THE CONCEPT OF DOUBLETHINK MAY HAVE ORIGINATED WITH GEORGE ORWELL and his novel Nineteen Eighty Four, yet it's managed to make its way into the dictionary, where it's defined as "illogical or deliberately perverse thinking in terms that distort or reverse the truth to make it more acceptable."

Quite the contrast to the Orwellian concept, which saw same as holding (and accepting as correct) two simultaneous and yet conflicting viewpoints of the same argument.

Which, put simply, suggests that "both sides may be right."

The sort of illogic which psychiatrists in certain Community Mental Health Centres will sometimes like deploying on such cases of theirs likely to be "troublemakers" or otherwise "too outpsoken" as a way to keep them in line with the prevailing views of the community (more likely than no a conservative-leaning such), and to accept same without question or reservation--usually with medication as reinforcing agent.

And if meds don't quite work, threaten them with incompetency proceedings in the courts, with "employment" in the local sheltered workshop seen as an alternative to avoid that possibility.

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Having been victim myself to the warped delusions of psychiatrists who enjoy using doublethink as a means of order and control, Your Correspondent can consider himself qualified to spot likely signs of doublethink in conservative propaganda, and the arguments so contained.

In any case: With today being the Martin Luther King, Jnr., holiday in the United States--the sort that racists and white supremacists would not like to celebrate, as opposed to Columbus Day--I should like to bring up a likely specimen of doublethink which the racist and white-supremacist community is fond of pushing:

If civil rights, diversity, multiculturalism and tolerance are to be looked upon as "Communist" or otherwise "un-American" (and, hence, threats to the Antient and Pecuilar Soverignty and Soverign Identity of the United States of America), are we to assume, then, that the only "true" and "pure" Americanism is one which excuses racism, bigotry, intolerance, xenophobia and the defence of White Christian Supremacy as "necessary" to the defence of said soverignty and soverign identity, not to mention the stability of a free-market capitalist system "necessary to the maintenance of said soverign identity"?

(Methinks we have a clear-cut example of illogic, pure and simple, as above. Which, moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, could further be excused as being one with "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's G-d" justifying same.)

As if that weren't enough, let's not forget where the same Communists who were holding high the banner of "the Great Unity of the Peoples of the World" were themselves guilty of racism and contempt for National Minorities. Witness these remarks from Nikita Khruschev's infamous "secret speech" of how the Stalin regime being so deflated saw this "Great Unity," usw.:

Comrades, let us reach for some other facts. The Soviet Union justly is considered a model multinational state because we have assured in practice the equality and friendship of all [of the] peoples living in our great Fatherland.

All the more monstrous are those acts whose initiator was Stalin and which were rude violations of the basic Leninist principles [behind our] Soviet state's nationalities policies. We refer to the mass deportations of entire nations from their places of origin, together with all Communists and Komsomols without any exception. This deportation was not dictated by any military considerations.

Thus, at the end of 1943, when there already had been a permanent change of fortune at the front in favor of the Soviet Union, a decision concerning the deportation of all the Karachai from the lands on which they lived was taken and executed.

In the same period, at the end of December, 1943, the same lot befell the [Kalmyks] of the Kalmyk Autonomous Republic. In March, 1944, all the Chechens and Ingushi were deported and the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic was liquidated. In April, 1944, all Balkars were deported from the territory of the Kabardino-Balkar Autonomous Republic to faraway places and their Republic itself was renamed the Autonomous Kabardian Republic.

Ukrainians avoided meeting this fate only because there were too many of them and there was no place to which to deport them. Otherwise, [Stalin] would have deported them also.

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Similarly instructive is the case of the Mingrelian nationalist organization which supposedly existed in Georgia. As is known, resolutions by the Central Committee, Communist Party of the Soviet Union, were made concerning this case in November 1951 and in March 1952. These resolutions were made without prior discussion with the Politbiuro. Stalin had personally dictated them. They made serious accusations against many loyal Communists. On the basis of falsified documents, it was proven that there existed in Georgia a supposedly nationalistic organization whose objective was the liquidation of the Soviet power in that republic with the help of imperialist powers.

In this connection, a number of responsible Party and Soviet workers were arrested in Georgia. As was later proven, this was a slander directed against the Georgian Party organization.

We know that there have been at times manifestations of local bourgeois nationalism in Georgia as in several other republics. The question arises: Could it be possible that, in the period during which the resolutions referred to above were made, nationalist tendencies grew so much that there was a danger of Georgia's leaving the Soviet Union and joining Turkey?

(Animation in the hall, laughter).

This is, of course, nonsense. It is impossible to imagine how such assumptions could enter anyone's mind. Everyone knows how Georgia has developed economically and culturally under Soviet rule. Industrial production in the Georgian Republic is 27 times greater than it was before the Revolution. Many new industries have arisen in Georgia which did not exist there before the Revolution: iron smelting, an oil industry, a machine-construction industry, etc. Illiteracy has long since been liquidated, which, in pre-Revolutionary Georgia, included 78 per cent of the population.

