Barack Obama, George Orwell, And Terror

American Thinker

By Michael Widlanski

George Orwell would have disliked Barack Obama’s big speech on terror, because Orwell hated when politicians used words to hide ugly truths.

In 1984, Orwell coined the term “double-speak.” He foresaw how men of state would misstate and mislead to stay in power, using words to distort more than to inform. Orwell knew politicians would then get trapped by their own words.

Lying can be a conscious choice or an accidental habit. The leader “Big Brother” did it all the time in 1984, but lying can also come from sloppy language. President Obama and his team use euphemisms to describe Arab-Islamic terror. Fort Hood was “workplace violence,” Detroit a “lone gunman.”

Obama and his staff got so wrapped up in “politically correct” and factually wrong syntax that they could not see the truth even when it bit them in the leg in Benghazi. Their own discourse trapped them in a policy of inaction and clumsy cover-up.

“A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks,” wrote Orwell

“It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.” (“Politics and the English Language”).

President Obama’s address on terror shows he is not interested in reversing his PC process of willful blindness and willful ignorance regarding Islamic terror.

Anyone who examines the disease of Arab-Islamic terror sees that the problem was never just Osama Bin Laden or a group called Al-Qaeda, both spawned by the earlier Muslim Brotherhood and the Wahabbi movement in Arabia. Indeed, there were many earlier examples of Arab-Islamic terror from Sunni and Shiite sources.

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