[jeffersondem]

“I'll be most interested to learn your thoughts on the subject (unconditional surrender), and how they may, or may not, be related to George Orwell's 1940s era warnings.”

The prefix “un-” means, so far as I know, not.

So, a new word with that prefix means the opposite of the original.

Unconditional surrender is the opposite of conditional surrender. Don't think of those two words as synonyms.

As to Orwell and his book, he was concerned about sinister forces abusing language for manipulative purposes.

[BroJoeK]

jeffersondem: "As to Orwell and his book, he was concerned about sinister forces abusing language for manipulative purposes."

So, do you mean by that, that some or all of the uses I cited above were "sinister forces abusing language for manipulative purposes"?