https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-news-media-becomes-fluent-in-newspeak-11595284117?mod=opinion_lead_pos5
‘War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
Part of George Orwell’s genius lay in his insight that manipulation of language was essential to the revolutionary project. If you can command popular compliance with a lexicon that reorders—or even inverts—the widely understood meaning of political terms, you can remake society as much as you can with any law, mandate or act of force. Thought is constrained by the limits of language, and so language becomes a vital tool for placing limits on thought.
We don’t have a Ministry of Truth in America. But our political and cultural institutions have no shortage of eager propagandists creating a new glossary.
Take freedom. Since free speech is such a subversive threat to the orthodoxy, the term itself needs to be tightly defined. Academic freedom in particular must be rigorously regulated.
So, in the words of a recent letter setting out demands from faculty members at Princeton, all research and publication should be submitted for approval to a special committee to root out any “racist” thought.
This freedom will be achieved in part by ostracizing those who dissent. When Joshua Katz, a classics professor, objected to the proposals, his words—unlike those of the original letter-writers—were roundly condemned, including by the university’s president, Christopher Eisgruber. All this ostensibly because Mr. Katz used some hyperbolic language in describing a black activist group.
This vignette is especially telling because the term “racism” itself is another of those undergoing a careful redefinition.