Tis the Season to … Revile Conservatives and Conservatism:
Literature as Propaganda

By Joseph Andrew Settanni


Essentially, what George Orwell said is that fundamental control of the language of a people is the giving of simultaneous control over the political order/regime of that people. Language affects the way a mind works. He was, therefore, among the few rare thinkers of the 20th century who had, indeed, keenly both understood and comprehended the profound semantic and linguistic realities that lay underneath a people’s use of speech. Verbal communication informs thought, meaning cognitive processes.

Is there, for instance, a ready example to be found of this sagacious asseveration (by Orwell) every holiday season, especially the Christmas season? Literature can be used as a form of ideological propaganda, and truth is then made dependent upon the perception of it. What is meant?

Scrooge as a False Conservative

Every year, fewer and fewer people know the true socioeconomic meaning behind Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carole. As a consequence, Dickens’ central character of Ebenezer Scrooge gets thought of (before his “conversion” experience) as obviously being that of a genuinely conservative, tight-fisted, cold-hearted, despicable, money-grubbing, people-hating, miser who had willingly lived only for the perennial maximumization of profit, as part of the glorification of Economic Man. But, the initial allegation, meaning being a conservative, is just completely untrue, nonetheless. Amazing?

It is then still not too surprising at all that all sorts of negative and nasty denotations and connotations get connected to the words “conservative” and “conservatism” because of what has wrongly happened, in the popular mind, to absurdly connect Scrooge to those terms or words. However, both historically speaking and, in fact, directly according to what the author meant to actually convey through that novel, the then motivating ideological force behind Scrooge was liberalism, not conservatism. How so?

Scrooge, though it may greatly shock most readers to learn, was the accurate depiction of a 19th century liberal with his explicitly liberal attitudes, not conservative ones, toward the world at large. He was a Manchesterian liberal of that past era who, therefore, freely adhered to what today is called classical liberalism that would be seen in now contemporary libertarianism. For the most part, these facts are lost knowledge that need to be recovered and disseminated to help, thus, correct the significant error that is made by those who are surely ignorant, those who are sadly uninformed as to the truth that ought then to be better known.

The economic, social, and cultural thinking of the chief protagonist, in that novel, is very far from and necessarily opposed to, e. g., the good principles and cognition of the traditionalist right, especially (profoundly) Christian rightists who are typically found concerned, e. g., with Church and charitable works of religious piety. Libertarians would, of course, be always naturally more comfortable with a vile Scrooge being among their ranks, which would include, as ideologically expected, his total indifference to religious scruples.

For Scrooge, theology/religion is, moreover, just valueless or worthless stuff suitable for only weaklings or the dim witted; it simply has, thus, no cash value.

Nonetheless, people who are mean-spirited, tight-fisted, unpleasant etc. (dedicated) misanthropes, who axiomatically scorn charity or any such proper concern for the suffering of their fellow human beings, get characterized falsely as “conservatives” due to their conservatism as to having a supposed miserly worldview. How so?


The word “liberality” is quite widely used as a synonym or, moreover, exact denotation for generosity and has other so quite pleasant connotations, furthermore, easily associated with it, of course. Giving someone, e. g., a liberal allowance means a larger amount of money than what could or might be so expected otherwise. Having a liberal attitude toward charity, as yet another easy example in popular speech, means that someone is truly generous or, at least, popularly thought to be so.

But, Dickens’ A Christmas Carole was clearly meant, on the contrary, to be an open denunciation of the illiberality of liberalism, not conservatism, as practiced by Scrooge, a rather prototypical Manchesterian liberal of the era, of course.

However, popular language and, with it, positively associated denotations and connotations have, propagandistically, given the words “liberal” and “liberalism” the inherently praiseworthy meanings (the upper hand) that ought, in truth, to rightfully better go to conservative and conservatism, which is the significant point being made in this present article.

A false view of Scrooge, as is correctly noted, and the true meaning of what that character had actually represented is yearly, decade by decade, and, now, century upon century wrongly perpetuated on the behalf of liberals and liberalism and, as an added/related result, directly against all conservatives and conservatism. A baseless stereotype has been unfairly created founded upon a falsehood perpetrated and perpetuated by the ideological abuse of the English Language as a propagandistic tool of those who support liberalism, progressivism by whatever name.

Language and Lies

This brief article has been an attempt, in opposition, to truthfully fight the obvious deteriorating trend of language, philology, so manifestly pertaining to the rather well noted misinterpretation, fundamental misapprehension, of Dickens’ work and the character he created in Scrooge. However, no etymological conspiracy is being alleged here; what has happened occurred in the lexical realm of general kinds of perceptions, as to variously assumed psychological traits, based upon presumptions or presuppositions of supposedly associated attitudes.

