“White Logic” and “Jew Physics”. Campus radicals have refreshed an ugly 1930s trope.

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | November 10, 2023 | Stanley K. Ridgley

[karpov]

When we think of “Newspeak,” the fictional language invented by George Orwell for his dystopian novel 1984, we typically think of powerful authoritarian governments manipulating language for the advancement of power and ideology. In such a case, the language substitutes for reality itself to protect the perceived infallibility of totalitarian leadership and its totalist ideology.

But the battle for language is not restricted to governments. Newspeak develops wherever a totalist ideology emerges—it is, in fact, a necessary characteristic of the ideology. Such battles for language dominance are ongoing all the time, and the chief locus for these battles is the university campus, that petri dish of leftist ideologies.

Today’s best example of this language struggle is the rigid artificial vernacular adopted by those who propound critical racialism. Critical racialism is an umbrella term that captures the indistinguishable variants of critical race theory, critical pedagogy, antiracist pedagogy, “decolonization,” and the odd, degenerative project of “indigenous knowledge.”

This vernacular and its ritual use arise from the stolid linguistic formula caricatured by Orwell’s Newspeak: 1) division of the world into a binary of those who are correct and those who are not and 2) paranoid, broad-brush labeling of opponents, as was done in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Communist China.

The first part of the formula is little more than crude, circular sophistry—it means that I am correct and you are wrong, because I have critical consciousness and you have false consciousness. Because this childlike assertion is nowhere acceptable for modern discourse, an entire vernacular is constructed to prop it up, and mantras are repeated ad nauseam to establish a faux legitimacy. In fact, the endless repetition of bombastic assertions is characteristic of all social-justice themes.

[thepoodlebites]

Belay my last. As Einstein would say, “let me a leetle think.”

E² = (pc)² + (mc²)²,
For m=0, E = pc. Here, pc is photon energy where p = h/λ.
E = pc = hc/λ, or E = h(λν)/λ, E = hν. That’s better.