Opinion: Reading between the lies of the anti-capitalist dictionary – Financial Post

Sep 18, 2024

As Orwell warned, words can be twisted to make falsehoods sound truthful and murder respectable. Today the left uses them to subvert capitalism

“Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic; they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all.” That’s how Victor Klemperer, a German Jew who somehow survived Hitler’s reign of terror, described the Nazi regime’s manipulation of words and their meaning in his 1957 book The Language of the Third Reich. The endless public repetition of fascist idioms and phrases regarding race, duty and country, Klemperer argued, turned Germans into unthinking servants of the Nazi cause.

Today, similar forces of linguistic control are wielded by propagandists embedded within our own democratic society. As Christopher Dummitt recently pointed out in this newspaper, the concept of personal responsibility is rapidly being excised from our language. Self-administered drug overdoses have become “accidental poisonings,” while vagrants are merely “experiencing homelessness.” Victims all.