Modern Newspeak Dictionary

by BEN DEBNEY

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In this day and age it can be hard to traverse the torrent of media driven
buzzwords, technical jargon and PR spin designed as much to obfuscate and
muddy the waters as to clarify and enlighten. In the interests of promoting
media literacy and general understanding then we present here the following
guide to many of the more ideologically emburdened terms in current usage.

Adjustment, quantitative, n.
Actual meaning: Socialism for the rich.

Usage: The government gave big business the entire nation’s GDP not to
move to China, thereby stimulating economic growth and making everyone
say, ‘wow, quantitative adjustment is amazing.’

Adjustment, structural, n.
Actual meaning: War by other means.

Usage: Used to be we would invade you and take all your stuff at the wrong
end of a musket or sword or an MG-42. Now we get the same results with an
IMF plan to service your debts. The note passed to the teller by the jumpy
looking guy in the overcoat read: ‘Adjust the structure of your till into this
bag and don’t look at anybody or say nothing.’

Attack, n.
Actual meaning: Criticism.

Usage: As someone in a powerful position, I don’t feel like having to be

responsible for the consequences of my actions today, or any other day. I
think I’ll just conflate being criticized and being attacked and play the victim
so that I can shift the blame for them back onto my critics and anyone trying
to hold me accountable for my actions. Then I’ll reconstruct myself as a
champion of democracy in the face of the terrorist peril with the aid of the
mass media woohoo!

Bias, n.
Actual meaning: Impartial.

Usage: The national broadcaster was very biased in its factual reporting of
government corruption and the revolving door between it and big business.
In giving air to perspectives other than the far one I agree with the fact is it
was revealing itself to be a hotbed of communist insurgency.

Chaos, n.
Actual meaning: Functional.

Usage: We can either have a society in which the entirety of the legislative
and juridical process is dominated by and functions to uphold the tiniest
minority of the mega-rich at the expense of the other 99% of the population
or we can have chaos.

Civilisation, western, n.
Actual meaning: War of all against all.

Usage: A kind of casino economy based on the jungle morality of winner-

take-all and survival of the fittest is the crowning glory of western
civilization.
Communist (1), n.
Actual meaning: Independent thinker.

Usage: If you think for yourself, the communists win.

Communist (2), n.
Actual meaning: State capitalists you want everyone to think are
communists.

Usage: The Soviet Union with its police state, bloated bureaucracy and
marked class hierarchies were a perfect example of communism in practice,
if not a good reason never to try to do anything meaningful about injustice
and institutional insanity at home.

Creation, Job, n.
Actual meaning: Exploitation of workers, women, subject peoples, the Earth,
the flaura and fauna and in fact the perpetration of practically any old dodgy
shit you can imagine that requires the labour of workers to be implemented.

Usage: Emperor Palpatine announced the construction of a new and even

more powerful Death Star, signaling a major boon for job creation.

Democracy, n.
Actual meaning: Corporate plutocracy.

Usage: Well you have a choice of voting between the pro-big business party
from the far right or the pro-big business party from the far right, that’s the
difference between democracy and dictatorship, where you have no choice at
all.

Domino, n.
Actual meaning: Independent.
Usage: Endor has rebelled against the Empire, which loves it and knows
what’s best and is being horribly mistreated by ungrateful, bearlike savages
who have only a primitive culture and who not even understand the gift of
civilization the Empire is attempting to bestow on them. This is the latest in a
series of planets to fall prey to the sweeping domino effect put into motion by
the insurgent hordes lead by the cultish Jedi renegades.

Entitlement, n.
Actual meaning: Right.

Usage: We had to cut back on the amount of oxygen entitlements in the

atmosphere in the name of maintaining a competitive economy.

Exposure, n.
Actual meaning: Subject to market forces.

Usage: We had to get all the states of the Eurozone involved in reaching an
agreement to reduce Greece to a nervous wreck huddled up sucking its
thumb in a foetal position in the corner so that a bunch of bank could avoid
the dire perils of unnecessary exposure; as any halfwit can tell you that’s a
resoundingly obvious textbook example of what free market economics is all
about.

