Peacocks on Parade

If the haunting specter of Bush supporters calling each other arrogant brings on laughter, brace yourself and don’t miss this from one Peter Wehner, formerly of Bush 43’s White House staff.

What is most telling is the DoubleThink:

“A healthy, self-confident conservative movement … allows for and even encourages genuine debate and creative thinking, the probing of ideas and holding them up to scrutiny, self-examination, and self-reflection.”

As the laughter subsides, we recall that this pompous treacle flows from the crowd that branded as “traitors” Pat Buchanan, Bob Novak, Joe Sobran, our own Lew Rockwell, and countless other critics of illegal, unconstitutional trillion-dollar wars. Loser John McCain’s rolling eyes also come to mind.

Mr. Wehner’s pandering paean of self-congratulation is worthy of Obama. In gratitude, however, we should note that he proves Orwell profoundly prescient in his description of the practitioner of DoubleThink: the absolute and irreconcilable contradiction between the two opposite beliefs that he holds so tenaciously is so deeply embedded that he doesn’t even notice. “That was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.”

From 1984:

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself — that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink.

The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them….To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.

Share

9:27 am on October 21, 2010