The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.
On R4 this evening they were asking:
Why is there still a migrant crisis in Europe?
Well part of the problem is organisations like the BBC that do their best to encourage these people to try their luck. The BBC is partly responsible for their deaths as they traverse the varied dangers of the routes from the traffickers themselves to desert, war zones and overladen, unseaworthy boats.
The programme tells us these are nearly all economic migrants, most of whom are in fact not poor but the relatively well off and educated…so we are stripping developing countries of the very people they need to succeed and to grow as they head to Europe not for sanctuary but merely for a better life…ie more money. They do so because it has been made clear to them that once in Europe they will be able to stay there regardless of their actual status and that they will not be sent back or stopped at the borders.
With NGO’s acting as taxi services for the people traffickers [and so many of the women ending up as unwilling prostitutes] and the BBC sending out film crews to make tear-jerking sentimental, guilt-trip films about the migrants and always ready to condemn anyone who seeks to control the flow of migrants as inhumane and lacking compassion is there any wonder there is still a migrant crisis and an endless flow of people thinking they will get a warm welcome, a job or weelfare, housing, schooling and health services on tap because that is what they are lead to believe.
It is remarkable that the BBC can admit so many truths such as that these are economic migrants and have no claim to asylum in Europe and indeed that many end up in a dire state once they get to Europe and yet they still propagate the message that they are ‘desperate’ migrants in need of sanctuary…..without mentioning the huge pressures such migrants put on infrastructure and the fabric of society itself…leading eventually to instability, conflict and breakdown.
It is what Orwell called ‘Doublethink’…the ability to believe in their own lies when knowing them to be lies…
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 contradictory 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 into memory again 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 act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word—doublethink—involved the use of doublethink.
The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them… To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.
Polish news is less untruthful…..