Extremist, n.
Actual meaning: Not us.

Usage: The extremist demonising critics and anyone daring to contradict him
by conflating criticism of his ideas and attacks on his person, while refusing
to acknowledge any grey area between the absolutist black and whites, played
the victim and blamed the victims of his own aggression as a way of avoiding
have to deal with his own unwillingness to be accountable for the
consequences of his actions, was not serving our interests. On that basis he
was therefore wrong.
Fact, n.
Actual meaning: A stick to beat your enemies with.

Usage: The fact is that what they are doing is completely unjustifiable. When
we do it it’s because disagreeing with us gives aid to the terrorists.

Faith, n.
Actual meaning: Blind obedience.

Usage: How’s about you start batting for the home team for a change and
demonstrating a little faith in the Prime Minister.

Freedom, n.
Actual meaning: Slavery.

Usage: We are free to choose our masters instead of having them imposed on
us, and to be exploited for wages constituting merely a proportion of the
value we create ourselves, which is given back to us while the master who
does nothing steals the rest, by the one we like best. We are free to choose
between the pro-big business party on the right and the pro-big business
party on the right at the ballot box. We have all the freedom we could ask for.
Stop whining, you dirty, ungrateful communist. We are free. Keep repeating:
we are free.

Growth, economic, n.
Actual meaning: Protecting and extending social and economic privilege at
the expense of all other considerations.

Usage: We must reintroduce chattel slavery as a means of boosting economic

growth.

Guilt, n.
Actual meaning: Self-awareness.
Usage: You and your endless guilt-mongering, I’m sick of being made to feel
guilty for being a white middle class male who could time travel back 500
years and still move about freely without being molested or killed by Jim
Crow, slave traders or witch hunters.

Hate, n.
Actual meaning: Criticism.

Usage: When I pointed out to the Muslim he was a backwards savage who
subscribed to a religion fundamentally at odds with a civilised society while
denying it was racist to establish a false binary between a heavily racialised
concept of a national way of life and a religious belief system in the face of
elementary logic demonstrating that it is, he reacted with a colossal amount
of hate.

Horse, trojan, n.
Actual meaning: Something I happen not to like but don’t have a good
argument against.

Usage: Environmentalist politics are a Trojan Horse for A Neo-Stalinist

Dystopia featuring sentient communist robots who use human beings as
batteries to power their society and keep them docile by plugging them all
into a virtual reality false consciousness made up of a universe governed by
the rules outlined in the literary output of Ayn Rand.

Jobs, n.
Actual meaning: Profits.

Usage: As everyone knows, the main reason anyone ever goes into business is
because of the jobs motive.

Leftist, n.
Actual meaning: angry ghetto troll.
Usage: Don’t mind that angry ghetto troll, he’s just a leftist.

Mongering, fear, n.
Actual meaning: Science.

Usage: The scientific community is engaging in a great deal of fear

mongering over the data surrounding climate change. I believe some of them
are even playing into the hands of the dirty evil communists who are trying to
cast doubt on the glorious beneficence of the almighty dollar, blessed be its
name.

Newspaper, n.
Actual meaning: Propaganda.

Usage: I understood how you can have all the answers without knowing what
the question is after I had finished reading the newspaper.

Power, hostile, n.
Actual meaning: Foreign power not able to be walked over.

Usage: The government of one particular foreign country had enough

leverage over the United States to say ‘no’ to it about some things; it was
therefore deemed to be a Hostile Power.

Practical, n.
Actual meaning: Opportunist.

Usage: When I argued we should move all the Muslims into internment
camps for the sake of national security I was merely being practical.

Principles, n.
Actual meaning: Something you remember when criticizing your enemies.
Usage: When we wanted to criticize North Korea we suddenly remembered
that police states are bad.

