In the beginning was the Word, then came the Lie with the aspect of Truth. In the modern Italian language inspired by the Newspeak of Ingsoc, the totalitarian ideology of the world of Orwell’s “1984”, the words indicate the opposite of their original meaning. Anyone who was a follower of Ingsoc had to believe in three laws: “Ignorance is strength”, “War is peace” and “Freedom is slavery”. The same that regulate the Italian Neodemocracy. Who better than a Gasparri or a Calderoli is a living expression of the ignorance in power? We are in a peace mission in Libya and in Afghanistan and we are free to work up until death.
From 1984: “The greatest difficulty facing the compilers of the Newspeak Dictionary was not to invent new words, but, having invented them, to make sure what they meant: to make sure, that is to say, what ranges of words they cancelled by their existence.” One example is the word “incinerator” substituted by the word “thermovaloriser”. After that an incinerator no longer incinerates, but it creates energy. The word “thermovaloriser” repeated for years by small and big brothers of information has eliminated the production of dioxin and pollution. Another word is “election financing” transformed into “reimbursement”. Financing in the form of a grant, in fact, it can be denied, it can produce disdain, while a reimbursement is due. “Countless other words such as honour, justice, morality, internationalism, democracy, science, and religion had simply ceased to exist.”
The Italian Newspeak has already eliminated words like justice, democracy, moral and honour. Anyone who still insists on pronouncing them no longer manages to connect them to reality. They are abstractions. They belong to a world that is fabulous and disappeared, like that of Atlantis. The Italian Newspeak is not conceived to develop thinking, cognitive capacity, but to reduce it. “What distinguishes Newspeak was the fact that every year, instead of getting bigger, its lexicon got smaller. Every reduction was considered to be a success because the more the possibility of choice got smaller, the fewer were the temptations to start thinking.” It cannot be denied that the number of words that we are using gets smaller year after year. We contract them. More frequently we use the language of gestures, and on the way, we lose concepts and pieces of culture, of History. The "stock phrases" that we are always pronouncing makes us feel comfortable together with the interlocutors who nod in agreement and are reassured. We recognise each other as equals. “The intention was to make speech, .. as nearly as possible independent of consciousness.” The unknowing slave, among all the slaves, is the one most loved by the democracies.