Letters to the Editor
-
Re: I just don't care "who is and who is not a libertarian."
To bend a coined phrase: You just don't "know the situation" or "understand what is going on".
You care about personal and individual liberties. You care about limited, non-intrusive government. Then these are matters that are of concern to you. It is no different from the debate over who is or isn't an American, or anti-American. Who is a conservative, or liberal, and what do those words mean? Words mean something or they don't, thereby being rendered useless, and language, or the manipulation of symbols, is the WMD of political warfare. The object here is to control the language. Control of the language means dominance on the political battlefield. As Nixon observed, "Losers don't legislate." You should take the high ground whenever you can, whatever the sign or symbol may be, as long as it isn't a term, sign, label or symbol you do not want them to appropriate. Don't cede it to the opposition unless it is a word that describes them better than yourself. Leave them labels like fascist, authoritarian, totalitarian, weak, etc., because that is precisely what they are attempting to do to you.
"If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say this or that even, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death."
"And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'"
"Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary."
"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."
Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?
Semiotics, anyone?
http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/semiotic.html