On speech codes

It's now possible to commit a crime by simply holding an inappropriate attitude. "Prominent scientist David Suzuki says that people should look for a way to hold politicians who ignore climate change science legally responsible, according to the National Post". His spokesman later said "the call for imprisonment was not meant to be taken literally, Dr. Suzuki reportedly made similar remarks in an address at the University of Toronto last month." By slow degrees we are told what we must say and must not say. Meanwhile ...

"The Philippine Congress has passed the third reading of a bill that would penalize the media for describing suspected terrorists and criminals as Muslims. House Bill 100, known as “An Act Prohibiting the Use of the Words ‘Muslim’ and ‘Christian in Mass Media to describe any Person Suspected of or Convicted for Having Committed Criminal or Unlawful Acts, and Providing Penalties for Violation Thereof” was introduced by Muslim Congressman, Representative Yusop Jikiri (pictured) from the southern Philippine Island of Mindanao and passed Congress on Feb 5. ...

According to the Filipino press, Jikiri told Congress his bill was “a defining law which will finally end the stereotyping of Muslims as kidnappers, drug pushers [and] terrorists.” ... Human rights activists and Muslim community leaders have long protested the public presentation of Moros in the Filipino press, saying their stereotyping as criminals, terrorists and drug traffickers is demeaning. Free-speech advocates, however, object to the bills attempt to regulate speech.

Not only are speech codes being created all over the world, but cut-down languages are being legislated into existence. George Orwell describing the synthetic dialect of 1984, Newspeak, described the goal of the new languages: to reduce the scope of thought.

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. 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. ...

Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive. 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.

Where words were allowed to survive, they were pre-loaded. In Newspeak the B vocabulary played an important role in achieving this goal. It was designed to inherently infuse any statement with "a desirable mental attitude". The overtones were built into the vocabulary itself. Today's "politically correct" speech is an implementation of Newspeak. The word "Christian" for example, cannot now be uttered without conjuring the image of a cowardly oppressor, at once exercising a bigoted tyranny over all non-Christians but at the same time constrained by the doctrines of Christ from responding to any provocation, however extreme. On the other hand, the word "Muslim" in politically correct speech means a person understandably driven to extreme acts in response to unbearable and long endured oppression. Thus, George Bush is a "religious bigot" while Louis Farrakhan is a "great man".

Speakers of political correctease will find that certain thoughts are actually impossible to express in that dialect. Some words have simply ceased to exist. Even names, such as the middle name of a well known Presidential candidate have been effectively excised from the language. Such words are impossible to utter and never spoken. In time they will cease to exist altogether. But that's as it should be. As Orwell put it:

When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the last link with the past would have been severed. History had already been rewritten, but fragments of the literature of the past survived here and there, imperfectly censored, and so long as one retained one's knowledge of Oldspeak it was possible to read them. In the future such fragments, even if they chanced to survive, would be unintelligible and untranslatable. It was impossible to translate any passage of Oldspeak into Newspeak unless it either referred to some technical process or some very simple everyday action, or was already orthodox(goodthinkful would be the Newspeak expression) in tendency. In practice this meant that no book written before approximately 1960 could be translated as a whole. Pre-revolutionary literature could only be subjected to ideological translation -- that is, alteration in sense as well as language. Take for example the well-known passage from the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government. . ."

It would have been quite impossible to render this into Newspeak while keeping to the sense of the original. The nearest one could come to doing so would be to swallow the whole passage up in the single word crimethink. A full translation could only be an ideological translation, whereby Jefferson's words would be changed into a panegyric on absolute government.

It won't be long now.