George Orwell fought to save language. 

I was blessed with a ninth-grade English teacher who assigned us not 1984 but Orwell’s essays. He aimed to make us not only good stylists, as Orwell’s instructions and example teaches crispness and clarity, but also to make us morally strong in our words.

Orwell homed in on how the tyrant acts to shut down all thought that challenges him. The most effective way to do that is to subvert language. Words are wrenched free from their significance and made to mean only what the tyrant allows them to mean: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

Let us look together at one such word and how it is being used to grab language out of our mouths and with the aim of greenlighting the most monstrous of crimes.

With access to German internal messages, Winston Churchill agonized over the developing horror the organized Nazi destruction of European Jewry. He could not tip his hand, so as not to clue the Germans that their unbreakable codes had been broken, so he held off public comment until there was enough information from other sources. There was barely controlled passion in his words when he spoke at last on the radio on the topic in 1941:

Whole districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands—literally scores of thousands—of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by the German police troops. We are in the presence of a crime without a name.

A Polish Jew, Raphael Lemkin, who had escaped the horror and had made it to still-neutral America, heard Churchill’s speech. He realized the importance of having a name for this nameless crime and he generated it from the Greek root genos, which can mean when applied to humans a large identifiable grouping of humans, like a tribe or race, and the Latin cide, meaning killing, as in homicide or pesticide. The new word: genocide. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: Right Brain, Left Brain, and the Kabbala: Knowing How We Know Matters)

The word “genocide” was created to allow us to speak directly about the crime that the Holocaust instantiated. Lemkin himself applied it as well to the Turkish organized mass murder of their Armenian minority during World War I. He campaigned for an international convention to forbid things that shared the characteristics of these two massive, sustained atrocities whose goal was to extinguish an entire people.

Both the Nazis and the Turks had plenty of people who did not care about words at all and brought their own improvised cruelties to bear on the genocidal projects in which their governments employed them. But their regimes were both demolished, and the Nazi name became forever befouled throughout a world that had been so deeply scarred by its crimes.

So those who follow its ideology, in particular its all-pervading hatred of Jews as demonic forces that must be exterminated, must escape the infamy that clings still to that Nazi project that they themselves carry on.

That has been achieved by them in a satanically brilliant way: they have successfully launched the lie, constantly inflated, endlessly repeated, accompanied by the endless drumbeats and puerile rhythmic rhyming of those who wish not only to no longer think but stop you from thinking — the lie that it is Israel who is committing genocide.

The least reflection exposes the lie as the worthless untruth that it is. Israel is waging war to defeat those whose express goal was to murder the souls and the bodies of every Jew they could, sent in motion by a working government and executed by an actual organized army, accomplished by sadistic civilian thrill-seeker camp-followers who enjoyed a few days of rape, torture, and kidnapping.

Hamas has announced that it intends to continue to act like this whenever it can. Its ends are expressly genocidal, and its actions are exactly consonant with those aims. Its culture, schooled into the children under their rule by UN confederates, trains them from birth to orient the moral structure of their life around the task of destroying Jewish life, both nationally and individually.

This should be pretty easy to be recognized as a gross and criminal lie. And yet, it has captured the children raised with no understanding of what Americans gave their lives to overcome in World War II. Riding that horrifying cultural wave is a political movement that has made its bid to reshape American policy and the world, which not only swallows the lie but becomes its active advocate. (READ MORE: Antisemitism Goes Hand-in-Hand With Societal Decay)

Listen to the news, read and hear the language of Blinken, Biden, and their eager crew. They have not yet explicitly accused Israel of genocide in defending itself, but they are setting it up. It is hinted at clumsily and ponderously — we are ready to deploy that word on you if you do not allow us to rescue Hamas.

But Hamas actually practices genocide. That’s what they will do given the chance. Had Israel’s goals ever been genocidal, had it acted with the complete focus on wiping out Gazans with the same devotion of available resources, there would be no one left. 

Israel’s goals are as ours were in World War II, what the Jews were powerless to achieve in World War II — to defend successfully against genocide and to eliminate the genocidal perpetrators and their culture. 

But now, in Biden’s America, war is peace. Those who shattered the ceasefire of October 6 are to be spared, rewarded, elevated. Those who fight against are to be demonized. 

And a sign of the times in Biden’s America, an X post from user Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) that has since been deleted (thanks to the redoubtable Nellie Bowles for reposting it):

Wild that Israel’s genocide has literally reversed the meaning of a swastika on a synagogue, from a Nazi threat to a condemnation of genocide.

So has it really come, as at the end of Animal Farm, that the fighters for freedom are indistinguishable from the oppressors? Harris is proud and ready, it seems, to pick up the swastika and its agenda, cleansed by a little bit of Decontructionist magic, and join the exhilaration attending the freefall dive into the Nietzschean abyss. He’s got a lot of company out there, and in many places of power. They are likewise enjoying the ride, so far.

The abyss is grinning right back, opening its maw wide to swallow them whole. Hitler is waiting to welcome his own.