In order to promote the success of its August security crackdown in the Iraqi capital, the US military reported a dramatic drop in the number of murders around Baghdad last month, in fact a 52 percent drop.
But then somebody noticed that the official records at Baghdad morgues suggested that in fact the death toll had not diminished at all, in fact, it had increased.
As it turns out the US command decided to only count individual murders, in other words, people who were individually targeted for execution by name as opposed to mass murders. So when the White House boasted about its growing success in reducing the threat of civil war and the bloody body count, it chose to "overlook" Iraqi civilians who died as a result of bombs, mortars, rockets or other mass attacks--including suicide bombings.
I was raised to understand that this kind of "overlooking" was called lying but in Bush America the truth has taken on a whole new meaning. And "overlooking" has replaced baseball as the hot new American pastime.
Once again, I'll be spending the rest of the afternoon banging my head against a brick wall.
This stuff is real, folks and a large number of Americans are totallly buying into it.
George Orwell has left us an invaluable legacy in 1984. More than ever it should be required reading for all students. It was about 3 months into the Bush reign that I first noticed the similarities between his administration's use of language and Orwell's principle of Doublethink.
"His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully-constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be conradictory and believing in both of them; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the art of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved using doublethink."
I now believe that the use of Doublethink is a carefully studied and consciously deliberate action of the New Republican Party and of this administration and its far-right-wing religious associates. They use words while fully realizing that the reality is exactly the opposite. "Operation Enduring Freedom", "Pro-Life", "Ex-Gay", "Clean Forests Initiative" are only a few items in a list that could be published in volumes without even beginning to examine whole sentences.
I would love to see you or anyone write an essay or column about "The Right Wing and Doublethink". And I strongly encourage anyone who sees this comment to read or re-read 1984. You will be astounded!
Posted by: Al Urik | Tuesday, 12 September 2006 at 02:18 PM
Sorry, I think I should have said "Healthy Forests Initiative"; I confused it with "Clean Air Initiative". Come to think of it, that confusion is an example of what I was talking about.
Posted by: Al Urik | Tuesday, 12 September 2006 at 02:26 PM
Fucking Bush we can’t believe him neither can the rest of the world. If he says it, you can be pretty much assured it’s a lie. BUT it doesn’t seem to be a BIG deal with AMERICANS. As long as you can gas your cars, who cares how many people a day gets killed in Iraq. OR how many future terrorists our country makes by blowing up some kids house and family to nothing. These people live by and eye for an eye and in another 20 years they are going to start trying to collect.
DonPato
San Jose
Posted by: DonPato | Tuesday, 12 September 2006 at 04:23 PM