From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" 
Subject: RE: (urth) Loyal to the Group of Seventeen
Date: Wed, 12 Jun 2002 13:47:12 -0700

Bob King wrote...

H'mmm. Bob, your long one-line paragraphs are getting cut off. Perhaps you
can use the occasional carriage-return/line-feed?

> I see a connection with Newspeak here, but more in the sense 
> that Wolfe is rejecting Orwell's pessimism (if I'm 
> interpreting him correctly) about the human mind's ability to 
> overcome totalitarianism.

Well, yeah, I agree with that, at least; Orwell's totalitarian
state was involved in a pragmatic application of the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis that suggests that our perceptions of reality are 
defined and delimited by our language; the Group of Seventeen
seem to be doing much the same thing. Nonetheless, I hold and 
insist that the more direct application of "Correct Thought" is
to the Mao-quoting habits of Chinese Communists, especially in
the '60s and '70s.

I wonder also if the choice of the number seventeen is 
significant -- perhaps a sort of sideways reference to another 
stfnal instantiation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I refer, of
course to Samuel R. Delany's novel in which a language with no
words for "I" and "You" plays a major role -- Babel-17.

--Blattid

You are trapped in that bright moment when you learned your doom


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