In the comments thread for my post on ‘political correctness’, Derrida Derider argues, citing Orwell, that

The language gamesters are unfortunately right – you CAN change the way people think, up to a point anyway, by changing language.

I think Orwell’s discussion of the issue left some ambiguities unresolved. Orwell is clear on the point that sloppy language can be a tool for self-deception. The prime example of this is the 1984 concept of ‘doublethink’, the capacity to maintain two contradictory beliefs at the same time that is essential to survival in a totalitarian system.

But the other side of doublethink is that, at some level, everyone knows the score. Experience of totalitarian systems over a long period suggests that in the end, command over language does not entail command over thought. Rather, in a totalitarian system, people necessarily develop a series of language codes:

• the official propaganda language for business dealings

,

• a set of very subtle and deniable codes for talk with a general circle of friends to be used, for example, to refer to blackmarket transactions or office politics
• and a still-coded but more direct language for intimate friends who can be presumed ‘safe’

.

I’ve referred to totalitarian systems in general, but in fact a lot of this discussion is only really applicable to Communist systems, which claimed to be democratic socialist states run by and for workers. Reflecting La Rouchefoucauld’s maxim that ‘hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue’, the maintenance of this claim in states which whose oligarchical and exploitative nature was evident to all required a high degree of ‘thought control’.

By contrast, as I observed in my review of Lilla’s Reckless Minds, ‘Although Nazi propaganda was mendacious in every detail, it never concealed the fundamental nature of Nazism.’ The Nazis never pretended to embody ideals of peace and democracy, openly declaring their preference for war and mastery. As a result, the language of the Nazis was mostly simple and direct. As with Bismarck a generation or two earlier, Nazi rhetoric was full of references to blood and iron, and this was a pretty fair summary of what they actually gave the world.