Tag: doublespeak

Canada’s Heritage Minister says online censorship bill will help free speech

To advise the Heritage Minister on regulating Canada’s internet, a panel of experts, most of them academics, has been appointed. One of the government’s internet regulation plans, alongside the online censorship bill, is to create a federal internet censorship agency.

When announcing the panel of experts, Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez said, “We are open to all ideas. The only thing we want is to do the right thing, is to make it right, is to make it happen.”

The minister was asked if it was a priority for the internet censorship bill not to infringe Canadians’ rights. He said that freedom of expression is a fundamental right and is “at the core” of the bill.

“But I’ll tell you something else,” Rodriguez said. “Actually there are a lot of people who don’t want to share what they think anymore, who are afraid of going online to speak freely because of the negative and violent reaction they may get. I think in some ways this will really help freedom of speech.”

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Doublespeak

It is a language that is alive and well in our world today.

Doublespeak can refer to terms that are euphemisms (mild expressions designed to hide harsher or more direct ones), deliberately ambiguous (expressions designed to hide the truth) or actual inversions (outright lies which state the opposite of the truth).

Although he never used the term doublespeak in his book 1984, many associate doublespeak with George Orwell.

After all, it was Orwell who famously wrote that the motto of the totalitarian ruling party in 1984 was “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength” – an example of an inversion.

Orwell did however use the term newspeak to refer to a new kind of language which drastically reduced the scope of available words and terms, so as to concurrently reduce the scope of possible free thought among the ruled population.

Many doublespeak terms in the following list are oxymorons, meaning that the term itself is contradictory.

Many hide the truth because it is too raw, unpalatable, uncomfortable or outright horrifying. It is vitally important we watch our language, because it plays a great part in how we shape our world and in how we create our reality.

In many ways, by unconsciously using these terms instead of more accurate or truthful ones, we are quietly lying to ourselves, or at a minimum acquiescing to the process of being lied to and programmed.

Political correctness is a great example of how language control, thought control and doublespeak can be introduced to an entire population without people realizing they are being deceived and manipulated.

Below is list of the top 20 modern Orwellian doublespeak terms, with the first half focusing on military and geopolitical terms.

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