"He who controls the language controls the masses" - (((Saul Alinsky))). What we are witnessing in Washington and across the nation and world, as in Oceania, is the manipulation of language in the service of a broader socio-political agenda that is dependent on socio-psychological engineering. And the movement’s cheerleaders aren’t shy about saying so. “Words matter,” Liz Watson, a senior adviser at the National Women’s Law Center, said of Washington State’s code revisions (Reuters, Apr. 22). “This is an important step in changing hearts and minds.” In other words, the goal wasn’t so much to change the language to reflect contemporary customs, but to customize the language to effect social change, by redirecting the affections (heart) and thoughts (minds) of the masses.
Ms. Watson eerily echoes O’Brien, a party apparatchik from Orwell’s novel, who explains the objective of Oceania’s linguistic program: “We convert the [resister], we capture his inner mind, we reshape him…. We bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul…. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret or powerless it may be. “