Word: totalitarian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Orwell. Humanity has nowhere been transformed into an amorphous mass of automatons ruled by invisible forces, a Stanlinist Gulag pushed to its logical conclusion and extended to the world at large. This has not occurred even in Communist countries. Quite the contrary: although their regimes remain frozen in totalitarian molds, their reality has been persistently evolving toward more liberal forms. The world is certainly a freer place today that it was in 1948 when Orwell wrote his anti-utopian novel...
...warnings from West European leaders that were conveyed to Nicaragua's Interior Minister Tomas Borge during his October tour of the continent. The Europeans bluntly told Borge that they might no longer provide financial and diplomatic support for the regime if it did not moderate its increasingly totalitarian ways...
...over the West, but nowhere more than in West Germany, the pragmatic realization of the need for coexistence with one's opponent in the nuclear age, was unfortunately extended into the wholly illusory and dangerous idea that peace required an end to ideological and moral confrontation between free and totalitarian societies, that as Peter Bender, an intellectual close to the SPD puts it, the "ideological era has come to an end." It was this decade long process of unilateral moral and political disarmament which contributed a great deal to the utopian confusions that have surfaced in Western Europe concerning...
Tens of millions have read it, in 62 languages: the story of Winston Smith, a minor bureaucrat in the totalitarian state of Oceania. War with the world's two other superpowers, Eurasia and Eastasia, is constant, although the pattern of hostilities and alliances keeps changing. Smith works at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting old newspaper stories to conform to current Party ideology. He uses the official language, Newspeak, a version of English being pared down to make unorthodox opinions impossible to conceive. Privacy has vanished. Waking and sleeping, Smith and all Party members are observed by two-way telescreens...
...first and best defense against such totalitarian gibberish, Orwell argued, is common sense. A person with a basic understanding of what the words freedom and slavery actually mean must reject a sentence that equates them. He wrote: "In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to fit." The alternative method promises treachery: "When you think of something abstract...