We have finally reached the point George Orwell warned us
about in 1949 when his novel 1984 was published. We cannot defend ourselves any more
because the official government vocabulary has been stripped of the words to formulate
the problem in the first place. Although Orwell expected Newspeak to be adopted by 2050, he was wrong.
Newspeak is already in effect.
As Robert Spencer points
out , “FBI had no idea how to
tell whether or not Tamerlan Tsarnaev was “engaging in extremist activity,”
because the “extremist activity” he was engaging in was Islamic jihad, and Obama’s FBI is forbidden to study Islamic jihad. This is because the Obama Administration in 2011 mandated the
scrubbing of counter-terror training materials of the truth about Islam and
jihad.”
Below
is the entire appendix to 1984, THE
PRINCIPLES OF NEWSPEAK. It should become required reading for anyone who
wishes to remain sane.
It is scary that an average New Yorker today is less
informed about what is transpiring in the world around than were Soviet
citizens in 1970s under the Soviet regime. At least the Russians understood
that the their press was garbage and sought to get vital info from the VOA, the
BBC (at that time the BBC was not what it has become today), Radio Free Europe
or Samizdat publications. The fact that millions of New Yorkers swallow
articles like A
Battered Dream, Then a Violent Path without protest is embarrassing. The density
of stupidity has passed the critical mass. At the time the access to
information is the easiest in human history, the wish to access this
information has gone down, resulting in a detached, ignorant and apathetic
majority. How many New Yorkers have read Bosch
Fawstin’s article in frontpage?
We in Israel should start screaming at the top
of our voices about these ignorant fools
in the US endangering not only their own lives, but endangering much more our
lives in Israel with their PC and in their refusal to face the problem of
jihadism, in their refusal to take the Twelvers' eschatology seriously.
Appendix.
The Principles of Newspeak
Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised
to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984
there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of
communication, either in speech or writing. The leading articles in ‘The Times’
were written in it, but this was a TOUR DE FORCE which could only be carried
out by a specialist. It was expected that Newspeak would have finally
superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we should call it) by about the
year 2050. Meanwhile it gained ground steadily, all Party members tending to
use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions more and more in their
everyday speech. The version in use in 1984, and embodied in the Ninth and Tenth
Editions of the Newspeak Dictionary, was a provisional one, and contained many
superfluous words and archaic formations which were due to be suppressed later.
It is with the final, perfected version, as embodied in the Eleventh Edition of
the Dictionary, that we are concerned here.
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. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to
give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party
member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and
also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done
partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable
words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so
far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single example.
The word FREE still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such
statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds’.
It could not be used in its old sense of ‘politically free’ or ‘intellectually
free’ since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as
concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless. 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.
Newspeak was founded on the
English language as we now know it, though many Newspeak sentences, even when
not containing newly-created words, would be barely intelligible to an
English-speaker of our own day. Newspeak words were divided into three distinct
classes, known as the A vocabulary, the B vocabulary (also called compound
words), and the C vocabulary. It will be simpler to discuss each class
separately, but the grammatical peculiarities of the language can be dealt with
in the section devoted to the A vocabulary, since the same rules held good for
all three categories.
THE A VOCABULARY. The A vocabulary
consisted of the words needed for the business of everyday life — for such
things as eating, drinking, working, putting on one’s clothes, going up and
down stairs, riding in vehicles, gardening, cooking, and the like. It was
composed almost entirely of words that we already possess words like HIT, RUN,
DOG, TREE, SUGAR, HOUSE, FIELD— but in comparison with the present-day English
vocabulary their number was extremely small, while their meanings were far more
rigidly defined. All ambiguities and shades of meaning had been purged out of
them. So far as it could be achieved, a Newspeak word of this class was simply
a staccato sound expressing ONE clearly understood concept. It would have been
quite impossible to use the A vocabulary for literary purposes or for political
or philosophical discussion. It was intended only to express simple, purposive
thoughts, usually involving concrete objects or physical actions.
