{"id":3662,"date":"2017-02-01T15:21:35","date_gmt":"2017-02-01T20:21:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/?p=3662"},"modified":"2017-02-01T15:21:35","modified_gmt":"2017-02-01T20:21:35","slug":"war-is-peace-freedom-is-slavery-ignorance-is-strength","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/2017\/02\/01\/war-is-peace-freedom-is-slavery-ignorance-is-strength\/","title":{"rendered":"WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH."},"content":{"rendered":"

If you have\u00a0read George Orwell\u2019s classic novel,1984, then you remember the preceding absurd statements published by the Ministry of Truth<\/em>. CliffNotes.com explains:<\/p>\n

\n

Crucial to manipulating the language and the information individuals receive are doublethink and Newspeak. Doublethink is the act of holding, simultaneously, two opposite, individually exclusive ideas or opinions and believing in both simultaneously and absolutely. \u00a0Moustaki, Nikki, and Gilbert Borman.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

When I first read the book, the year 1984 was yet twenty years into my future. It never occurred to me that fifty years later, I would be witnessing such blatant examples of\u00a0Doublethink<\/em> and Newspeak.<\/em><\/p>\n

Kellyanne Conway\u2019s assertion that Trump spokesman Sean Spicer was using “alternative facts<\/a>” was more than shocking \u2013 it was classic Doublethink .<\/p>\n

During the campaign I caught an afternoon interview with MSNBC\u2019s Craig Melvin and the Republican Party\u2019s Sean Spicer. On loan to the Trump campaign,\u00a0Spicer was attempting damage-control following the obviously plagiarized Melania Trump speech,\u00a0<\/p>\n

The doublethink<\/em> was on full display in the July 19, 2016 interview. \u00a0Spicer insisted that the similarities in the speeches of Melania Trump and Michelle Obama were completely coincidental, that no fair-minded person should conclude that Ms. Obama\u2019s speech was used in Ms. Trump\u2019s speech.<\/p>\n

Only by doublethinking<\/em> could I accept that an obvious example of plagiarism was really an unfortunate collection of oft-used quotations.<\/p>\n

Spicer even brought a list of similar expressions from various sources, including children\u2019s animated series unicorn Twilight Sparkle<\/em>, to prove that anyone could write\u00a0anything, without plagiarizing.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cTwilight Sparkle from My Little Pony said \u2018This is your dream, anything you can do in your dreams you can do now.\u2019 I mean, if we want to take a bunch of phrases and run \u2019em through Google and say, hey, who else has said them, I could come up with a list in five minutes. And that\u2019s what this is.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Craig Melvin correctly countered that the issue\u00a0was not the similarity of any one word or expression, but the matching\u00a0sequence<\/em> of expressions. Melvin stated further that a plagiarism website had just determined \u201cthat there was less than a one in a trillion chance that the similarities would be so striking.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sean Spicer shopped his doublethink<\/em> to multiple media outlets, insisting that somehow the similar expressions just fell into place in exactly the same way as in the Michelle Obama speech eight years prior.<\/p>\n

Apparently no one was buying. The next day the conservative blog RedState<\/em> announced:<\/p>\n

\n

The hapless Sean Spicer was later sent out to beclown himself with his My Little Pony defense. Now, barely 24 hours later, the campaign has admitted what was known yesterday morning: passages of Melania Trump\u2019s speech were lifted from a 2008 speech by Michelle Obama.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Orwellian concept is that truth is not really determined by facts, but by\u00a0the official standing given to a statement, regardless of veracity. Newspeak (think New Speak) is a reduction of vocabulary and is designed to control thought. \u00a0<\/p>\n

In other words when plagiarism becomes an acceptable coincidence in which entire passages merely appear\u00a0 to have been lifted from the work of another,<\/em>\u00a0plagiarism<\/em>\u00a0as both word and concept conveniently disappears.<\/p>\n

From 2011 until September 2016, Donald Trump was the country\u2019s chief birther, repeatedly claiming that Obama was not born in the United States. Then suddenly he claimed to be nobly ending the discussion by announcing that \u201cPresident Barack Obama was born in the United States, period.\u201d<\/p>\n

The take-away from this is that something is only true if Donald Trump says so. Whatever is patently false is really true as long as\u00a0Donald Trump claims it to be true. And if he<\/em> is challenged, reality<\/em> is false — fake news.\u00a0 The true news is whatever Donald says \u2013 and that<\/em> my friend is Doublethink<\/em>\u00a0articulated via\u00a0Newspeak<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is a reason the novel is popular after 68 years. \u00a0George Orwell’s study of the art of lying for political profit\u00a0<\/em> is finding modern-day relevance.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four<\/i> has once again become a best-seller, with additional printings ordered.<\/p>\n

George Orwell invented words such as Doublethink<\/i> and Newspeak<\/i>. Like Winston Smith (the propagandist working for The Ministry of Truth), spokesman Sean Spicer has specialized in turning falsehoods into truth.<\/p>\n

Larry recalls an interview between MSNBC Craig Melvin and Sean Spicer in 2016.<\/p>\n Continue reading →<\/span><\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3681,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-frontpage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3662"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3662\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}