The only words that matter now are those we hardly ever hear… the truth, says Neil Oliver

Words matter. The precise meaning of words matters most of all, and one by one, those meanings are being changed right under our noses.

Not only are we being censored, not only are legislators here in the UK and around the world turning the screws on the freedom to speak, words themselves are being stolen, made meaningless or gelded.

For most of my life, the word woman referred only and precisely to an adult, female human being.

A human being born female with a female body. Not anymore. Now anyone can be a woman, can insist on being described and known as a woman.

Can co-opt the rights and status of a woman, make free with places set aside for the privacy and safety of women. All of it regardless and in denial of physical, biological reality.

Racist is another word made slippery by modern meddling. All the way back in 1963, half a lifetime ago, Dr Martin Luther King Junior said he wanted a world in which each individual was judged not by skin colour, but by the content of their character.

A colourblind world, if you will. Not anymore. Now it’s a prerequisite to notice skin colour first and to judge character second as often as not on the basis of that colour.

Discrimination against white skin is not deemed racist, but is instead virtually a requirement of meeting the demands of equity, diversity and inclusivity.

Equity diversity, inclusivity, The stuff of word salads, along with other words and acronyms repeated by the powerful and meddlesome until rendered into meaningless mind numbing.

Can’t save our NHS? Flatten the curve, Build back better, narrow window of opportunity. ESGDEI. Extremist means whatever the establishment says it means, so that anyone and everyone might be labelled extremist if they hold and voice opinions at odds with the ideology of the day.

Right and left – Words that used to be descriptive of political affiliation, terms everyone understood have not changed their meaning, Rather, they’ve been rendered utterly meaningless.

A Nazi is anyone who disagrees with today’s agenda. So too a fascist. Nazi, fascist and extremists are interchangeable, one-size-fits-all labels ready to be flung in the face of anyone deemed to be speaking out of term.

Diversity and inclusivity were once upon a time, innocuous terms. Now they come laden with implied threat, empowering those that use them with authority that may not be challenged for fear of attracting the aforementioned labels of Nazi, fascist and extremist.

One by one, words are being stolen from us or set aside for the exclusive use of those assuming authority over anyone they don’t like. Any dissenting voice, even the word truth is all but gone, no longer absolute and inviolable.

The straightforward truth. Now the truth belongs to the powerful and means whatever they say it means, and always with the flexibility to mean something else tomorrow and then the next day.

Truth. What used to be meant by truth. Truth for those who are otherwise powerless is now misinformation or disinformation, or best of all malinformation, which is truth that doesn’t fit, that isn’t wanted by the powerful.

Inconvenient truth. Anti-Semitic used to be descriptive of someone who by speech or deed made clear he or she did not like people of the Jewish faith.

Now its meaning has been altered until it is descriptive as well of anyone opposed to actions of the State of Israel, even anyone with questions to ask about the legitimacy of those actions.

Jewish people opposed to the actions of the State of Israel are also liable to be labelled anti-Semitic. In this way has anti-Semitism been devalued to the point where it’s ancient power to discourage racism is all but gone.

The word democracy is little more than the punchline to a joke. In the United States in this year of a presidential election, politicians have learned to say that democracy itself is on the ballot, which is ironic given that the intention is to have one name on the ballot and one name only, other names banned.

The name of Donald J Trump removed altogether. The word democracy has had its meaning turned inside out, upside down.

To be democratic now is to ensure the delivery of power into the hands of the few and to hell with the wants of the many.

Last week in the UK the PM, Rishi Sunak hurried back to London in the aftermath of a by-election in the English town of Rochdale.

He stood at a podium outside Number 10 and said the majority secured by George Galloway, leader of the Workers Party and a legitimate candidate by any measure, was beyond alarming.

He said change can only come through the peaceful democratic process, except we’re left to infer when elections are won by candidates of which the establishment disapproves in 2024, we’re invited to accept that the settled will of the people must not trump the will of the establishment.

On Thursday, in his State of the Union address, U.S., President Joe Biden had a lot to say about democracy.

