What is Orwellian doublespeak and how does it apply to Putin’s messages about the war in Ukraine?

If you’ve been paying attention to how the Russian president, Vladimir Putintalk about the war Ukraine, you may have noticed a pattern. Putin often uses words that mean the exact opposite of their usual meaning.

He rates the acts of war as “peacekeeping tasks”.

He claims to be involved in the “denazification” of Ukraine as he seeks to overthrow or even kill Ukraine’s Jewish president, who is the grandson of a Holocaust survivor.

He claims that Ukraine is plotting to create nuclear weapons, while the biggest current threat of nuclear war seems to be Putin himself.

Putin’s manipulation of language is attracting attention.

Kira Rudik, a member of the Ukrainian parliament, recently said about Putin in an interview with CNN:

“When he says, ‘I want peace’, it means, ‘I am gathering my troops to kill you’. If he says, ‘They’re not my troops,’ he means, ‘They’re my troops and I’m gathering them. ‘And if he says, ‘Okay, I’m withdrawing,’ it means ‘I’m regrouping and gathering more troops to kill you.'”

As a philosophy professor studying British author George Orwell, Rudik’s comments on Putin remind me of another set of claims: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” These are the words carved into the side of the government agency building called the “Ministry of Truth” in Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984,” published in 1949.

Orwell uses this feature of the novel to draw attention to how totalitarian regimes—as in the book’s fictional State of Oceania— they perversely distort language to gain and retain political power. Orwell’s acute understanding of this phenomenon was the result of having witnessed it himself.

Lies scarier than bombs

In dealing with Putin’s lies and spin, it is helpful to look at what earlier thinkers and writers, such as Orwell, have said about the relationship between language and political power.

Orwell, an Englishman who lived between 1903 and 1950, experienced war, imperialism and poverty during the first half of his life. These experiences led Orwell to identify himself as socialist and member of the British political left.

So it might seem inevitable that Orwell would have viewed Soviet Communism, a leading force on the political left in Europe at the time, favorably. But this was not so.

Instead, Orwell he believed that Soviet communism shared the same flaws as Nazi Germany. Both were totalitarian states where the desire for total power and control displaced any space for truth, individuality or freedom.

Orwell did not believe that Soviet communism was truly socialist, but only had a socialist facade.

At age 33, Orwell served as a soldier volunteer in the Spanish Civil War. He fought with a small militia as part of a larger leftist coalition that was trying to stop an insurrection by Spain’s nationalist right. This left-leaning coalition received military support from the Soviet Union.

But the small militia with which Orwell was fighting eventually became the target of Soviet propagandists, who launched a series of accusations against the militia, including that its members were spies for the other side.

This was a by-product of the Soviet Union’s attempts to use its stake in Spain as a way to gain political power.

Orwell watched as the militia he had fought with was vilified in the European press as part of this Soviet smear campaign.

He explained in his book “Homage to Catalonia” that this smear campaign included telling demonstrable lies about concrete facts. This experience deeply disturbed Orwell.

He later reflected on this experience and wrote that he was frightened by the “sense that the very concept of objective truth is fading from the world”. That prospect, he said, scared him “much more than the bombs.”

Language shapes politics and vice versa

Such fears influenced much of his major writing, including his novel “1984” and his essay “Politics and the English Language.”

In this essay, he reflects on the relationship between language, thought and politics. For Orwell, language influences thought, which in turn influences politics.

But politics also influences thought, which in turn influences language. Thus Orwell, like Putin, saw how language shapes politics and vice versa.

Orwell argues in the essay that if one writes well, “one can think more clearly”, and in turn that “clear thinking is a necessary first step toward political regeneration,” which I think meant to him that a political order could recover from destructive political influences like totalitarianism. This makes good writing a political task.

Orwell’s desire to avoid bad writing is not a desire to uphold rigid rules of grammar. Rather, Orwell’s goal is for language users to “let the meaning choose the word, not the other way around.” Communicate clearly and accurately requires conscious thought. Work is needed.

But just as language can illuminate thought and regenerate politics, so can language can be used to obscure thought and degenerate politics.

Putin sees this clearly and seeks to use it to his advantage.

“Doublethink”, “double speak”

Orwell warned against the kind of abuses of language that Putin commits, writing that “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

Orwell explored what the mutual corruption of language and politics looks like in a totalitarian regime in his dystopian “1984”.

In the world of “1984”, the only crime is “criminall” (the Newspeak word for the crime of having unorthodox or politically unacceptable thoughts). The ruling class seeks to prevent the possibility of a criminal eliminating the language necessary to have those previously criminalized thoughts.

This included any idea that might undermine totalitarian control of the party. Limit language and you limit thought, Or so the theory goes. Thus, the Russian Parliament passed, and Putin has signed, a law that could lead to criminal offenses for using the word “war” to describe the war in Ukraine.

Orwell also uses “1984” to explore what happens when communication conforms to the wishes of political power rather than demonstrable facts.

The result is the “doublethink“, which occurs when a fractured mind simultaneously accepts two contradictory beliefs as true.

The slogans “War is peace”, “Freedom is slavery” and “Ignorance is strength” are paradigmatic examples. This Orwellian idea has given rise to the doublespeak Concept, what happens when you use language to obscure your meaning and manipulate others.

Doublespeak is a tool in the arsenal of tyranny. It is one of Putin’s weapons of choice, as it is for many authoritarians and would-be authoritarians around the world.

As Orwell warned: “Power lies in tearing human minds apart and putting them back together in new forms of their own choosing.”

* Mark Satta is an assistant professor at Wayne State University. This note originally appeared on The Conversation and is published here under a Creative Commons license..

Read the original article here.

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