Orwellian nightmare

I watched George Bush's convention speech in New Yrok yesterday, and what came to mind for me was that this was a masterpiece of Orwellian double speak. War is peace. No evidence, is evidence. Weak is strong. Saddam, not an international terrorist, is an international terrorist. They don't have the facts and the truth on their side, so if they lie and manipulate language often enough and persistently enough, maybe those lies will become the truth, and the American people believe them. I have since learned that this has reflected the tone of the whole Republican convention. Here is a piece from the Guardian on this, and a couple of key excerpts.

"In a truly revealing turn of events, after years in which rightwing America has endlessly celebrated the unquiet Vietnam veterans as a betrayed generation of real male patriots, mainstream Republican demonology has now cast Kerry as a man whose preoccupation with his own exploits in Vietnam make him fundamentally unreliable both as man and potential leader. The fact that rightwing America can so shamelessly taunt Kerry in this way, led by a non-combatant president who refuses to condemn the negative campaign and by a vice-president who fanned the flames in his own speech this week ("I had other priorities" is how Cheney icily describes his own Vietnam years) is a reminder that what is crucially important to Republicans is not, as they like to say, the tradition of armed service but, in reality, their claim to exclusive ownership of the politics of US defence, security and war."

"In any other political culture, you would characterise the Republicans as a militarist party, and in that context it would be perverse not to reflect upon whether this central development in American life did not have far more sinister implications, not least when so many references to the war on terror this week have been accompanied by testosterone-fuelled chants of "U-S-A, U-S-A"."

"Time and again Bush also deployed his well-established "double-coding" technique, dotting his speech with remarks which may not sound to the uninitiated as though they have a Christian conservative meaning, but which initiates will easily read differently.

"We must win this culture war," the Republican senator Sam Brownback told a private Family, Faith and Freedom rally in New York this week. For many in Bush's party, this is now the central task of a second term. "We ask that you continue to provide strength to President Bush and the first family," intoned the blessing with which the final convention evening began. "Guide, protect, and grant wisdom to him as he leads America and the world against the forces of evil ... And father, we pray your will is accomplished in this convention and throughout this great country." Much of what was said in Madison Square Garden this week was a masterpiece of Orwellian double-speak. A few things, on the other hand, meant exactly what they said."