Newspeak for a New Millennium
Orwell’s 1984 doubletalk lives in the 21st century

When I was in my early teens and consumed nearly every science-fiction novel that came my way, I had a true fascination for George Orwell’s bleak tale of the future, 1984. Part of that fascination came from the fact that the year in question lie only a few years in the future and part of it came from the subtle way the novel described how a government could slyly strip freedom away from its citizenry by claiming that Big Brother would be their protector.

In addition to penning the classics 1984 and Animal Farm, George Orwell wrote great memoires such as Down and Out in Paris and London and Homage to Catelonia.

The country was called Oceania and one of its government’s primary tools in convincing its people to lay down their freedoms was called “Newspeak.” It was a form of language filled with euphemisms and double meanings whereby people would call the nefarious group of children trained by the government to spy on their elders the “Youth League.” The manner in which the government destroyed records it didn’t want public was to put them in a “memory hole.” And “Room 101” was the euphemism for the torture chamber that every citizen knew to fear with all his heart.

23 years after the title year of Orwell’s novel, we have our own brand of Newspeak that the government and the media use every day. For instance, Blackwater Worldwide is a private company that sends armed men to Iraq to protect United States emissaries and private corporations setting up shop in that beleaguered oil-rich nation. The company, which maintains a 6,000-acre training facility in Moyock, NC, is filled with heavily armed men paid much more than your average soldier, even though they are both paid primarily with public taxpayer money (90% of Blackwater’s revenue comes from government contracts, two-thirds of which are no-bid contracts).

Now some English language traditionalists might call such men “mercenaries,” the definition of which is “hired soldiers in foreign service.” But in our 21st century Newspeak, we call companies such as Blackwater “security contractors.”

On Wednesday of this week, federal investigators found that the September 16th shooting deaths of at least 14 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad by Blackwater personnel guarding a US Embassy convoy “violated the rules of deadly force.” That’s Newspeak for “people who posed no threat to the convoy were murdered by its guards.”

American Newspeak was also in the news last month when the U.S. House of Representatives debated passing a resolution condemning the Armenian genocide of 1915. The event is considered the first genocide of the 20th century and actually inspired Raphael Lemkin to coin the word “genocide.” It occurred when nearly 2 million Armenians living in Turkey were wiped off of their historic homelands through forced deportations and massacres. The event lasted three years and resulted in the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians.

When news of the proposed Congressional measure reached the ears of Turkish General Yasar Buyukanit, he warned America that if the House proceeded with the vote, “our military ties with the U.S. will never be the same again.” Fearless leader George W. Bush then stepped in to assuage Turkey’s fears by calling the genocide a “tragic suffering” by the Armenian people. He then called on his diplomatic and military leaders to state publicly that such a vote would harm U.S.-Turkey relations at a time when we need them most (Turkey shares a border with Iraq), in an effort to get Congress to drop the issue.

Of all the current examples of Newspeak in America, I would have to say that “waterboarding” is my favorite. Waterboarding was a big topic this past month while the president’s nominee for attorney general, Michael Mukasey, was being interviewed during confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He was asked by the committee on several occasions if he considered waterboarding to be torture.

For those unfamiliar with the term, waterboarding is an “enhanced interrogation technique” whereby a prisoner of war is strapped to a board with his arms bound behind his back. He is then dunked into a tank until his lungs fill with water. He is then pulled out, coughs up the water, and is asked some polite questions. If those answers do not satisfy his captors, rinse and repeat.

Waterboarding is such a benign term for the technique. It summons up images of surfer guys in Mountain Dew commercials. “Dude, you gotta check out these rad waterboarding moves I learned last weekend!”

In reality, the brains of people being waterboarded tell them they are being drowned and they panic, sometimes causing irreparable harm to their hearts and other vital organs. There is also no evidence that such techniques have produced valuable information that would help secure the safety of our soldiers or our citizenry.

During the confirmation hearings Mukasey was evasive on the issue of waterboarding but eventually admitted, “If it amounts to torture, it is not constitutional.”

That’s the kind of small truth that eventually leads to bigger truths. If that sort of thing snowballs, it could be the death of Newspeak as we know it in America.