War on Words

Dictators want to control not only what people do but also what they think. The first step towards that mind control is to strictly manage the ideas that are available. That is most directly dealt with by forbidding certain books, notably by making displays of burning those that were seen as a threat.

In the presciently futuristic 1953 Ray Bradbury book, and subsequent 1966 movie, directed by François Truffaut, Fahrenheit 451, the theme is that all books are banned and have to be burned. 451 degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature needed to burn them. This is in order to control the citizenry and ensure they only have access to ideas, narrative and concepts that support the state’s objectives.

Such attempts at mind control by rigid regimes have a long history. The Vatican established its ‘Index’ of Forbidden books in 1559, not very long after mass production of books from printing presses became widely available. These books were forbidden to protect Catholics from moral dangers. They included works by Galileo, Descartes, and Voltaire. Although that Index was officially abolished in 1966, other regimes have notoriously taken a leaf out of that book (so to speak).

The first step in shaping ideas, even before they become narratives, or end up in books, is the control how words are used. A glaring example in the daily news are spokespeople for the current Israeli government’s reference to the West Bank as Judea and Samaria. These are the biblical labels for those places. That naming therefore carries assumptions and beliefs about the historical rights of Israeli Jews to own that land. Donald Trump’s executive order to rename The Gulf of Mexico as The Gulf of America may not have quite the significance of Judea and Samaria, but it is a step in the direction of declaring further the significance and power of the USA.

Beyond the labelling of places and banning books, the creeping manipulation of vocabulary in daily use is a recognizable step towards attempts at mind control. The witty BBC Radio 4 program Strong Message Here, hosted by the iconoclast Armando Iannucci and Helen Lewis, delves into politicians’ use of language.  Although it is very funny, the underlying message draws on Orwell’s idea of doublespeak in his book 1984. The process of making words mean their opposites in order to change what and how people think. The most obvious example is the term ‘fake news,’ implying that what passes for factual information cannot be trusted.

Examples of current attempts at controlling language has recently been revealed by The New York Times. They have has done a remarkable job of identifying nearly 200 words that are being banned by the current US administration across the many departments of state. Given Trump’s a views on human biology, it is perhaps to be expected that those words that deal with the richness of sexual identities, such as non-binary, transgender, or even the clinical term transexual are banned, even the term gender itself. (Transvestite seems to have survived?) Beyond those words, related concepts including diversity and even pronouns and equality are brushed under the carpet.

However, the aspirations of the Trump administration to change how the world is understood goes far beyond their Victorian notion of gender. Many banned technical and scientific terms have been identified by The New York Times. These include confirmation bias. A process identified by Daniel Kahneman that was part of the reason he got the Nobel prize for economics. Other terms with clear legal or scientific meaning are not to be mentioned, disparity, injustice, prejudice, status, trauma, victim.

Making America great, again, goes far beyond tariffs and attempts to bring chronic wars to an end. It is about changing how and what people can think. I wonder if anyone has the courage to mention to the president that in vernacular English, especially among children in the UK, trump has been used for centuries to mean flatulence?