[ExI] "PC"

[Stefano Vaj]

On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 1:01 AM, Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com> wrote:
> Yes, I understand that even the strictest Soviet Communists gave
> lip-service to "political freedom" and "democracy"---the "vastly
> different meanings" you speak of. And I guess I understand that
> when first coined, these terms did serve "as a way to challenge
> the order in place". But I don't understand what you mean exactly
> by suggesting that Newspeak aims to remove this---this what?

In fact, one would be hard-pressed to find anybody declaring himself
against "freedom", even though, say, in absolutism monarchies this
used to mean just "freedom from foreign dominations" (as in "Jeanne
d'Arc freed the Kingdom from the Englishmen").

As for "democracy", we do have here a few catholic monarchists or
islamic traditionalists who challenge the very concept, but this is
not the case for most of totalitarian regimes of the XX century.
Communists notoriously engaged in a "war of words" with the West on
which part of the world was more (or "really") democratic (see inter
alia the curiously redundant terminology of "popular democracies") and
I believe that somewhere in Mein Kamp Hitler makes an express
reference to an ideal "german democracy". In fact, Mussolini is
probably the European dictator who made the least use, if any, of the
"D" word.

Having said that, in 1984 those working on Newspeak wants "free" to
mean only "free from fleas", and "Socing" to replace "socialism" in
order to indicate only the current state of affairs, and *not* a
possibly divergent concept covering a number of vaguer ideals.

Stefano Vaj