Language as the Ultimate Weapon

Language as the Ultimate Weapon Entry.

Language, for the majority of the people it's "just" a system to communicate, but for others it could be the perfect tool to manipulate societies. If used properly, language has the power to mask the truth and mislead the public. Which can create a society with unquestioningly obeying their government and mindlessly accept all propaganda as reality.

Several psychologists theorists says that words that are available for the purpose of communicating though tend to influence the way people think. Even the relations that words had with our brain could affect memories, thoughts an perceptions.

In Orwell's novel the media is such a powerful tool for manipulation, because the public is widely exposed to it, and the public trusts it. The party expose the public to propaganda that serves to manipulated them, day by day.

New Speak doesn't have any words with negative connotations meaning that when the media wants to communicate something no one can interpret it as negative or bad, This directly affects because it disabled the people to express or think other than positive.

The media in Orwell's novel is skilled at engineering "truth" through language, and one of the most disturbing consequences of this developed in the novel is that the party has ultimate control over history. Since languages is the link to history. This reminds me of one of the quotes of the book:

"Who controls the past, controls the future: who controlls the present controls the past".

Orwell's novel asks the philosophical question: if all available evidence show something to be true, is it not true?

Part of the importance of the novel has to do with the relation it has with the present and the actual history since the alteration of history has already been used. In the Stalinist era there was much distortion of History, so that it appears that Trotsky was first the hero of the Civil War.

There are other similarities between our reality and the novel,  just look to advertising, and industry based in manipulation of language and thought.

As Berkes says Orwell's novel carries an important warning about the powers of language and how it can be used. "Languages is one of the key instruments of political dominations, the necessary and insidious means of the 'totalitarian' 'control of reality' (Rai, 122).