Controlling Minds by Controlling Language

If you want to control minds, start by controlling language. If some people call black, white and red, green communication will become immpossible. You will not be communicating information or working to achieve something but will be showing yourself to be a member in good standing of a cult. 

If the difference between right and wrong is saying that something is right or wrong, you can distort moral values by forcing people to call right wrong and to call wrong right. 

This implies that right and wrong are mere conventions, imposed by those who have the most power in society. Your dastardly deeds will then become heroic.

Rather than build something of your own, as in, a functioning society, you attack someone else’s functioning society and declare it to be a criminal enterprise. At best, you might persuade them to stop building and to self-deconstruct.

It's the principle of the fifth column. When you are fighting and losing a war, you can turn the situation in your favor by persuading your enemy that they cannot win. Thus, you will try to persuade them either that it is futile to persist in a losing cause or else that they are only winning because they are evil.

If your opponent is evil and you are good, you are saying that you can do anything you want to destroy them. And that they deserve nothing better. In that case negotiation is out of the question.

If the game is rigged, you need not play by the rules. You can defy the rules in order to get your way.

Moreover, if God is on your side, you can persuade yourself that you will necessarily win in the end. 

So, as Gerard Baker explained in the Wall Street Journal, in time of war and not just in time of war, certain people weaponize language. 

They force people to reject conventional language usage and to use words the way your overlords want them to use it. It’s like belonging to a cult where you affirm your membership by using the right passwords. You forget about truth and about reality, and only care about showing that you belong.

So, the battle for minds supersedes the battle for territory. As Baker explains:

But in war, as in peace, words can also be used to demoralize and disorient. They can be used—and have been—more deviously by the enemy, and its quill-, microphone- and laptop-carrying enablers and propagandists, to obfuscate and confuse, to seed doubt in a just cause.

Of course, words can be used to blind us to reality. Today’s American intellectuals tend not to accept that reality exists. They think that it’s just a question of belief. If you want to change reality you need not build anything; you can simply persuade enough people that a boy is a girl or a girl is a boy.

… we are being bombarded with rhetoric that seeks to persuade us not to believe what we see, to convince us that right is wrong, justice is tyranny, terrorism is heroism.

Nowadays the propaganda media is doing everything in its power to persuade people that the victim of October 7 was really an evil oppressor. Thus, its people deserved to be massacred and the perpetrators of the horrors were on the side of the angels. They did nothing wrong. If you think that they did something wrong you are mentally defective:

All kinds of cunning efforts have been used to get us to see that the country whose citizens were wantonly slaughtered on Oct. 7 by an enemy that has sworn to wipe it from the planet is in fact the wicked oppressor.

And now, diplomats are debating whether Israel, currently winning the battle for Gaza, should cease fire unilaterally. Of course, Baker explains, it would hand Hamas a victory. It would show Israel to be unable to continue the fight against a more righteous opponent. Israeli weapons, the best that the industrialized world has to offer, are for nothing when fighting against a righteous cause.

Strangely, or, not so strangely, no one is recommending that Hamas lay down its arms and surrender.

As for the talk of a cease fire, Baker explains:

But we know what that would mean: victory for Hamas. It would mean that the terrorist group should be allowed to continue to run a statelet only a few weeks after it has made good on its commitment to attack its neighbor and done so with complete disregard for international law or common decency.

And then there is the Hamas propaganda, that Israel is committing genocide:

There is something especially malignant about this term to describe Israel’s operation—and those propagating it know that full well. They know its resonance in the history of the Jewish people, and they use it deliberately to equate what happened to the Jews at the hands of the Nazis with a military action today that is justified in self-defense, but which inevitably, tragically results in large numbers of civilian casualties—often because Hamas itself deliberately exposes civilians to harm.

If you can suggest that what Israel is doing in Gaza is equivalent to what happened in the gas chambers, then you are explicitly reducing the Holocaust to the level of a regrettable byproduct of a legitimate military campaign.

It’s the ultimate indignity-- it says that Israelis are really no better than Nazis. And therefore, that they deserve whatever they are getting. And that they also merited Nazi extermination or to the October 7 attacks. By the logic of the argument about genocide Jews are the scourge of the planet, and have no right to exist. Sound familiar?

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