GEORGE ORWELL & MACEDONIA: the great writer foresaw many dramatic changes in world society. He understood that language and history are connected to other parts such as politics and the economy. I try to explain to my journalism colleagues in Macedonia that if youre lazy with your words or let others re-write your history it has consequences. When you say u Skopje it shows a cultural inferiority and when you accept the crazy historical thesis of Zoran Todorovski, cooked up in a Sofia nightclub, youre handing your destiny and ultimately your economy to others. But unfortunately they cant see it. They cant make the connection between saying u Skopje and there being no jobs & empty stomachs. The connection is when you allow others to think for you, you hand over your independence and are at the mercy of others. When you lack independent thought, youre less likely as a society to invent things, create jobs, youre more likely to get corruption. It is why they who seek power focus so much energy on the words you use and the history you read...a recent example has been this obsession, forcibly mandated by the EU, over the use of words such as gragjani - a deliberate attempt to strip away nationality and somehow naively create international peace with the stroke of the pen. Quotes from George Orwell: He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history. Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
Posted on: Thu, 01 May 2014 23:36:57 +0000
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