Edward Cline :Politically Correct Speech IS NEWSPEAK
https://edwardcline.blogspot.com/2017/08/politically-correct-speech-is-newspeak.html
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. From the Appendix of Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell, “The Principles of Newspeak.”
Orwell does not delve very deeply into the subject, but one of the shared chief goals of politically correct speech and NEWSPEAK is to literally shrink the epistemology of the mind. It is not merely a matter of “mental habits,” but to mold the preferred stunted mind of totalitarian activists like Antifa.
It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods.
Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.
Without exaggeration, this is the shrunken state of mind of Antifa and its political allies in the Democratic Party. The new “thoughtcrime” is now to be suspected of harboring alleged sympathies with Nazism and racism, even though the accusers are grossly ignorant of the roots and practices of Nazism and even of “racism” or “whiteness,” and of the etymological roots and meanings of the words, even though there is not a shred of evidence that “racism” or “Nazism” exists in the fabric of a person’s words and actions. But evidence of innocence
Dr. Leonard Peikoff discusses the “mental state” of Nazi Germans and their Brown Shirts in The Ominous Parallels:
“The concept of personal liberties of the individual as opposed to the authority of the state had to disappear; it is not to be reconciled with the principle of the nationalistic Reich,” said Huber to a country which listened, and nodded. “There are no personal liberties of the individual which fall outside of the realm of the state and which must be respected by the state… The constitution of the nationalistic Reich is therefore not based upon a system of inborn and inalienable rights of the individual.”
Peikoff, writing in the chapter “Hitler’s War Against Reason” in The Ominous Parallels, goes far, and long before the appearance of Antifa and the statue-smashing Social Justice Warriors:
The voluntarist worship of mindless action may be designated by the term “activism.” Activism is the form of irrationalism which extols physical action, based on will or instinct or faith, while repudiating the intellect and its products, such as abstractions, theory, programs, philosophy. In a very literal sense, activism is irrationalism – in action. “We approach the realities of the world only in strong emotion and in action,” says Hitler. (p. 52 of the book)
Ayn Rand wrote in 1971:
Kant’s expressly stated purpose was to save the morality of self-abnegation and self-sacrifice. He knew that it could not survive without a mystic base—and what it had to be saved from was reason.“All within the state; nothing outside it,” proclaimed Benito Mussolini.
Imbibing PC speech and writing, and applying it to any and all issues, achieves the same ends as Orwell’s description of NEWSPEAK, one of which it to inculcate unswerving conformity in thought and deed. Not to mention automatic. And thoughtless obedience, and thoughtless action. One is initially dumbfounded by the crass ignorance of those who censor freedom of speech and the right of assembly. Thus it is fruitless to accuse an Antifa thug of practicing what he purportedly and loudly opposes – Fascism, or the suppression of freedom of speech and assembly – when he physically assaults those with whom he opposes. Anyone who disagrees with him is an “enemy.” Argumentation with the street totalitarians is impossible. “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” said Mao. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, the Perons, Mussolini, and other dictators could have said it, just as well. It is doubtful that Antifa thugs have ever heard of Mao’s “Little Red Rule.”
It would be wrong to claim that the Newspeakers consciously apply PC to their writing and speech; they just do it in kneejerk fashion. It is no longer a matter of choice. It would also be wrong to say that any one Antifa munchkin “disagrees” with what you say (or even are) and strikes out at you. He is incapable of disagreement as a mental exercise. Disagreement entails thought. His sole method of argumentation is the fist or the stick or blinding spray.
Imbibing PC speech and writing, and applying it to any and all issues, achieves the same ends as Orwell’s description of NEWSPEAK, one of which it to inculcate unswerving conformity in thought and deed. Not to mention automatic. And thoughtless obedience, and thoughtless action. One is initially dumbfounded by the crass ignorance of those who censor freedom of speech and the right of assembly. Thus it is fruitless to accuse an Antifa thug of practicing what he purportedly and loudly opposes – Fascism, or the suppression of freedom of speech and assembly – when he physically assaults those with whom he opposes. Anyone who disagrees with him is an “enemy.” Argumentation with the street totalitarians is impossible. “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” said Mao. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, the Perons, Mussolini, and other dictators could have said it, just as well. It is doubtful that Antifa thugs have ever heard of Mao’s “Little Red Rule.”
It would be wrong to claim that the Newspeakers consciously apply PC to their writing and speech; they just do it in kneejerk fashion. It is no longer a matter of choice. It would also be wrong to say that any one Antifa munchkin “disagrees” with what you say (or even are) and strikes out at you. He is incapable of disagreement as a mental exercise. Disagreement entails thought. His sole method of argumentation is the fist or the stick or blinding spray.
This is the apex of the destruction in modern language and educational policies. (I would say philosophies, but that would be honoring today’s destroyers.) Ayn Rand wrote extensively on the role of concepts and their links to words. In her essay, “The Chickens Homecoming,” she wrote as Orwell would never have been able to write:
It is the claim of Linguistic Analysis that its purpose is not the communication of any particular philosophic content, but the training of a student’s mind. This is true—in the terrible, butchering sense of a Comprachico operation. The detailed discussions of inconsequential minutiae—the discourses on trivia picked at random and in midstream, without base, context or conclusion—the shocks of self-doubt at the professor’s sudden revelations of some such fact as the student’s inability to define the word “but,” which, he claims, proves that they do not understand their own statements—the countering of the question: “What is the meaning of philosophy?” with: “Which sense of ‘meaning’ do you mean?” followed by a discourse on twelve possible uses of the word “meaning,” by which time the question is lost—and, above all, the necessity to shrink one’s focus to the range of a flea’s, and to keep it there—will cripple the best of minds, if it attempts to comply. [Italics mine]
“Mind-training” pertains to psycho-epistemology; it consists in making a mind automatize certain processes, turning them into permanent habits. What habits does Linguistic Analysis inculcate? Context-dropping, “concept-stealing,” disintegration, purposelessness, the inability to grasp, retain or deal with abstractions. Linguistic Analysis is not a philosophy, it is a method of eliminating the capacity for philosophical thought—it is a course in brain-destruction, a systematic attempt to turn a rational animal into an animal unable to reason.
The thugs of Antifa, given the relative youth that one sees in videos of current riots, are college-educated by the academic and political enemies of reason. Their minds have been deliberately sabotaged, emasculated, and made impervious to rational or even plain civil discourse. The brains remain, but are permanently infected by the pathogen introduced and injected into philosophy by Immanuel Kant and his successors. The teachers charged with the task of preparing young people for life have instead turned children into The Walking Dead, or the living dead, or into humanoid vegetables. (It is the same virulently anti-reason philosophy promulgated by the scholars and imams of Islam.) What brains are left, as Edwin Jenner puts it, are just shells, lifeless dark shells driven by mindless instinct. Unable anymore to think, or want to.
Politically correct speech – and thought – has loosed on us tribes of the epistemologically stunted Newspeakers of all suasions, and just not the activists of Antifa, and the MSM. Antifa and its political allies are indeed the chickens roosting and clucking angrily and unintelligibly on the growing rubble of our civilization.
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