Renewable Revolution

 Friday, March 10, 2017 

By Bill Moyers and Henry A. Giroux, Moyers & Company | Op-Ed

SNIPPET:

As Orwell often remarked, historical memory is dangerous to authoritarian regimes. In Orwell's Ministry of Truth, it is a crime to read history against the grain. In fact, history is falsified so as to render it useless both for understanding the conditions that shape the present and for remembering what should never be forgotten. As Orwell makes clear, this is precisely why tyrants consider historical memory dangerous; history can readily be put to use in identifying present-day abuses of power and corruption.


The Trump administration offered a pointed example of this Orwellian principle when it issued a statement regarding the observance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.


In the statement, the White House refused to mention its Jewish victims, thus erasing them from a monstrous act directed against an entire people. Politico reported that the official White House "statement drew widespread criticism for overlooking the Jews' suffering, and was cheered by neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer."

This act of erasure is but another example of the willingness of the Trump administration to empty language of any meaning, a practice that constitutes a flight from historical memory, ethics, justice and social responsibility.


Under such circumstances, government takes on the workings of a dis-imagination machine, characterized by an utter disregard for the truth that is often accompanied, as in Trump's case, by "primitive schoolyard taunts and threats." In this instance, Orwell's "Ignorance is Strength" materializes in the Trump administration's weaponized attempt not only to rewrite history, but also to obliterate it. Trump's contemptuous and boisterous claim that he loves the uneducated and his willingness to act on that assertion by flooding the media and the American public with an endless proliferation of peddled falsehoods reveal his contempt for intellect, reason and truth.

As the master of phony stories, Trump is not only at war with historical remembrance, science and rationality, he also wages a demolition campaign against democratic ideals by unapologetically embracing humiliation, racism and exclusion for those he labels as criminals, terrorists and losers, categories equated with Muslims, Mexicans, women, the disabled -- the list only grows. As John Wight observes, Trump's language of hate "is redolent of the demonization suffered by Jewish people in Germany in the 1930s, which echoes a warning from history."

All Governments Lie



Orwell's point about duplicitous language was that all governments lie. The rhetorical manipulation definitive of Orwellian language is not distinctive to the Trump administration, though it has taken on an unapologetic register in redefining it and deploying it with reckless abandon. The draconian use of lies, propaganda, misinformation and falsification has a long legacy in the United States, with other recent examples evident under the presidency of George W. Bush. Under the Bush-Cheney administration, for example, "doublethink" and "doublespeak" became normalized as state-sponsored torture was shamelessly renamed as "enhanced interrogation." Barbaric state practices such as sending prisoners to countries where there were no limits on torture were framed in the innocuous language of "rendition." Such language made a mockery of policy discourse and eroded public engagement. It also contributed to the transformation of institutions that were meant to limit human suffering and misfortune and protect citizens from the excesses of the market and state violence into something like their opposite.

But the attack on reason, dissent and truth itself finds its Orwellian apogee in Team Trump's endless proliferation of lies: including claims that China is responsible for climate change, former President Obama was not born in the United States and voter fraud prevented Trump from winning the popular vote for the presidency.

Such lies, big and small, don't function simply as mystification; they offer justification for aggressive immigration crackdowns, for effectively silencing the EPA and for upending Obamacare.


Too often the relentless fabrications serve to distract the press, focusing its energies on exposing the untrustworthiness of the person and not on the symbolic, legal and material violence that such pronouncements and harsh policies invariably unleash. 
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/39750-our-president-is-up-to-no-good