Could the Georgians, comparing the situation in their republic with the hard situation of the working masses in Turkey, be aspiring to join Turkey? In 1955, Georgia produced 18 times as much steel per person as Turkey. Georgia produces 9 times as much electrical energy per person as Turkey. According to the available 1950 census, 65 per cent of Turkey's total population is illiterate, and 80 per cent of its women. Georgia has 19 institutions of higher learning which have about 39,000 students; this is 8 times more than in Turkey (for each 1,000 inhabitants). The prosperity of the working people has grown tremendously in Georgia under Soviet rule.

It is clear that, as the economy and culture develop, and as the socialist consciousness of the working masses in Georgia grows, the source from which bourgeois nationalism draws its strength evaporates.

As it developed, there was no nationalistic organization in Georgia. Thousands of innocent people fell victim to willfulness and lawlessness. All of this happened under the "genius" leadership of Stalin, "the great son of the Georgian nation," as Georgians like to refer to him.

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Let us also recall the "affair of the doctor-plotters."

(Animation in the hall.)

Actually there was no "affair" outside of the declaration of the woman doctor [Lidiya] Timashuk, who was probably influenced or ordered by someone (after all, she was an unofficial collaborator of the organs of state security) to write Stalin a letter in which she declared that doctors were applying supposedly improper methods of medical treatment.

Such a letter was sufficient for Stalin to reach an immediate conclusion that there are doctor-plotters in the Soviet Union. He issued orders to arrest a group of eminent Soviet medical specialists. He personally issued advice on the conduct of the investigation and the method of interrogation of the arrested persons. He said that academician [V. N.] Vinogradov should be put in chains, and that another one [of the alleged plotters] should be beaten. The former Minister of State Security, comrade [Semyen] Ignatiev, is present at this Congress as a delegate. Stalin told him curtly, "If you do not obtain confessions from the doctors we will shorten you by a head."

(Tumult in the hall.)

Stalin personally called the investigative judge, gave him instructions, and advised him on which investigative methods should be used. These methods were simple--beat, beat and, beat again.

Shortly after the doctors were arrested, we members of the Politbiuro received protocols with the doctors' confessions of guilt. After distributing these protocols, Stalin told us, "You are blind like young kittens. What will happen without me? The country will perish because you do not know how to recognize enemies."

The case was presented so that no one could verify the facts on which the investigation was based. There was no possibility of trying to verify facts by contacting those who had made the confessions of guilt.

We felt, however, that the case of the arrested doctors was questionable. We knew some of these people personally because they had once treated us. When we examined this "case" after Stalin's death, we found it to have been fabricated from beginning to end.

This ignominious "case" was set up by Stalin. He did not, however, have the time in which to bring it to an end (as he conceived that end), and for this reason the doctors are still alive. All of them have been rehabilitated. They are working in the same places they were working before. They are treating top individuals, not excluding members of the Government. They have our full confidence; and they execute their duties honestly, as they did before.

(The "doctors' plot," it turned out, was a ruse by which Stalin sought to launch all-out pogroms against the Jewish population of the then-Soviet Union as would have made the Holocaust of Nazi Germany look like a cheap bus excursion to Branson of the kind the Great Unwashed are fond of. Stalin's death in March 1953 essentially short-circuited its outright implementation.)

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Here's another case of "spot the doublethink" to ponder:

If conservative thought expects the Lower Classes to regard free-market capitalism with American characteristics--a so-called "pure" capitalism, as it were, "completely and finally released from undue and unnecessary regulatory burden [and] opening the magic doors of free choice, competition and lower prices to the poor heretofore enslaved to State welfare and its tendencies towards Socialism"--it turns out being rather ironic, and then some, to discover where these same conservatives see the same Lower Classes in "clear and compelling need [of] 'pure' capitalism" as being @ high or extreme risk of contracting Moral Hazard (i.e., they should be held solely responsible for their actions, however immoral or unwise they may be, and they should not expect any help or mercy from the State in case problems develop--in other words, "they knew what they were doing, and they should get what they deserve. No more, no less").

And conservatives will, no doubt, be quick to blame public education for the Great Unwashed being all the more @ risk for Moral Hazard, and tendencies towards.

Why, you may ask?

The conservatives' likely answer: Because public education "has done nothing to promote a healthy and proper moral compass and True Patriot Love expected of the people and nation," especially if required for the sake of National Unity and Identity. (For "True Patriot Love," expect such to be hypernationalistic, xenophobic and ignorant.)

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Now try and show me where the examples I have illustrated above are not doublethink. You know where to leave the comments.