The grammar of Newspeak had
two outstanding peculiarities. The first of these was an almost complete
interchangeability between different parts of speech. Any word in the language
(in principle this applied even to very abstract words such as IF or WHEN)
could be used either as verb, noun, adjective, or adverb. Between the verb and
the noun form, when they were of the same root, there was never any variation,
this rule of itself involving the destruction of many archaic forms. The word
THOUGHT, for example, did not exist in Newspeak. Its place was taken by THINK,
which did duty for both noun and verb. No etymological principle was followed
here: in some cases it was the original noun that was chosen for retention, in
other cases the verb. Even where a noun and verb of kindred meaning were not
etymologically connected, one or other of them was frequently suppressed. There
was, for example, no such word as CUT, its meaning being sufficiently covered
by the noun-verb KNIFE. Adjectives were formed by adding the suffix — FUL to
the noun-verb, and adverbs by adding — WISE. Thus for example, SPEEDFUL meant
‘rapid’ and SPEEDWISE meant ‘quickly’. Certain of our present-day adjectives,
such as GOOD, STRONG, BIG, BLACK, SOFT, were retained, but their total number
was very small. There was little need for them, since almost any adjectival
meaning could be arrived at by adding — FUL to a noun-verb. None of the
now-existing adverbs was retained, except for a very few already ending in —
WISE: the — WISE termination was invariable. The word WELL, for example, was
replaced by GOODWISE.
In addition, any word — this
again applied in principle to every word in the language — could be negatived
by adding the affix UN-, or could be strengthened by the affix PLUS-, or, for
still greater emphasis, DOUBLEPLUS-. Thus, for example, UNCOLD meant ‘warm’,
while PLUSCOLD and DOUBLEPLUSCOLD meant, respectively, ‘very cold’ and
‘superlatively cold’. It was also possible, as in present-day English, to
modify the meaning of almost any word by prepositional affixes such as ANTE-,
POST-, UP-, DOWN-, etc. By such methods it was found possible to bring about an
enormous diminution of vocabulary. Given, for instance, the word GOOD, there
was no need for such a word as BAD, since the required meaning was equally well
— indeed, better — expressed by UNGOOD. All that was necessary, in any case
where two words formed a natural pair of opposites, was to decide which of them
to suppress. DARK, for example, could be replaced by UNLIGHT, or LIGHT by
UNDARK, according to preference.
The second distinguishing
mark of Newspeak grammar was its regularity. Subject to a few exceptions which
are mentioned below all inflexions followed the same rules. Thus, in all verbs
the preterite and the past participle were the same and ended in — ED. The
preterite of STEAL was STEALED, the preterite of THINK was THINKED, and so on
throughout the language, all such forms as SWAM, GAVE, BROUGHT, SPOKE, TAKEN,
etc., being abolished. All plurals were made by adding — S or — ES as the case
might be. The plurals OF MAN, OX, LIFE, were MANS, OXES, LIFES. Comparison of
adjectives was invariably made by adding — ER, — EST (GOOD, GOODER, GOODEST),
irregular forms and the MORE, MOST formation being suppressed.
The only classes of words
that were still allowed to inflect irregularly were the pronouns, the
relatives, the demonstrative adjectives, and the auxiliary verbs. All of these
followed their ancient usage, except that WHOM had been scrapped as
unnecessary, and the SHALL, SHOULD tenses had been dropped, all their uses
being covered by WILL and WOULD. There were also certain irregularities in
word-formation arising out of the need for rapid and easy speech. A word which
was difficult to utter, or was liable to be incorrectly heard, was held to be
ipso facto a bad word; occasionally therefore, for the sake of euphony, extra
letters were inserted into a word or an archaic formation was retained. But
this need made itself felt chiefly in connexion with the B vocabulary. WHY so
great an importance was attached to ease of pronunciation will be made clear later
in this essay.
THE B VOCABULARY. The B
vocabulary consisted of words which had been deliberately constructed for
political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a
political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude
upon the person using them. Without a full understanding of the principles of
Ingsoc it was difficult to use these words correctly. In some cases they could
be translated into Oldspeak, or even into words taken from the A vocabulary,
but this usually demanded a long paraphrase and always involved the loss of
certain overtones. The B words were a sort of verbal shorthand, often packing
whole ranges of ideas into a few syllables, and at the same time more accurate
and forcible than ordinary language.
The B words were in all cases
compound words. [Compound words such as SPEAKWRITE, were of course to be found
in the A vocabulary, but these were merely convenient abbreviations and had no
special ideological colour.] They consisted of two or more words, or portions
of words, welded together in an easily pronounceable form. The resulting
amalgam was always a noun-verb, and inflected according to the ordinary rules.
