Propaganda appears differently for every cause, but the end goal is always synonymous; to attract the audience to believe the ideas that propagandists are spreading. Blackwhite is a very accurate representation of Former Vice President Al Gore’s thoughts on global warming; he sees an event and says that it was caused by global warming when it clearly was not. Gore filmed a documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, in 2006 about the dangers of global warming. Just like the Party, he tries to convince people to believe in his assertions. His documentary contains a great deal of facts that are misconstrued. In 1984, the Party propagandizes its citizens to become orthodox in terms of the Party. Events such as the mandatory Two Minutes Hate take away citizens’ individuality and leave them so thoughtless and orthodox that they are not even aware of the brainwashing that they are constantly undergoing from all the propaganda.
The Newspeak term blackwhite can be applied to Al Gore’s campaign about global warming. He claims that global warming has become a “planetary emergency” (An Inconvenient Truth). Through communal justification, most scientists state that while global warming has become an issue to pay attention to, humans are not as doomed as Al Gore implies. His ability to see a moderately hazardous issue as an “extremely dangerous crisis” can be summed up as blackwhite. While Al Gore does blow the effects of climate change out of proportion, he does make an important point that people do need to be careful about the amount of damage caused to the environment. The world is slowly deteriorating due to the excessive amount of damage caused to the environment; just not to the extent that Al Gore has demonstrated.
Lies always seem more convincing when there is a little bit of truth spun into them. Al Gore claims in his documentary that polar bears are drowning because they are swimming long distances in search of ice that has melted due to global warming (An Inconvenient Truth), However, this claim is a fallacious claim because he used authoritative justification without communal justification. While it is true that four polar bears had been found dead in the Beaufort sea, but they hadn’t died from global warming at all; there had been a massive storm in the Beaufort Sea that killed them (Monckton). Similarly, in 1984, O’Brien tells Winston that he has been brought to the Ministry of Love to be “cured” from his insanity (Orwell 209). This is an invalid claim because Winston’s “insanity” is defined by the Party and no one can truly verify if he’s insane or not. While O’Brien lied about curing Winston, he does add in a truth; that their enemies are always changed (Orwell 209). Whether the change is good or not depends on who justifies it. The propaganda of both the Party and Al Gore tell partial truths, which in actuality, are just lies (Fremuth).
While the democrat Al Gore worked hard to promote awareness for the issue that is global warming, he is rather hypocritical. He owns a channel called Current TV, which conservative Glenn Beck offered to buy. Gore declined saying that his channel is “sensitive to networks not aligned with our point of view”. He then turned around and sold it to the network Al Jeezera in Qatar. Not only is this a very anti-America, anti-Israel, and pro-terrorist network, the country also has a huge oil industry, which contradicts