It’s treason, not diplomacy by Sherman Yellen

When the world and its words are turned upside down, I often go to my mentor, the late, great George Orwell, to be reminded of how fascists manipulate people by controlling our language. He called it Newspeak in 1984, his dystopian novel.

Newspeak was created so that the ruling Party could control its people. It banished words that might describe the tyranny that the people experienced. In its devious simplicity, it mainly prevents the people from thinking any “illegal” thoughts. If they do not have any words to describe how they think or feel, they cannot commit any “thoughtcrimes.”

Our media has become the victim of Newspeak. When Trump blatantly lied — any of his news conferences will do — there was often an article under the heading “Trump Misspoke.” The simple, truthful heading was “Trump lied.” Even better would be a headline in the present tense, “Trump lies.”

Nowadays, a few reckless typesetters will use the word lie but ever so discreetly. I was so disturbed by the Newspeak that I cancelled my lifelong subscription to the NYTimes, because this “paper of record” was not calling out the lies but playing softball with the English language — a most dangerous game.

I will let the nervous media call rape assault, since they wish to pay homage to a criminal act and the criminal who performed it, but I cannot let them call treason diplomacy. When our president talked with Putin to carve out the future of Ukraine and divide up its mineral wealth, there was only one word to cover it — “treason.” But it was a treason that was holding hands with “theft.” No, it was not a peace conference since it failed to include Ukraine’s President Zelensky.

They sidelined him and created a fiction about his legality, lies to damage a brave leader by the cowards who can only understand greed. By creating an alliance with Putin, we had turned the invaded into the invader, the victim into the violator. And when the GOP failed to speak out about the betrayal of an embattled and invaded ally and failed to recognize treason as the great betrayal it is, the Republican Party died as a protector of our embattled democracy. Such a party deserves to join the Whigs in the trash basket of history.

This president and his autocratic cohorts — the unelected and the uninformed, the insatiably greedy, together with the GOP cowards who give their loyalty to a president and his moneyed cohort rather than to their oath to the constitution — these men and women are the Benedict Arnolds of our world. Traitors to their country through their loyalty to a tyrant. History will not be kind to them. Nor should it be. Nor should we be.

“Democracy” is one of the forbidden words in Newspeak — but if democracy is to be replaced by real estate and precious mineral deals then Orwell is looking down at us and saying “Gentlemen and Ladies — call it what you will, but it is simply treason. Forget the high price of eggs, we are talking about the high price of freedom for yourselves and your children and other people’s children.”

Will they soon be allowed to read Orwell or any other book that advances democracy? Or will it be taken from the school library to be used as fuel for the burning of our constitution? The shelf life of tyranny is relatively short — but it can last for over a decade as it did in Nazi Germany — and I am too damned old and impatient to wait to see the tyrant and his treason gone, and so eager to see honor restored to our country.

Organize, vote, speak out sweet land. We are better than our current leaders and we have the chance to show it in every vote and in every protest. As FDR might have said, “We have nothing to fear but Trump himself, and his new book, The Art of Treason.”