“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” — slogans of the “Party” in George Orwell’s 1984
Barack Obama promised to “fundamentally” transform America, and this often starts with transforming the language. Thus has sneaking in large numbers of Muslim migrants become “alternative safe pathways,” terrorism become “man-caused disaster,” government spending become “investment,” and tax increases become “revenue enhancement.” But now we have what Powerline’s John Hinderaker calls the “euphemism of the decade,” courtesy of Obama attorney general Loretta Lynch.
To wit: young criminals are now “justice-involved youth.”
As the Department of Justice writes at its website:
In an effort to help young people involved in the justice system find jobs and housing, the U.S. Departments of Justice and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) today announced $1.75 million for Public Housing Authorities (PHAs) and nonprofit legal service organizations to address the challenges justice-involved individuals face when trying to find work and a place to call home….
“The future of our nation depends upon the future of our young people — including young people who have become involved with our justice system,” said Attorney General Lynch. “By helping justice-involved youth find decent jobs and stable housing after they return home, these critical grants provide a foundation for a fresh start and offer a path towards productivity and purpose. In the months ahead, the Department of Justice will continue helping justice-involved youth enrich their lives and improve our country.”
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Of course, critics might say this is expected from a hard left-wing attorney general chosen by a hard left-wing president, both titles of which become euphemistic when applied to the individuals in question. Yet euphemizing is nearly as old as man himself, and its profound dangers have been recognized for almost as long.
Ancient Chinese sage Confucius said 2500 years ago that if he had the power to influence governance, the first change he’d effect would involve the “rectification of names.” Said the wise man (I’m paraphrasing), “How can people do a good job if they’re lying about what they’re doing?” Confucius was, apparently, referring to deceptive titles, but when incorrect they share with euphemism a certain quality: that of being the polar opposite of truth in advertising.
A euphemism is a linguistic Trojan horse, at best a wrapping more beautiful than the present within, at worst poison labeled panacea. This is dangerous because, to provide one example, mislabeling a policy is much like mislabeling a drug: How can people choose the right prescription if it’s branded something it’s not? Labels matter. A man with a nut allergy expects that something labeled nut-free really won’t contain nuts.
Speaking of nuts, the two-legged ones have certainly made euphemizing an art in recent times. Consider: We’ve conjured up something called “gay marriage,” yet it has no more to do with happiness than it does with matrimony. Many label an illegal alien an “undocumented worker,” which is a bit like calling a rapist an undocumented husband. Homosexual behavior is now a “lifestyle choice,” just, I suppose, like deciding to live on a houseboat. And the graver the evil, the more extreme the mislabeling, prenatal infanticide being a good example. Doctors may call it a “dilation and extraction,” but even the term “abortion” should be questioned. In the 19th century, “abortion” could refer to miscarriages occurring between six weeks and six months from conception, and intentional miscarriage was called “criminal abortion.” But “criminal” was eventually dropped to make the criminal seem casual. Thus, in light of the aforementioned, calling prenatal infanticide “abortion” is a bit like saying that a man stabbed through the heart died of a heart attack.
Of course, today many go beyond euphemism and insist a label needn’t have any relationship at all to reality because reality is relative. Just consider this line from a CNN article: “When he exited the bathroom, the teacher did not say anything to him, but he knew from the ‘exasperated’ look on her face that he was in trouble.” A casual reader might not realize that CNN writer Emanuella Grinberg is talking about a girl who is masquerading as a boy. This is routine in the media now, to refer to a person with the pronouns he prefers instead of those reflecting his actual sex (a.k.a. reality). But, you know, such people no longer have a psychological disorder but are “transgender.”
And so it goes. Philosopher G.K. Chesterton wrote in “On Evil Euphemisms”: “When somebody wishes to wage a social war against what all normal people have regarded as a social decency, the very first thing he does is to find some artificial term that shall sound relatively decent.” So now people involved in bestiality have been rebranded “zoophiles” and receive sympathetic media coverage. Likewise, pedophiles want to be called “minor-attracted people,” aided and abetted by attitudes reflected in the following Los Angeles Times line, “Now, many experts view it [pedophilia] as a sexual orientation as immutable as heterosexuality … a deep-rooted predisposition … that becomes clear during puberty and does not change.”
As for hope-and-change AG Lynch, perhaps she’s not a liar but just someone who has a “flexible relationship with truth.” About her Orwellian euphemism, American Thinker’s Thomas Lifson asks “Isn’t Lynch involved with justice, as head of the DoJ? Isn’t she ‘justice-involved’?” But since Lynch has considered lynching climate-change realists and now is being accused of trying to force colleges and universities to violate the First Amendment, I would answer no. She is involved in injustice.
Perhaps the worst injustice is to deny your fellow man the truth. And how can people know the truth when the language itself is designed to obscure it? How can they constitute an informed electorate when the language serves to misinform?
Contrary to the Party slogan in 1984, ignorance isn’t at all strength. If it were, though, we’d now have our strongest generation of leaders yet.
Photo of Attorney General Loretta Lynch: AP Images