To take a single example: the word GOODTHINK, meaning, very roughly,
‘orthodoxy’, or, if one chose to regard it as a verb, ‘to think in an orthodox
manner’. This inflected as follows: noun-verb, GOODTHINK; past tense and past
participle, GOODTHINKED; present participle, GOOD-THINKING; adjective,
GOODTHINKFUL; adverb, GOODTHINKWISE; verbal noun, GOODTHINKER.
The B words were not
constructed on any etymological plan. The words of which they were made up
could be any parts of speech, and could be placed in any order and mutilated in
any way which made them easy to pronounce while indicating their derivation. In
the word CRIMETHINK (thoughtcrime), for instance, the THINK came second,
whereas in THINKPOL (Thought Police) it came first, and in the latter word
POLICE had lost its second syllable. Because of the great difficulty in
securing euphony, irregular formations were commoner in the B vocabulary than
in the A vocabulary. For example, the adjective forms of MINITRUE, MINIPAX, and
MINILUV were, respectively, MINITRUTHFUL, MINIPEACEFUL, and MINILOVELY, simply
because — TRUEFUL, -PAXFUL, and — LOVEFUL were slightly awkward to pronounce.
In principle, however, all B words could inflect, and all inflected in exactly
the same way.
Some of the B words had
highly subtilized meanings, barely intelligible to anyone who had not mastered
the language as a whole. Consider, for example, such a typical sentence from a
‘Times’ leading article as OLDTHINKERS UNBELLYFEEL INGSOC. The shortest
rendering that one could make of this in Oldspeak would be: ‘Those whose ideas
were formed before the Revolution cannot have a full emotional understanding of
the principles of English Socialism.’ But this is not an adequate translation.
To begin with, in order to grasp the full meaning of the Newspeak sentence
quoted above, one would have to have a clear idea of what is meant by INGSOC.
And in addition, only a person thoroughly grounded in Ingsoc could appreciate
the full force of the word BELLYFEEL, which implied a blind, enthusiastic
acceptance difficult to imagine today; or of the word OLDTHINK, which was
inextricably mixed up with the idea of wickedness and decadence. But the
special function of certain Newspeak words, of which OLDTHINK was one, was not
so much to express meanings as to destroy them. These words, necessarily few in
number, had had their meanings extended until they contained within themselves
whole batteries of words which, as they were sufficiently covered by a single
comprehensive term, could now be scrapped and forgotten. The greatest
difficulty facing the compilers of the Newspeak Dictionary was not to invent
new words, but, having invented them, to make sure what they meant: to make
sure, that is to say, what ranges of words they cancelled by their existence.
As we have already seen in
the case of the word FREE, words which had once borne a heretical meaning were
sometimes retained for the sake of convenience, but only with the undesirable
meanings purged out of them. Countless other words such as HONOUR, JUSTICE,
MORALITY, INTERNATIONALISM, DEMOCRACY, SCIENCE, and RELIGION had simply ceased
to exist. A few blanket words covered them, and, in covering them, abolished
them. All words grouping themselves round the concepts of liberty and equality,
for instance, were contained in the single word CRIMETHINK, while all words
grouping themselves round the concepts of objectivity and rationalism were
contained in the single word OLDTHINK. Greater precision would have been
dangerous. What was required in a Party member was an outlook similar to that
of the ancient Hebrew who knew, without knowing much else, that all nations
other than his own worshipped ‘false gods’. He did not need to know that these
gods were called Baal, Osiris, Moloch, Ashtaroth, and the like: probably the
less he knew about them the better for his orthodoxy. He knew Jehovah and the
commandments of Jehovah: he knew, therefore, that all gods with other names or
other attributes were false gods. In somewhat the same way, the party member
knew what constituted right conduct, and in exceedingly vague, generalized
terms he knew what kinds of departure from it were possible. His sexual life,
for example, was entirely regulated by the two Newspeak words SEXCRIME (sexual
immorality) and GOODSEX (chastity). SEXCRIME covered all sexual misdeeds
whatever. It covered fornication, adultery, homosexuality, and other
perversions, and, in addition, normal intercourse practised for its own sake.
