This kind of news is increasingly coming to us from France, Great Britain, the United States, Canada and other Western countries. Here’s a teacher saying “he” about a boy who suddenly decided he was a girl. Another teacher refuses to refer to a self-diagnosed child as “it”. Such workers are expelled from school and some are even banned from the profession for life.
And this kind of news recently comes to us from the Russian Federation. Someone says that it was Russia that attacked Ukraine and did not defend against its attack. Someone else admits that he dreamed of Zelensky and was not a deterrent in this dream. Yet another uses the word aggression instead of “special military operation.” Such persons are brought to court and sentenced to pay heavy financial fines.
Why were these people punished so severely? After all, they did not attack anyone, they did not beat anyone, they did not take someone else’s property for themselves. Officially, the justification is: they hurt the feelings of others. In the West – transgender, in Russia – soldiers. In fact, their mistake is much worse: they used the wrong words, so they thought wrong.
The charms of totalitarian democracy
Five centuries before Christ, Confucius said that to change the world, you must first change the language. George Orwell understood this perfectly, who noted that there is no totalitarianism without twisting the language. In his novel 1984 he called it ‘newspeak’. The purpose of its introduction was to change man’s way of thinking in such a way that any “heretical thought” would be “unthinkable”. Because thinking depends on the words we use. That is why Newspeak invents new words, eliminates old ones and gives different meanings to others. Let’s see how many new terms have appeared around us lately: transphobia, non-binary, queer, parent A, parent B, reproductive health, a woman with a member, a person with a uterus, etc. etc.
In this way it shapes not only thinking, but also conscience, making people more flexible and susceptible to manipulation, slowly, imperceptibly and involuntarily accepting the imposed framework for the interpretation of the world and taking ideological dogmas for irrefutable facts.
Thus, language can be a means of imposing soft totalitarianism, otherwise known as a system of totalitarian democracy. The Israeli historian Jacob Leib Talmon wrote about this phenomenon as early as 1952 in his classic work “The Roots of Totalitarian Democracy”. According to his definition, it is a degenerate form of parliamentary democracy in which, although there is private property, but no mass terror and open censorship, it is the state that determines what is right and wrong, what is true and what is wrong. As a result, it is the state that decides what may be said, i.e. how to think.
There is no forgiveness for thought crime
John Stuart Mill, one of the leading theorists of liberal democracy, warned of such a development of the situation as early as the 19th century, seeing a threat in the excessive merging of state power with the dominant political and financial lobby. In this way they can multiply their impact on society. This is what happens today, when newspeak is promoted not only by the state, but also by the most influential media and international companies. Thanks to the Internet, they increase the radiation range and jointly establish a semantic monopoly in the information space. This ensures that the indoctrination goes undetected and unhindered, limiting free speech and killing the ability to think critically.
Anyone who dares to think otherwise commits, as Orwell wrote, a “crime of thought.” Just like in today’s Russia when someone shouts attack defense. Or in the West when someone uses the wrong articles or pronouns. Such thought crimes should be severely punished to provide others with a deterrent example of how not to think. After all, it’s not up to us to decide what to think.
Source: wPolityce