Sen. Lieberman: Administration Engaging in Terrorism Doublespeak

Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, the Independent former Democrat who pretty much marches in lockstep with his former party except on national security issues (which admittedly is an important distinction), describes as Orwellian this in the latest of a series of terminology changes by the Obama administration.

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) on Sunday called the administration's proposal to avoid the term "Islamic extremism" in national security references "absolutely Orwellian and counterproductive."

Lieberman revealed on "Fox News Sunday" that he had sent a letter to the president's top counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, saying in part: "The failure to identify our enemy for what it is, violent Islamist extremism, is offensive and contradicts thousands of years of accepted military and intelligence doctrine to know your enemy."

 The chairman of the Homeland Security Committee said the letter was the product of him growing "so frustrated" with the White House over the terminology issue. He said the Defense Department omitted references to "violent Islamist extremism" in its report on the massacre at Fort Hood...

Lieberman said that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were not carried out by "some amorphous group of violent extremists or environmental extremists or white supremacist extremists."

Orwell considered himself a man of the Left but was quite outspoken against certain elements in the leftist movement, especially those apologists for Stalin's acts of mass murder and treachery.

Orwell on Totalitarianism

Famed novelist George Orwell (Animal Farm, 1984) initially considered himself a "Tory Anarchist" and then a socialist. He was, however, highly critical of various factions within the socialist movement, and especially assailed apologists for Stalin.

Orwell had seen the deadly consequences of Stalinism up close during the Spanish Civil War. In a fascinating biography of Orwell by Gordon Bowker that we're reading, Bowker quotes from an Orwell speech, circa 1941:

The totalitarian state exists for the glorification of the ruling clique, which means that the ruling clique are the prisoners of their own power and are obligated to follow any policy, no matter how self-contradictory, which will keep them in power. And having followed their policy they are obliged to justify it, so that all thought becomes a rationalization of the shifts of power politics.

Separately, Orwell wrote that "the really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits 'attrocities' but that it attacks the concept of objective truth: it claims to control the past as well as the future." Sound familiar? Hope and change anyone?

Orwell also disparagingly referred to Bolshevik commissars as "half gangster, half gramophone," which to some degree may be the contemporary equivalent of propaganda-by-talking-points.