Quantum wrote on Jan 9
th, 2015 at 1:30pm:
As always the Orwellian mind of these leaders comes out.
The only person making it political is Cameron. Farage is pointing out an issue that needs to be dealt with. If he said cameron is responsible so vote for me then he would be making it political. But as it is we see Cameron as the one using false outrage to throw dirt at Farage thereby bringing politics into it. Same routine all the time against anyone not agreeing with the script.
Lessons in NewSpeak
RIGHT-WING: Baddie. Vladimir Putin, a lifelong KGB man who regrets the break-up of the USSR, is invading neighboring countries. This is a bad thing, so he must be “right-wing.” The mullahs in Iran abolished the monarchy, nationalized industry, and drove most of the middle classes into exile. But they’re also nasty, so they, too, must be “right-wing.” A crazed gunman goes into a school and . . . oh, you get the picture.
DIVERSITY: People who look different but think the same way. Diversity applies to race, sex, disability, and sexual orientation. It emphatically does not apply to opinion. Indeed, when it comes to political views, it has taken on more or less the opposite of its Oldspeak meaning.
DISCRIMINATION: Being unpleasant to women or black people. Literally, of course, discrimination simply means discernment. It is something we practice every time we decide between alternatives. But its political undertones have spilled over into every usage of the word, so that discrimination, in any context, becomes discreditable. A firm that discriminates in favor of properly qualified applicants, or a university that insists on good exam results, cannot wholly escape the sense that it is doing something shameful.
XENOPHOBIA: Opposition to the European Union. By a curious inversion, you demonstrate your broadmindedness by continuing to support the Brussels racket, however illiberal or undemocratic it becomes, but condemn yourself as a bigot if you value the independence of other countries. Xenophobia (or “Europhobia”) has nothing to do with whether you feel comfortable with other cultures. Neil Kinnock, a former European Commissioner, has helpfully explained that skeptics don’t stop being xenophobes “just because they happen to speak fluent Catalan or whatever.” The only way to escape the charge is to proclaim your support for the Brussels institutions.
PREJUDICE: Hating other people. In its literal sense, prejudice simply means pre-judging a new situation on the basis of past experience. If you see an expensively dressed man, your prejudice tells you that he is likely to be well off. If a politician rings your doorbell, your prejudice tells you that he is probably after your vote. As Edmund Burke argued in his Reflections, life would become intolerable if we had to think everything through from first principles. But the anathematization of the word also touches its original meaning. If your common sense tells you that longer sentences would cut crime, or that there is a limit to how much immigration a country can absorb, it’s because you are prejudiced.
FREE SPEECH: Support for racists. We have been told so often that “free speech can never be used as an excuse for racism” that the two things have become conflated in our minds. Arguing for the first automatically opens you to the accusation of supporting the second. If you think that I exaggerate, cast your mind back to the case of the pensioner in Liverpool who was charged with “racially aggravated criminal damage” after scrawling “Free speech for England” on a condemned wall.
CONSERVATIVE: Neanderthal. Like “right-wing” (q.v.), but with the added bonus that it can be applied to both sides in the same conflict. Islamist “conservatives” want to impose headscarves while Western “conservatives” want to ban them. Hardline Israeli settlers and hardline Hamas terrorists are both “conservatives.” And so on.
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/A-lesson-in-Newspeak-8050
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UKIP's Nigel Farage telling it like it is ... (Read 351 times)
