By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, April 07, 2016
Last week, French president Francois Hollande met
President Obama in Washington to discuss joint strategies for stopping the sort
of radical Islamic terrorists who have killed dozens of innocents in Brussels,
Paris, and San Bernardino in recent months. Hollande at one point explicitly
referred to the violence as “Islamist terrorism.”
The White House initially deleted that phrase from the
audio translation of the official video of the Hollande-Obama meeting, only to
restore it when questioned. Did the Obama administration assume that if the
public could not hear the translation of the French president saying “Islamist
terrorism,” then perhaps Hollande did not really say it — and therefore perhaps
Islamist terrorism does not really exist?
The Obama administration must be aware that in the 1930s,
the Soviet Union wiped clean all photos, recordings, and films of Leon Trotsky
on orders from Josef Stalin. Trotsky was deemed politically incorrect, and
therefore his thoughts and photos simply vanished.
The Library of Congress, under pressure from Dartmouth
College students, recently banned not just the term “illegal alien” in subject
headings for literature about immigration, but “alien” as well. Will changing
the vocabulary mean that from now on, foreign nationals who choose to enter and
reside in the United States without being naturalized will not be in violation
of the law and will no longer be considered citizens of their homeland?
Did the Library of
Congress ever read the work of the Greek historian Thucydides, who warned some
2,500 years ago that in times of social upheaval, partisans would make words
“change their ordinary meaning and . . . take that which was now given them.”
These latest linguistic contortions to advance
ideological agendas follow an established pattern of the Obama administration
and the departments beneath it.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper described
Egypt’s radical Muslim Brotherhood as “largely secular.” CIA Director John
Brennan has called jihad “a legitimate tenet of Islam,” a mere effort “to
purify oneself.”
Other administration heads have airbrushed out Islamic
terrorism by referring to it with phrases such as “man-caused disaster.” The
effort to combat terrorism was called an “overseas contingency operation,”
perhaps like Haitian earthquake relief.
The White House wordsmiths should reread George Orwell’s
1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” which warned that “political
writing is bad writing” and “has to consist largely of euphemism.”
Obama has said the greatest threat to future generations
is “climate change,” a term that metamorphosed from “global warming.” The now
anachronistic term “global warming” used to describe a planet that was
supposedly heating up rather quickly. But it did not account for the unpleasant
fact that there has been negligible global-temperature change since 1998.
Rather than modifying the phrase to “suspected global
warming” or “episodic global warming,” the new term “climate change” was
invented to replace it. That way, new realities could emerge. Changes of all
sorts — historic snows, record cold, California drought, El Nino storms — could
all be lumped together, supposedly caused by man-made carbon emissions.
Volatile weather such as tornadoes, tsunamis, and
hurricanes was sometimes rebranded as “climate chaos” — as if Western industry
and consumer lifestyles were responsible for what used to be seen as fairly
normal occurrences.
The term “sanctuary cities” describes municipalities that
in neo-Confederate fashion deny the primacy of federal immigration law and
refuse to enforce it.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch used the term
“justice-involved youth” to describe young criminals arrested and charged with
crimes. From such terminology, one might think the offenders’ “involvement”
meant that they were parole officers or young lawyers.
So what is the point of trying to change reality by
making up new names and phrases?
It’s mostly politics. If Hollande had used the label
“skinheads” to describe European right-wing movements, the White House might
not have altered the video. If a half-million right-wing Cubans were pouring
illegally into Florida each year, or if 100,000 Serbs were crossing the border
from Canada, the Library of Congress might not object to calling them “illegal
aliens.” Clapper and Brennan are unlikely to claim that the Crusades were
largely secular or an exercise in self-purification.
The Obama administration probably would not describe
rogue police officers charged with crimes as “justice-involved police.” If
cities with conservative mayors declined to enforce the Endangered Species Act
or federal firearms statutes, they probably would not be known as “sanctuary
cities,” but rather as “nullification cities.”
Orwell also wrote about a futuristic dystopia ruled by a
Big Brother government that created politicized euphemisms to reinvent reality.
He placed his novel in the year 1984, warning Westerners about what was in
their future.
We are now 32 years beyond 1984, but we are at last
living Orwell’s nightmare.
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