes a step closer to extinction. We didn't ask for it; we didn't want it; yet still it's happening because a tiny minority of politically correct busybodies have wormed their way into institutions such as the BBC and taken control.
Their goal is to create a world where Left-wing thinking – on 'fairness', on race, on sexual equality, on the role of government – becomes the norm. So far, they are doing brilliantly."...
[Ed. note: They didn't need to be brilliant, they only needed to be patient. They had no opposition. When you have the schools and patience, anything is possible.]
(continuing): "This capture of the language for political ends was exactly what George Orwell warned us of more than 60 years ago in his book 1984. In the appendix he described how Big Brother devised its language Newspeak to make it impossible for people to think in the 'wrong' way. 'Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought,' he wrote. 'It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought should be literally unthinkable.'
'BC' and 'AD' are just the latest examples of the Oldspeak that the linguistic commissars of the BBC are so desperate to expunge. But the process has been going on for decades, accelerating under New Labour. Tony Blair's rejection of history ('We're a young country' he once nonsensically claimed) and his embrace of modernity may have seemed vacuous but they were part of a deliberate political strategy.
Who controls the language controls the culture. Who controls the culture wins the war....And isn't it only fair that we should be a bit more considerate to the sensitivities of other races, religions and creeds?
No, it's an act of cultural suicide. Most of us may not realise this but the ideological Left certainly does, for it has long been part of its grand plan to destroy Western civilisation from within. The plan's prime instigator was the influential German Marxist thinker ('the father of the New Left') Herbert Marcuse. A Jewish academic who fled Germany for the US in the Thirties, he became the darling of the Sixties and Seventies 'radical chic' set.
He deliberately set out to dismantle every last pillar of society – tradition, hierarchy, order – and key to victory, he argued, would be a Leftist takeover of the language, including 'the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care etc'.
In other words, those of us who believe in smaller government or other 'Right-wing' heresies should be for ever silenced.
Marcuse's teachings were de rigueur among student radicals on the campuses of the Sixties; his teachings formed the intellectual bedrock for every revolutionary group from the Black Panthers to the Baader-Meinhof gang. And also for that generation of long-haired students who now occupy senior positions in universities, in the judiciary, in government, in the civil service and, of course, at the BBC.
They may no longer define themselves as Marxists but they have absorbed the lessons of Marcuse unquestioningly.
At the time, Marcuse may have seemed like one of those fashionable Left-wing academics whose silly ideas you grow out of once you've got a job. Only now are we beginning to appreciate just how lethal he was.
Thanks to the sterling work done by his acolytes, Marcuse's most fervent desires – and Orwell's darkest predictions – are coming true. There was a time when we used to complain about it – remember our outrage when nursery children were taught to sing about 'Baa baa rainbow sheep'? – but now we've grown so used to it that we tend to shrug our shoulders, mutter under our breath about 'political correctness gone mad' and accept it as the way things are.
This complacency is fatal. Great civilisations do not die from the sudden arrival of the barbarians at the gates. They succumb much more slowly than that, from the death-by-a-thousand-cuts permitted from within by those who have forgotten why their traditions and cultural values are worth defending."
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Added:
Feb. 2000, "Language as the “Ultimate Weapon” in Nineteen Eighty-Four," Jem Berkes
Orwell "realises that language has the power in politics to mask the truth and mislead the public, and he wishes to increase public awareness of this power. He accomplishes this by placing a great focus on Newspeak and the media in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Demonstrating the repeated abuse of language by the government and by the media in his novel, Orwell shows how language can be used politically to deceive and manipulate people, leading to a society in which the people unquestioningly obey their government and mindlessly accept all propaganda as reality....
As Orwell says in his essay Politics and the English Language, “Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”...
In many ways, the media is relying on the principle that a piece of information that is repeated often enough becomes accepted as truth. Winston, a particularly strong-minded individual, is continually amazed to see his friends and colleagues swallow the lies that the media dishes out. For this form of brainwashing (‘Duckspeak’) to be effective, “you just say things frequently and people eventually understand and say it themselves” (Chilton 27). This brainwashing is done through the words of the telescreens, newspapers and magazines."...
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