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| Illustration by Alexander Hunter/The Washington Times |
The nightmare societies portrayed in novelist George Orwell's “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and “Animal Farm” gave us the word “Orwellian” -- describing a too-powerful government’s efforts to deceive, control, rewrite history and reinvent ...
◼ Today’s liberal vanguard recrafts words to mean their opposites - Victor Davis Hanson/Washington Times
The nightmare societies portrayed in the George Orwell novels “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and “Animal Farm” gave us the word “Orwellian.” That adjective reflects a vast government’s efforts not just to deceive and control the people, but also to do so by reinventing the meaning of ordinary words while rewriting the past itself.
America, of all places, is becoming Orwellian. The president repeatedly reminds the American people that under his leadership, the United States has produced a record level of new oil and natural gas. However, didn’t President Obama radically curtail leases for just such new energy production on federal lands?
Have the edicts on the barn wall of “Animal Farm” been changed again, with the production of new oil and gas going from bad to suddenly good?
Does anyone remember that the “Affordable Care Act” was sold on the premise that it would guarantee retention of existing health plans and doctors, create 4 million new jobs and save families $2,500 a year in premiums, all while extending expanded coverage to more people at a lower cost?
Only in Orwell’s world of doublespeak could raising taxes while the costs of millions of health plans soars be called “affordable.” Is losing your existing plan and doctor a way of retaining them?
The Congressional Budget Office recently warned that Obamacare would “keep hours worked and potential output during the next 10 years lower than they would be otherwise.” That nonpartisan verdict should be bad news for workers.
Not in our brave new world. The Obama administration says it is pleased that workers will now be freed from “job lock.”
What is job lock — a made-up Newspeak word right out “Nineteen Eighty-Four”? Work fewer hours, make less money and create fewer outputs — and be happy....
In politics, of course, the left and right, conservative and liberal, make up stuff. But Orwell, who also blasted the rise of European fascism, focused more on the mind games of the statist left.
Why? He apparently feared that the left suffered an additional wage of hypocrisy in more openly proclaiming the noble interests of “the people.”
Because of those supposedly exalted ends of equality and fairness, statists were more likely to get a pass from the media and public for the scary means they employed to achieve them.
Right now in America, the words and deeds of both past and present become reality only when the leaders put them in the correct service of the people.
