From Live Not By Lies:

It is difficult for people raised in the free world to grasp the breadth and the depth of lying required simply to exist under communism. All the lies, and lies about lies, that formed the communist order were built on the basis of this foundational lie: the communist state is the sole source of truth. Orwell expressed this truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Under the dictatorship of Big Brother, the Party understa

nds that by changing language—Newspeak is the Party’s word for the jargon it imposes on society—it controls the categories in which people think. “Freedom” is slavery, “truth” is falsehood, and so forth. Doublethink—“holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them”—is how people learn to submit their minds to the Party’s ideology. If the Party says 2 + 2 = 5, then 2 + 2 = 5. The goal is to convince the person that all truth exists within the mind, and the rightly ordered mind believes whatever the Party says is true.

Orwell writes:

It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you—something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.

In our time, we do not have an all-powerful state forcing this on us. Under soft totalitarianism, the media, academia, corporate America, and other institutions are practicing Newspeak and compelling the rest of us to engage in doublethink every day. Men have periods. The woman standing in front of you is to be called “he.” Diversity and inclusion means excluding those who object to ideological uniformity. Equity means treating persons unequally, regardless of their skills and achievements, to achieve an ideologically correct result.

To update an Orwell line to our own situation: “The Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

To update an Orwell line to today’s news, “The European Commission tells you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It is their final, most essential command.” What am I talking about? A source at the EC sent to me a PDF of a new set of “inclusive communication” guidelines for employees of the baizuocracy (“baizuo” is the Chinese term of contempt for white leftists). It’s like a woke computer came up with it to replace how actual human beings speak. Here are some excerpts:

Here’s how one is to speak about racial minorities. Notice the first example, how one is never, ever, ever to suggest that minorities might bear responsibility for their situation. Maybe the African migrant has no language skills or other things  required for skilled labor in Europe. Well, it’s society’s fault! And notice the last one: you can’t talk about people as desperate, but you have to treat them as in need of special coddling:

Writing about the Alphabet People? Well, here’s how you gotta talk:

Oh, and even vexillologists have to be woke in the EC:

Oh, and DON’T SAY ‘CHRISTMAS’ and DON’T SAY ‘MARIA,’ or you might not be inclusive!

The pod people who come up with this garbage must be repudiated at every opportunity. They are trying to change the meaning of … well, of reality, by the use of language. The thing is, they really can do a hell of a lot of damage by requiring people to do this, and making mastering the jargon the sine qua non of working for the EU bureaucracy (and eventually for woke capitalist entities). If I were European, I would vote populist, simply to vote for common sense and basic reality. If I had to work for the EC, I would have to keep my code-switching skills up so that I didn’t lose touch with humanity.

Alarmingly, this might be impossible for younger Europeans. Again, from Live Not By Lies:

In Poland, Skibiński explains, the only long-lasting social institutions that existed were the church and the
family. In the twentieth century, the twin totalitarianisms tried to capture and destroy the Polish Catholic Church.

Communism attempted to break apart the family by maintaining a monopoly on education and teaching young
people to be dependent on the state. It also sought to lure the young away from the church by convincing them
that the state would be the guarantors of their sexual freedom.

“The thing is, now such tendencies come from the West, which we have always looked up to, and regarded
as a safe place,” he says. “But now many Poles start to develop the awareness that the West is no longer safe for
us.

“What we see now is an attempt to destroy the last surviving communities: the family, the church, and the nation. This is one connection between liberalism and communist theory.”

Skibiński focuses on language as a preserver of cultural memory. We know that communists forbade people
to talk about history in unapproved ways. This is a tactic today’s progressives use as well, especially within
universities.

What is harder for contemporary people to appreciate is how we are repeating the Marxist habit of falsifying
language, hollowing out familiar words and replacing them with a new, highly ideological meaning. Propaganda
not only changes the way we think about politics and contemporary life but it also conditions what a culture judges worth remembering.

I mention the way liberals today deploy neutral-sounding, or even positive, words like dialogue and tolerance to disarm and ultimately defeat unaware conservatives. And they imbue other words and phrases—hierarchy, for example, or traditional family—with negative connotations.

Recalling life under communism, the professor continues, “The people who lived only within such a linguistic
sphere, who didn’t know any other way to speak, they could really start believing in this way of using of words.
If a word carries with it negative baggage, it becomes impossible to have a discussion about the phenomenon.”

Teaching current generations of college students who grew up in the postcommunist era is challenging because they do not have a natural immunity to the ideological abuse of language. “For me, it’s obvious. I remember this false use of language. But for our students, it’s impossible to understand.”

Soon enough, there won’t be any Europeans left who remember the old way of speaking and writing, only the falsified one that destroys the concepts of family, church, and nation.

UPDATE: A reader who asks not to be quoted directly writes to say that both this story and the previous one about the hiney-lickers of Princeton show how far the ruling class and its institutions are from the rest of us in terms of values. It’s not that these people exist, he says, but that they exist in such exalted and powerful positions, and use their privilege to dominate all culture and society. Make fun of the EU Newspeak all you want, says this reader, but if you don’t obey it, you will have a hell of a challenge staying employed in the middle-class to upper-class professional world.

Why is it, he asks, that the Left has built a powerful machine to make sure nobody can fire their favored constituents without taking massive hits on all kinds of channels, but the Right rarely stands up for its own? Why is it that Kyle Rittenhouse will never be employable in any middle or upper profession, but almost nobody who did anything violent or destructive in the 2020 BLM riots will ever have to worry? Considering the factors that make this true, and you will understand something about power in the United States. While we on the Right sat around making fun of all these grievance studies majors for not being able to make it in the real world, the Left went about creating employment guarantees for them, turning them all into commissars.

The reader says that the baizuocracy sees right-wingers like us as crazy and probably dangerous — but still “safe,” because we still operate within the rules that the Left controls.

My question: how can we begin to dismantle all this baizuo privilege? If the GOP ever gets unified control of Congress and the White House, what should they do?

UPDATE: Well, well, well, the Woke finally lost, for once! This just out:

Concern was raised with regards to some examples provided in the Guidelines on Inclusive Communication, which as is customary with such guidelines, is work in progress. We are looking into these concerns with the view of addressing them in an updated version of the guidelines. pic.twitter.com/90ZK8rpPb2

— Helena Dalli (@helenadalli) November 30, 2021