In a pitch for more weapons and money for Ukraine, he invoked the memory of past presidents Roosevelt and Lincoln and the Civil War, and said freedom and democracy were under attack at home and abroad.

He said democracy must be defended, that the events of January the 6th added up to a dagger at the throat of US democracy. He called for respect, for free and fair elections.

All of that against the background of hundreds of billions of pounds and dollars of taxpayers.

Money already spent through Ukraine, not to mention half a million Ukrainian dead and counting. So much talk of democracy in the US and overseas while US puppet President Vladimir Zelensky has silenced opposition in Ukraine, silenced, the media outlawed the Orthodox faith.

George Orwell, the author whose words are quoted now more than most said.

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

He said the purpose of politicians was the defence of the indefensible.

Which brings us to the word genocide, A word with more explosive power than any ordinance dropped in 1945. Apparently coined in 1944 by Polish born US jurist Raphael Lemkin in specific reference to the Nazi extermination of the Jewish people, the word genocide literally means the killing of a tribe.

Last month the International Court of Justice deemed as plausible, plausible accusations by the government of South Africa that the state of Israel was perpetrating a genocide upon the captive Palestinian people of Gaza.

And yet and yet, Despite that statement, by no less of court than the International Court of Justice, still the use of the word genocide in the context of what is being inflicted upon the people of Gaza, well over 100,000 civilians, dead, wounded, lost and counting, remains controversial to say the least.

To misquote others of Orwell’s words, all people are equal, but some people are more equal than others. Words matter.

Famine is a word often misused and misapplied, or at least misunderstood. It comes from a Latin word that means to bring the hunger. Think about that, to bring the hunger.

Famine is most precisely used now to describe an absence of food. An absence of food that might be interpreted as the will of God, perhaps, or an accident of nature caused by drought or by blighted crops.

For some, it recalls thoughts of the suffering of millions of Ethiopians in the 1980s. Others hear the word and think of Ireland in the 1840s.

In neither case were people starving to death for want of available food. Ethiopia was riven by brutal civil war, and one side was withholding food from the other.

Man made starvation as a weapon in 19th century Ireland. The potato crop upon which the poor depended failed for years in a row on account of blight right enough, but there was food all around.

Meat and vegetables abounded, grown and raised in Irish fields, but instead of being given to the starving poor, it was loaded onto ships and exported. Man made starvation once more. Back in Gaza right now, this moment Gaza of the plausible genocide.

People are starving to death, out of sight but not out of mind. There is food nearby, some at least. But the humanitarian aid that might preserve life, make life possible, is being denied to the people of Gaza, so that babies have no formula, nursing mothers have no water, children have no bread.

President Biden talked this week about building a temporary pier for humanitarian aid deliveries. But what’s the point, I ask, in delivering food for a few weeks of ceasefire while simultaneously unloading weapons in Israel for the moment, the firing starts once more?

All around the world, people are demanding an end to the war in Gaza. Millions marched to call for a ceasefire at least, and are labelled extremists. The marches, described as hate marches, hates another word, possessed or manipulated by the powerful.

It’s apparently up to the powerful to decide and to define, what is hate? What is hateful? Who is hateful? Hate speech stirring up hatred. These are new crimes for the age of misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, new crimes for a time in which the truth is, whatever the powerful say it is, words matter.

Here’s the thing. If there is any truth at all in the notion that the pain is mightier than the sword, then words make the cutting edge of the blade.

They are kept sharp by precise definition and use, but blunted into meaninglessness when redefined at the whim of the powerful, snatched out of the mouths of those who often have nothing more than words with which to make plain who they are and what they stand for. What’s matter? Biden, so-called leader of the free world, calling for more war and the defence of democracy in a country where there is no democracy?

One powerful word he did not utter once was Trump too powerful? Perhaps, Biden said, Putin is on the march, that Europe was at risk, that the whole world was at risk, one decrepit ghoul rousing a rabble of other ghouls.

It was hard to watch, harder to listen to lies and more lies.

The only words that matter now are those we hardly ever hear.

The truth.