There was no need to enumerate them separately, since they were all equally
culpable, and, in principle, all punishable by death. In the C vocabulary,
which consisted of scientific and technical words, it might be necessary to
give specialized names to certain sexual aberrations, but the ordinary citizen
had no need of them. He knew what was meant by GOODSEX— that is to say, normal
intercourse between man and wife, for the sole purpose of begetting children,
and without physical pleasure on the part of the woman: all else was SEXCRIME.
In Newspeak it was seldom possible to follow a heretical thought further than
the perception that it WAS heretical: beyond that point the necessary words
were nonexistent.
No word in the B vocabulary
was ideologically neutral. A great many were euphemisms. Such words, for
instance, as JOYCAMP (forced-labour camp) or MINIPAX (Ministry of Peace, i.e.
Ministry of War) meant almost the exact opposite of what they appeared to mean.
Some words, on the other hand, displayed a frank and contemptuous understanding
of the real nature of Oceanic society. An example was PROLEFEED, meaning the
rubbishy entertainment and spurious news which the Party handed out to the
masses. Other words, again, were ambivalent, having the connotation ‘good’ when
applied to the Party and ‘bad’ when applied to its enemies. But in addition
there were great numbers of words which at first sight appeared to be mere
abbreviations and which derived their ideological colour not from their
meaning, but from their structure.
So far as it could be
contrived, everything that had or might have political significance of any kind
was fitted into the B vocabulary. The name of every organization, or body of
people, or doctrine, or country, or institution, or public building, was
invariably cut down into the familiar shape; that is, a single easily
pronounced word with the smallest number of syllables that would preserve the
original derivation. In the Ministry of Truth, for example, the Records
Department, in which Winston Smith worked, was called RECDEP, the Fiction
Department was called FICDEP, the Teleprogrammes Department was called TELEDEP,
and so on. This was not done solely with the object of saving time. Even in the
early decades of the twentieth century, telescoped words and phrases had been
one of the characteristic features of political language; and it had been
noticed that the tendency to use abbreviations of this kind was most marked in
totalitarian countries and totalitarian organizations. Examples were such words
as NAZI, GESTAPO, COMINTERN, INPRECORR, AGITPROP. In the beginning the practice
had been adopted as it were instinctively, but in Newspeak it was used with a
conscious purpose. It was perceived that in thus abbreviating a name one
narrowed and subtly altered its meaning, by cutting out most of the
associations that would otherwise cling to it. The words COMMUNIST
INTERNATIONAL, for instance, call up a composite picture of universal human
brotherhood, red flags, barricades, Karl Marx, and the Paris Commune. The word
COMINTERN, on the other hand, suggests merely a tightly-knit organization and a
well-defined body of doctrine. It refers to something almost as easily
recognized, and as limited in purpose, as a chair or a table. COMINTERN is a
word that can be uttered almost without taking thought, whereas COMMUNIST
INTERNATIONAL is a phrase over which one is obliged to linger at least
momentarily. In the same way, the associations called up by a word like
MINITRUE are fewer and more controllable than those called up by MINISTRY OF
TRUTH. This accounted not only for the habit of abbreviating whenever possible,
but also for the almost exaggerated care that was taken to make every word
easily pronounceable.
In Newspeak, euphony
outweighed every consideration other than exactitude of meaning. Regularity of
grammar was always sacrificed to it when it seemed necessary. And rightly so,
since what was required, above all for political purposes, was short clipped
words of unmistakable meaning which could be uttered rapidly and which roused
the minimum of echoes in the speaker’s mind. The words of the B vocabulary even
gained in force from the fact that nearly all of them were very much alike.
Almost invariably these words — GOODTHINK, MINIPAX, PROLEFEED, SEXCRIME,
JOYCAMP, INGSOC, BELLYFEEL, THINKPOL, and countless others — were words of two
or three syllables, with the stress distributed equally between the first
syllable and the last. The use of them encouraged a gabbling style of speech,
at once staccato and monotonous. And this was exactly what was aimed at. The
intention was to make speech, and especially speech on any subject not
ideologically neutral, as nearly as possible independent of consciousness. For
the purposes of everyday life it was no doubt necessary, or sometimes
necessary, to reflect before speaking, but a Party member called upon to make a
political or ethical judgement should be able to spray forth the correct
opinions as automatically as a machine gun spraying forth bullets. His training
fitted him to do this, the language gave him an almost foolproof instrument,
and the texture of the words, with their harsh sound and a certain wilful
ugliness which was in accord with the spirit of Ingsoc, assisted the process
still further.
