The New “Newspeak” TestBob Barr
In
George Orwell’s dystopian novel, “1984,” which describes life in an
oppressive, virtually inescapable Surveillance State, the vocabulary of
the populace is so tightly controlled and manipulated by the central
government, it becomes a language unto its own: Newspeak. The
purpose of
Newspeak is to limit individual thought and provide the government
virtually complete control over how citizens communicate. This, in turn,
allows government agents to engineer whatever reality best serves the
interests of the State. As a result, “truth” is whatever government
wants it to be at a particular time and under specific circumstances;
and the vast majority of citizens, happy in their status as cogs of the
State, are none the wiser.
Many
Americans like to think our “enlightened” society would never fall for
such obvious trickery; unfortunately, they’d be wrong. The Obama
Administration routinely employs its own campaign of Newspeak to
facilitate the implementation of a deeply authoritarian political agenda
designed to reduce individual liberty, while simultaneously making
citizens more reliant on the State. Obama has turned the White House
into a veritable Ministry of Truth,
creating any reality he wishes by manipulating the Mainstream Media
through intimidation, misdirection and outright lies.
“This is the most closed, control-freak administration I’ve ever covered,”
New York Times Washington correspondent David Sanger told the
Washington Post in a report on the
state of journalism under Obama.
Sanger
and other members of the national press aptly note that the
Administration is creating a toxic environment for reporters – at least
for those who maintain roots in old-school journalistic ethics. Regular
polygraph tests of government employees intimidate whistleblowers from
“leaking” information that
might be harmful to the Administration’s agenda. The Administration
also strictly limits press access, using super-exclusive, “
off the record” briefings, and relies on “
staged” photo ops to create the best public image possible.
This
“control-freak” culture of Obama’s Ministry of Truth has been on full
display following the launch of ObamaCare. When asked about initial
enrollment numbers, Administration officials claimed such data was
currently unavailable -- logically absurd in this day of instant online
metrics and Big Data. Yet, by refusing to release any information to the
media, officials were able to craft their own, customized narrative of
ObamaCare “success,” without
having to objectively prove the statements they made.
When
that “truth” was no longer viable, as the true devastation of ObamaCare
began to be felt by millions citizens across the country who received
insurance policy cancellation notices, the Administration flipped the
script again. Suddenly Obama’s (repeated) promise of, ‘If you like your
plan, you can keep your plan,’ became a media misinterpretation of
what Obama really meant, and the rash of cancellations was simply
“transitioning” people into “better” insurance policies. In this
contorted universe, ObamaCare was working as expected, and the truth was
exactly as Obama stated. Up is down, left is right, and bad is good.
Did
it matter that Obama knew for years that people would lose individual
insurance coverage, and that he intentionally lied to the
public so he could pass ObamaCare before being re-elected to office? Of
course not, since that would be inconvenient for the President; so
those facts were sent straight down the memory hole. Obama and his
apologists simply blamed citizens for failing to understand the
complexities of the new healthcare laws, and “bad apple” insurance
companies for not being team players.
Those
who dare speak out against such manufactured realities face a culture
of mockery and intimidation that permeates every level of government.
For example, Ruben Santiago, interim police chief for the City of
Columbia, South Carolina, recently took to the department’s Facebook
page to
threaten a commenter with police action for
doing nothing more than questioning his department’s focus on
marijuana-related offenses. The message thus delivered was crystal
clear -- question law enforcement at your own risk -- even after
Santiago stated later that his comment was misunderstood (sound
familiar?).
This 21
st Century
version of Orwell’s alternate language has found its way onto Capitol
Hill; and appears to be a bi-partisan force. For example, former FBI
Special Agent and current U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), Chair of the
House Intelligence Committee,
recently mocked privacy watchdogs during
a hearing on NSA surveillance. Rogers declared that privacy rights
“can't be violated if people are not aware their privacy is being
violated.” Such a facially absurd comment encapsulates the mentality of
Big Government
advocates like Lindsey Graham, John McCain, Nancy Pelosi and Obama
himself – public officials all -- who regularly rely on blatantly
illogical arguments to justify the paranoid reality they are
engineering.
In
order for a democracy to function, citizen voters must be informed and
educated about key public policy issues. This requires that the
government provide full and accurate information -- free from political
manipulation. If government is intentionally misleading the people, then
the people no longer have control of their elected officials and become
pawns in their political scheming.
If
there was ever paradigm for how the citizens of Orwell’s “1984” could
be so systematically mislead by their government -- sometimes even
contradicting itself one day to the next – it is this Administration.
Employing the tools of the digital
age, the federal government and those who administer it, have been able
to take Orwell’s fictional “Newspeak” to a very real and frightening
level.