Someone Else's Thought For The Day

David Horowitz on the Left's response to President Bush's second inaugural address:

The totalitarian Left -- the Left that calls itself progressive and identifies its totalitarian goals with the seductive phrase "social justice" -- hated the speech (naturally), along the man who gave it. "The worst president ever" was one of the milder slogans on a sign in the crowd that gathered along Pennsylvania Avenue to trumpet their hate towards the inaugural parade. But there was hardly a liberal organ in the nation -- from the New York Times to the Washington Post -- that did not find something to wring its hands about in the president's speech. It was a Rorschach moment. This was a self-revelation, a testament to the reactionary force that liberalism has become. The torch of freedom has passed, as President Kennedy said in his own summons to his countrymen to stand up for what is right. But it has passed not to a nation united, as Kennedy fervently wished, but to the conservative vanguard that still takes the Founding spirit of the nation seriously, still rings its Liberty Bell, and is prepared to stay the course of the mission that inspired its birth.

What would Orwell say?

Those who uphold, defend, and spread economic and political liberty are called Conservatives while those who seek to lock humanity down under their total control are called Progressives. In effect, in the political context, the practical meanings of the political labels are reversed.

The one of the functions of language is to serve as the operating system of human thought. But the function of Newspeak is to prevent correct identification of the facts of reality. Thus bloodsoaked tyrants such as Fidel Castro are called liberators and liberators such as President Bush are called oppressors. But since clarity of thought, the correct identification of the facts of reality, is necessary for humans to survive and prosper, a language form that obscures facts and disconnects thought from reality has the effect of being toxic to human life. Each subsequent revision of Newspeak, with its increasing disconnection from reality, is increasingly toxic to human life. An ultimate version of Newspeak, in which any thought is impossible, would be totally lethal.

Thus if we are to survive and prosper as individuals and as a society we must remove the newspeakers from our educational establishments and if necessary isolate them from society altogether.