So did the fact of having
very few words to choose from. Relative to our own, the Newspeak vocabulary was
tiny, and new ways of reducing it were constantly being devised. Newspeak,
indeed, differed from most all other languages in that its vocabulary grew
smaller instead of larger every year. Each reduction was a gain, since the
smaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought.
Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without
involving the higher brain centres at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the
Newspeak word DUCKSPEAK, meaning ‘to quack like a duck’. Like various other
words in the B vocabulary, DUCKSPEAK was ambivalent in meaning. Provided that
the opinions which were quacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but
praise, and when ‘The Times’ referred to one of the orators of the Party as a
DOUBLEPLUSGOOD DUCKSPEAKER it was paying a warm and valued compliment.
THE C VOCABULARY. The C vocabulary
was supplementary to the others and consisted entirely of scientific and
technical terms. These resembled the scientific terms in use today, and were
constructed from the same roots, but the usual care was taken to define them
rigidly and strip them of undesirable meanings. They followed the same
grammatical rules as the words in the other two vocabularies. Very few of the C
words had any currency either in everyday speech or in political speech. Any
scientific worker or technician could find all the words he needed in the list
devoted to his own speciality, but he seldom had more than a smattering of the
words occurring in the other lists. Only a very few words were common to all
lists, and there was no vocabulary expressing the function of Science as a
habit of mind, or a method of thought, irrespective of its particular branches.
There was, indeed, no word for ‘Science’, any meaning that it could possibly
bear being already sufficiently covered by the word INGSOC.
From the foregoing account it
will be seen that in Newspeak the expression of unorthodox opinions, above a
very low level, was well-nigh impossible. It was of course possible to utter
heresies of a very crude kind, a species of blasphemy. It would have been
possible, for example, to say BIG BROTHER IS UNGOOD. But this statement, which
to an orthodox ear merely conveyed a self-evident absurdity, could not have
been sustained by reasoned argument, because the necessary words were not
available. Ideas inimical to Ingsoc could only be entertained in a vague
wordless form, and could only be named in very broad terms which lumped
together and condemned whole groups of heresies without defining them in doing
so. One could, in fact, only use Newspeak for unorthodox purposes by
illegitimately translating some of the words back into Oldspeak. For example,
ALL MANS ARE EQUAL was a possible Newspeak sentence, but only in the same sense
in which ALL MEN ARE REDHAIRED is a possible Oldspeak sentence. It did not
contain a grammatical error, but it expressed a palpable untruth — i.e. that
all men are of equal size, weight, or strength. The concept of political
equality no longer existed, and this secondary meaning had accordingly been
purged out of the word EQUAL. In 1984, when Oldspeak was still the normal means
of communication, the danger theoretically existed that in using Newspeak words
one might remember their original meanings. In practice it was not difficult
for any person well grounded in DOUBLETHINK to avoid doing this, but within a
couple of generations even the possibility of such a lapse would have vanished.
A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language would no more know that
EQUAL had once had the secondary meaning of ‘politically equal’, or that FREE
had once meant ‘intellectually free’, than for instance, a person who had never
heard of chess would be aware of the secondary meanings attaching to QUEEN and
ROOK. There would be many crimes and errors which it would be beyond his power
to commit, simply because they were nameless and therefore unimaginable. And it
was to be foreseen that with the passage of time the distinguishing
characteristics of Newspeak would become more and more pronounced — its words
growing fewer and fewer, their meanings more and more rigid, and the chance of putting
them to improper uses always diminishing.
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.
A good deal of the literature
of the past was, indeed, already being transformed in this way. Considerations
of prestige made it desirable to preserve the memory of certain historical
figures, while at the same time bringing their achievements into line with the
philosophy of Ingsoc. Various writers, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Swift,
Byron, Dickens, and some others were therefore in process of translation: when
the task had been completed, their original writings, with all else that
survived of the literature of the past, would be destroyed. These translations
were a slow and difficult business, and it was not expected that they would be
finished before the first or second decade of the twenty-first century. There
were also large quantities of merely utilitarian literature — indispensable
technical manuals, and the like — that had to be treated in the same way. It
was chiefly in order to allow time for the preliminary work of translation that
the final adoption of Newspeak had been fixed for so late a date as 2050.
