Educazione civica inglese, Guide, Progetti e Ricerche di Inglese

Scarica Educazione civica inglese e più Guide, Progetti e Ricerche in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! I want to focus on doublethink, a term coined by Orwell in 1984, used by the Party. Doublethink is a process of indoctrination whereby the subject is expected to accept two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct, often in contravention to one's own memories or sense of reality. A similar concepts was also used in politics. Some examples are “alternative facts” and big lie. "Alternative facts" was a phrase used by U.S. Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway during a Meet the Press interview on January 22, 2017, in which she defended White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer's false statement about the attendance numbers of Donald Trump's inauguration as President of the United States. When pressed during the interview with Chuck Todd to explain why Spicer would "utter a provable falsehood", Conway stated that Spicer was giving "alternative facts". Todd responded that the alternative facts are not facts. They're falsehoods. The phrase was extensively described as Orwellian, particularly in reference to the term doublethink. Conway later defended her choice of words, defining "alternative facts" as "additional facts and alternative information". A big lie is a propaganda technique used for political purposes, defined as "a gross distortion or misrepresentation of the facts, especially when used as a propaganda device by a politician or official body." The German expression was coined by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated his 1925 book Mein Kampf, to describe the use of a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously." Hitler claimed the technique was used by Jews to blame Germany's loss in World War I on German general Erich Ludendorff, who was a prominent nationalist political leader in the Weimar Republic. Historian Jeffrey Herf says the Nazis used the idea of the original big lie to turn sentiment against Jews and bring about the Holocaust. Herf maintains that Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi Party actually used the big lie propaganda technique that they described – and that they used it to turn long-standing antisemitism in Europe into mass murder. Herf further argues that the Nazis' big lie was their depiction of Germany as an innocent, besieged land striking back at an "international Jewry", which the Nazis blamed for starting World War I. Nazi propaganda repeated over and over the claim that Jews held power behind the scenes in Britain, Russia, and the United States. It spread claims that the Jews had begun a "war of extermination" against Germany, and it used these claims to assert that Germany had a right to "annihilate" the Jews as self-defense. In 1943, The New York Times contributor Edwin James asserted that Hitler's biggest lie was his revisionist claim that Germany was not defeated in war in 1918, but rather was betrayed by internal groups. This stab-in-the-back myth was spread by extreme right-wing groups, including the Nazis. In the 21st century, the term was applied to Donald Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election. "The big lie" in this instance was the false claim that the election was stolen from him through massive fraud, and the scale of the claim's proponents eventually culminated with Trump supporters storming the US Capitol. In addition, Since February of this year, with the increase of the Covid 19 pandemic, may we unconsciously and progressively accustomed ourselves to considering as right and desirable an infinite number of Theses that have been proposed to us and then consider simultaneously right and desirable their Antitheses, acting in this way carelessly and automatically and forgetting both the change of opinion and the the very act of forgetting, both necessary for the realization of the “two-thinking. ” for example We have been obliged, to fight the pandemic, to put the mask on our faces inside the car if we are in the company of non- cohabitants (Thesis), but at the same time we are led to accept and consider right and correct the concept (Antithesis) that the use of the mask is only effective if we keep a space between people of more than one metre, or rather two, and we provide an appropriate exchange of air in the environment, both conditions, especially in winter, not present in cars. Another Thesis, rightly accepted and shared, is that we must enter premises and commercial activities in order to avoid inappropriate contacts, while at the same time we are induced, for work, school or other needs, to use overcrowded public transport (Antithesis). Another example is to take up the invitation, during the summer, not to travel to avoid the spread of the pandemic (Tesi), except to welcome enthusiastically the opposite proposal to use the Holiday Bonus to encourage travel and promote the economic recovery of hotels and their related products (Antithesi). We are persuaded to accept the closure of restaurants, gyms, swimming pools and ballrooms in order to counteract activities and sports involving close contact, and the quarantine of dozens of people in the event of a positive finding among users of these services (Thesis) and, at the same time, we do not find soccer matches incongruous and the very close contact between the players and, if one of them is found to be positive, we uncritically tolerate that the quarantine concerns only the latter and not both teams and all their followers (Antithesis). We automatically and uncritically accept everything and the opposite of everything, forgetting both the changes of opinion and the acts of forgetting themselves, but also and above all we forget who, how and when, for instrumental and propaganda purposes, uses language and intentionally carries out behaviours that promote the development and maintenance of Orwellian doublethinking among the population.