Doublethink

Orwell taught us that doublethink was the means by which members of the Party were able to function:

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully-constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be conradictiory and believing in both of them; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the art of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved using doublethink.

Kinda like this:

U.S. military spokesman Major General William Caldwell said the police brigade responsible for Baghdad's southern districts had been "pulled off-line" for retraining after Sunday's mass kidnapping of mainly Sunni Muslim factory workers in the Amil district.

(snip)

Caldwell said the number of attacks had increased in Baghdad in past weeks "as expected," but that while the number of casualties was up in September, it "did not increase in proportion to the number of attacks."

"The overall effectiveness of the attacks and the enemy's ability to inflict casualties has decreased and has been decreasing since the June period," he said in Baghdad.


Insurgents shot dead two U.S. soldiers on Tuesday, the U.S. military said on Wednesday. One was killed in Baghdad and the other near the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. The deaths brought to 17 the number of U.S. soldiers killed since Saturday.

Caldwell said it had been a "hard week" for the U.S. military, which hopes to turn over more and more control of Iraqi territory to Iraq's security forces to enable it to begin withdrawing its more than 140,000 troops.

Or, as the AP notes:

The U.S. military also announced the death of two soldiers — the latest in what has been one of the bloodiest stretches of days for American troops this year. At least 17 troops have been killed in combat since Saturday, including eight U.S. soldiers who died in gunbattles and bomb blasts Monday in Baghdad — the most killed in a single day in the capital since July 2005.

Doublethink. You don't even realize when you're using it.