Realism, n.
Actual meaning: Whatever serves the status quo and the vested interests
behind it.

Usage: That’s very interesting what you say about the golden rule being that
those with gold make the rules and that, since the primary function of all
governments is to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority, as
James Madison put it, the only major problem with getting rid of states when
it come to protecting society from thugs and criminals is making sure they’re
not able to form another government. I on the other hand feel that we should
accommodate power structures, reasoning being because I think I have a
better handle on reality than you.

Refugee, n.
Actual meaning: Scapegoat.

Usage: With the global economy and the global geopolitical situation both
being up the spout and us not having any solution on how to deal with either
that would involve making any changes or accommodations ourselves, we
were very glad that the chaos it was producing was also generating a steady
flow of refugees.

Relations, public, n.
Actual meaning: Corporate propaganda.

Usage: We are not trying to put a positive spin on the lies we want to tell, we
are employing a Public Relations expert.

Security, national, n.
Actual meaning: Security of the special interests.
Usage: When we had finished passing the legislation making it illegal for
anyone to say bad things about corporations, especially where the revolving
door between government and military contractors was concerned, and
making the casting of doubt about the merit of corporations punishable by a
life sentence in a privately-run work prison making iPhones for two cents a
month, I made a statement to the press pointing out the necessity of doing so
in the interests of defending national security.

Self-loathing, n.
Actual meaning: The capacity for self-criticism.

Usage: Those leftists sure display a lot of self-loathing about their privilege
where their class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability, religion and nationality
are concerned.

Soft, n.
Actual meaning: Restrained.

Usage: Anyone against turning the government into a police state is soft on
terrorism.

Terrorist (1), n.
Actual meaning: Not us.

Usage: The terrorist using arbitrary violence outside of all international law
and United Nations oversight to achieve political ends wasn’t working for us.

Terrorist (2), n.
Actual meaning: Not working for the state.

Usage: The terrorist using arbitrary violence outside of all international law
and United Nations oversight to achieve political ends wasn’t flying a drone
around Pakistan from the safety of a control room in the Midwest while
chomping down on a bag of Doritos.

Terrorist (3), n.
Actual meaning: Person with brown skin.

Usage: When I was sitting in Harry’s House of Saturated Fat waiting for a
plate of puppy ribs, a terrorist smiled at me when they were walking past.

Terrorism, Counter, n.
Actual meaning: State terrorism; us.

Usage: We decided to employ arbitrary state violence outside of all

international law and United Nations oversight and in the face of the
manifest opposition of a great wave of public opposition because we felt that
this was the best way to engage in counter-terrorism and defend the
principles we maintain a thin pretense of understanding, I mean giving two
fucks about, I mean upholding.

Voter, n.
Actual meaning: Mark.

Usage: As the voter approached me and the shills from the opposition party
got ready to move the policy shells around as though there was any way we
would ever in a million years let him find a pea of enfranchisement; I knew
then we would take that gullible fucker for everything he was worth.

Welfare, n.
Actual meaning: The tiny proportion that goes to the poor.

Usage: The government introduced a bill to scrap welfare as an enabler of the

lazy to sit around and leech off the taxpayer, with a rider approving another
eleventy trillion dollars in tax breaks for companies posting more than $100
quarterly profit.

War (1), n.
Actual meaning: Disobedience.

Usage: Saddam declared war on us by refusing to make his oil reserves and
other natural resources available to us at a good price and by not doing what
he was told.

War (2), n.
Actual meaning: Turkey shoot.

Usage: The drone war in Pakistan killed tens of thousands of non-

combatants and people who were determined to be terrorists after they were
dead by remote controlled drones.

Work, n.
Actual meaning: Wage-slavery.

Usage: Entrepreneurs! Don’t tie up valuable capital in your slaves – lease

them instead! Sick and tired of the hassles associated with having to feed,
clothe and house your slaves? With our new system of wage labour, you can
still exploit them, and with the fraction of the value they create you pay them
in wages they can do the job themselves!