Comment by flukus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by flukus | Hacker News Reader

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> Interestingly, one of the main themes that hasn't been the focus for any past generation, is how controlling language can control thought, but maybe that is something still to come.

To pick an obvious example, the Department of War was renamed to the Department of Defense just 2 years after this book. I better the current funding would look very different had the change not been made.

Language is controlled via wrongthink, aka political correctness in the initial "adherence to soviet policy" definition, this affected a generation of communists and socialist including Orwell himself. There are also modern version of wrongthink, opinions you can't share publicly for fear of reprisal for better or worse.

Control of language seems to be intertwined with controlling history too, being openly racist is now wrongthink, so history gets rewritten into things like "the civil war was about states rights".

Like the other aspects, it's there just not as draconian as Orwell predicted.

You can't disconnect that bit of Newspeak from what really happened, a hostile takeover of the Navy Department by the Army and Air Force that previously comprised the War Department (all this a couple of year before publication). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolt_of_the_Admirals for just one bit of fallout from this.

That isn't an issue of language but social pressure and ideas of acceptability and normalization. There will always be ideas which fall into Wrongthink even if what is acceptable varies drastically. Language is the carrier but not the end idea in itself.

So yes you might get different approval ratings depending on how you say it but ideas are a limitation as well.

It isn't like people are appalled by saying "we should kill the Jews" because they said "Jews" instead of "Jewish people" or because they said "kill" instead of "liquidate" or "euthanize". The whole idea is an abhorrent attempt to repeat dark history which gets people to stop while they are a head in the same way a president trying to make an appearance in an open topped vehicle would be vetoed by the Secret Service.

As any Yankee would tell you the fact it was once a slur of their foes doesn't matter.

The problem of rebranding that distorts perceptions of you nature in your initial favor is that unless you change to match the new name, you fail at your new mission/brand.

Having been renamed from the Department of War to the Department of Defense, many years later after the failure to "defend" America well on 9/11 (due to incompetence? or the nature of the Posse Comiatatus Act? or military industrial complex momentum?), the department decided to support creating a new department of defense, Department of Homeland Security, lest anyone get confused about the DoD's true mission and modus operandi (which is more along the lines of "the best defense is a good offense").

That was apparently preferrable to tackling the full mission of "Defense".

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