Control of the language by which people communicate is critical to totalitarian control. Joseph Stalin famously said: “Let me control the dictionaries, and I will control the world.”
The term “Newspeak” originated in George Orwell’s seminal novel 1984, published in Britain in 1949. “Newspeak” is a controlled language of simplified grammar and small vocabulary, designed to limit critical thinking. It proscribes the individual’s ability to articulate and communicate abstract concepts, which are deemed “thoughtcrimes”. To quote Orwell: “Freedom is the freedom to say two plus two is four. If that is granted, all else follows.” But, in this Brave New World, to borrow the title of Aldous Huxley’s famous book, we’re told that “two plus two really equals five.”
In Orwell’s dystopia,
“the Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture, and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy; they are deliberate exercises in doublethink. For it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely.”
In today’s Department of Defense,
“Diversity management calls for creating a culture of inclusion in which the diversity…shapes how the work is done….Although good diversity management rests on a foundation of fair treatment, it is not about treating everyone the same. This can be a difficult concept to grasp, especially for leaders who grew up with the EO-inspired mandate to be both color and gender blind. Blindness to difference, however, can lead to a culture of assimilation in which differences are suppressed rather than leveraged.Cultural assimilation, a key to military effectiveness in the past, will be challenged as inclusion becomes, and needs to become, the norm.”
“Traditional basic training, for example, is focused on assimilating individuals into a fighting force tied together by the adoption of similar terminology, customs, and attitudes. However, current military operations are executed within more-complex, uncertain, and rapidly changing operationalenvironments that defy the war-fighting standards of the past and that need to be met with an adaptive and agile leadership that is ready to respond more flexibly… The need to leverage diversity while maintaining unit cohesion will require implementing new training and procedures and addressing new tensions—important elements of diversity management”.
The above quote is from the final report of a Congressionally-mandated Commission on “Military Leadership Diversity”, published in 2011. Orwell would have been proud.
The vocabulary of “Newspeak” contains no words to articulate complex ideas. There is no “honor,” “courage,” “shame,” “dignity,” “unity”, “freedom.” Without those words, people literally can’t communicate any abstract concepts. Ideas are reduced to cliches. By limiting language, “Newspeak” limits thought. This is clearly reflected in the tortured “doublespeak” and logical contradictions of the MLDC Final Report.
Few are familiar with the MLDC, its origins and its sweeping recommendations. Yet Diversity.defense.gov has a revealing 3-pager titled “How Did the Military Leadership Diversity Commission Come About”. It states that “there is sparse documentation available” and the “origins are in the thinking of 4 members of the House of Representatives”: Elijah Cummings, (D-MD), Hank Johnson, (D-GA), Kendrick Meek, (D-FL), and Kathy Castor, (D-FL). It became law in September 2008 and was further expanded to include the National Guard and the Reserve in the 2010 Defense Authorization Act.
It is baffling that nobody in Congress paid attention to what they were legislating. There is no evidence of any debate on the matter. Yet the report—and the implementing law—are breathtaking in both scope and implications. MLDC calls for a fundamental “transformation” of our military—making racial and gender representation the “top defense priority” and placing the POTUS and SECDEF as the chief executives accountable for implementing it.
MLDC itself compared this “transformation” to the Goldwater-Nichols Act of Oct 1986 “which imposed joint operations on an unwilling military”. Ask about Joint Operations, and everyone in the military and DOD knows precisely what it is: jointness is how we fight. Ask about MLDC and you’ll get blank stares. How is this possible? Simple: “if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes truth.” (Joseph Goebbles, Reich Minister of Propaganda, 1933-1945).
MLDC spawned a huge, self-perpetuating bureaucracy to implement its sweeping recommendations across the “defense enterprise”. But, apparently, that wasn’t enough. And so, on September 23, 2022, Secretary Lloyd Austin stood up a new Advisory Committee on Diversity and Inclusion (DACODAI), appointing General Lester Lyles, USAF (ret) as its chair. Coincidentally, General Lyles also chaired the MLDC.
In accepting the appointment, General Lyles stated:
“This year marks a historic event as the first committee to provide the Secretary of Defense with advice and recommendations to improve racial/ethnic diversity, inclusion, and equal opportunity as a force multiplier in the military. I look forward to working with my fellow committee members to help the Defense Department so that our national security is strengthened by the full participation of a diverse and inclusive environment [sic] with service members of every background.”
This “doublespeak” would make Orwell proud. So would the many new contractions, abbreviations, and acronyms—all typical of “Newspeak” and all designed to obfuscate meaning and limit thinking—that have entered our everyday lexicon: BTW, IMHO, IRL, LOL, YOLO, IDK, FOMO, SMH. Take a look at your kids’ and grandkids‘ text messages. It’s all “Newspeak”. So are CRT, WEF, BLM, ANTIFA, DEI, MRFF, LGBTQIA2S+ . Emojis replace words.✊🏿 😂🤦♀️🤷🏾♂️👨👨👧👧 We reduce our ideas to “sound bites”, to fit the permissible 140-280 characters of a Tweet or text message. Even Orwell couldn’t have foreseen such intellectual impoverishment, wedded to a technology that gives the most far fetched, inane of ideas instant, “viral” loft.
And thus, a new Utopia is fast-emerging, wherein men can give birth—heck, there’s even an emoji for that. 🫃There are tampons in the boys bathroom, but boys can use the girls’ bathroom if they feel like it. There are 57+ genders, which are different from the “sex assigned at birth”—you know, when the doctor turned the newborn upside down and told the elated parents: “it’s a boy, or “it’s a girl”.
We are incredulous, knowing deep down that “two and two still equals four”, but the new language and the “reality” it spawns are overwhelming in their societal impact and smothering common sense—which suddenly becomes rather rare.
tomorrow, Part 4: Conclusion.
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