I started this “dictionary” shortly after seeing a 60 Minutes segment about rare earth elements. After learning that we use vast quantities of such elements, particularly in the new F-35 jet fighter, and that China has a near monopoly on the elements’ production, Lesley Stahl, an intensely serious and worried look on her face, asked, “But doesn’t that compromise national security?” or words to that effect. I began wondering what on earth she meant. She apparently assumed lack of rare earth elements would end production of the F-35. But failure to deploy the F-35, an extraordinarily expensive and wasteful boondoggle, did not seem a threat to me or to anyone I know. In fact, it seems quite clear to me that continuing production of the F-35 would represent a greater threat to “the general welfare” than would our failure to produce the aircraft. Then I began to wonder what any of us means by the phrase “national security,” or, for that matter, by any of hundreds of other vague, ill-defined phrases commonly used in the mainstream media. Having recently re-read George Orwell’s 1984 and “Politics and the English Language,” I have come to think that our current politicians, especially but not exclusively Republican politicians, and the mainstream media have degraded our language more seriously than even Orwell believed. And so I’ve begun this “Orwellian Dictionary for Our Time.” Feel free to add entries as you see fit.
Classified document: any one of hundreds of millions of government documents containing information the public should know, but whose publication might embarrass the powerful and is therefore considered treasonous
Collateral damage: the military’s burning, dismembering, killing, or wounding of non-combatant, therefore irrelevant, infants, children, men, and women who chose to be in the wrong place at the wrong time (e.g. at home, at a wedding, in the market, at a playground)
Entitlements: outrageous, excessive, and undeserved re-payments to citizens of money those citizens were required to pay in trust to the government
Freedom: the unrestricted right of large, monopolistic corporations to destroy the earth and exploit its people
Free market: absence of restriction on the expansion of potentially monopolistic corporations
Hero: a member of our standing professional military hired with the people’s money to protect the powerful
National Security: the purchase and use of vast quantities of weapons to ensure nothing restricts the right of the powerful to destroy the earth and exploit its people (see freedom)
Pro-life: strongly opposed to aborting babies, to providing public assistance to them and their families if they need help, to disarmament, and to gun control
Second amendment: amendment that gives every white American man the right to own weapons--handguns, automatic rifles, grenades, mines, bombs, cruise missles, etc.—without restriction
Small government: a government that spends trillions on weapons, on a vast national security apparatus, and on subsidies to the rich and powerful and to corporations but virtually nothing on regulation of corporate excess and public assistance to people in need
Special interest group: the public or a group representing the interests of the public as opposed to groups representing corporate and business interests
Terrorists: foreign fighters who occasionally do to a few of our people what our military and intelligence agencies regularly do to many other peoples
Whistle-blower: an insider who must be severely punished for revealing classified information, information that an informed public should know but that could potentially embarrass the powerful