Liberals and their supporters naturally do then encourage people to believe in such falsehoods as a way of illiberally besmirching conservatives and, as a logical consequence, conservatism. And, as obviously, the vast majority of teachers of literature do not, in fact, exactly go out of their way to give the correct knowledge needed; this is, of course, concerning the ideological predisposition of the Scrooge character nor is it to their progressive-minded interests to explain further the economic-historical realities of the 19th century pertaining to the intent of that novel.

Misunderstanding or misperception, thus, gets reinforced socially and culturally by the simple use and abuse of popular language, as Orwell would have wisely understood. The more subtle the propaganda, the more effective it is; people are to simply think that they are independently thinking these thoughts, not that they have been imposed upon them by the liberal possessors of the social, political, and cultural institutions of a country. Unperceived propaganda is the most insinuating and thoroughgoing as to its highly acceptable and unquestioned psychological and emotional impact.

So, in the name of liberalism, there is the vile notion that there is no really great need to correct this false knowledge with the truth instead. Falsehood, therefore, becomes the integrally corrupt standard by which error is defended and, thus, plainly reinforced by just letting the people believe that Scrooge was a fairly typical, though literary-created example, of a conservative of that past era, not, in fact, a liberal.

And, the majority of liberals, by and large, do think that this gross veniality is just quite charmingly harmless, of course, because it does not harm them in the slightest to perpetuate a certainly negative stereotype that, thus, clearly denigrates conservatives and, by extension, the quality of all their beliefs; this form of guilt by association is fully OK, if it doesn’t happen to progressives, one supposes.

At any rate, even if this aforementioned discussion is just entirely ignored, the ideological consistency of liberalism is easily provable in noting Scrooge’s pro-death unconcern, over the death of poor people, since they supposedly represent the “surplus population” that directions attention to 19th century Malthusian and 20th/21st century neo-Malthusian beliefs; these do strongly support abortion-on-demand, euthanasia, and infanticide (aka partial birth abortion).


The crude atavistic primitivism of obvious human sacrifice, service rendered willingly to Moloch (aka Satan), continues under various progressive euphemisms (e. g., free choice), meaning ever into a presumably advanced and highly enlightened era of human progress (and its increasingly insatiable lust for blood), which ought to be recognized; this is for the sake of truth about liberal beliefs and opinions.

Liberalism’s staunchly held pro-death attitude has, moreover, continued for centuries and is augmented by its support for modern democratism; one can instructively read, for instance, such enlightening volumes as Kenneth Minogue’s The Servile Mind: How Democracy Erodes the Moral Life, for useful confirmation.

The prominent ethical and moral modernity of (the pre-reformed) Scrooge is, as a consequence, rarely recognized, along with its various positivist, pragmatic, and utilitarian elements, that help to define liberalism. One perceives this, more clearly, with the quite evident success of hedonism, materialism, and nihilism continuing into contemporary society and culture.

Of course, admittedly, with the vast cumulative and continuing cognitive impact of existentialism, phenomenology, and gestalt theory, truth itself has gotten relativized into nothingness (of importance or semantic meaning).

Conclusion

And so, in the popular, Christmastime (of all seasons of the year to pick) imagination, therefore, Scrooge (the archetype of a progressive Manchesterian liberal) greatly looms, prior to his visitations by the three spirits, as the simply expected, hard-hearted and nasty conservative businessman, worthy to be booed and hissed at, in his being addicted to profits and adverse to loss.

From the novel, Dickens’ depiction of a vilely economizing scoundrel [a liberal] of the lowest sort is freely imputed, through much stereotyped thinking, to the character’s overt stinginess, due to his just assumed attitudinal conservatism. But, the denotative injustices of all this gets laughed at by those progressives who, willingly, do go along with promoting the gross falsehood involved.

He’s there depicted as a much hardened man of illiberal spirit, a true conservative character, one, quite falsely, supposes. But, as was earlier noted, Orwell correctly knew that controlling the language, also, then regulates, controls, the perception of truth among people.

Vocabulary trains a person’s thought processes; direct the verbiage ideologically and, so, coopt the cognition. Someone, meaning a person on the political right, who does not enthusiastically support or favor the existing welfare-warfare State as to its ideological collectivism, meaning modern liberalism, can get denounced as being—you guessed it—a Scrooge.