Good post at Redwood Dragon, here.

I’ll have to get the book he references.

“…the preeminent strategy of Babylon, according to Stringfellow, is babel:

‘Babel means the inversion of language, verbal inflation, libel, rumor, euphemism and coded phrases, rhetorical wantonness, redundancy, hyperbole, such profusion in speech and sound that comprehension is impaired, nonsense, sophistry, jargon, noise, incoherence, a chaos of voices and tongues, falsehood, blasphemy. And, in all of this, babel means violence.

Babylon is the city of babel. The language and liturgies of emperor worship in Imperial Rome were babel. The Nazis practiced babel against the Jews. Babel spawns racism. In [Orwell’s] 1984, babel is the way advanced technocracy dehumanizes persons. By the 1970s in America, successive regimes had been so captivated by babel that babel had become the means of ruling the nation, the principal form of coercion employed by the governing authorities against human beings.’

But, one might ask, what are we to do in the face of such overwhelming power, our voices drowned out by a sea of nonsense and idolatry? In a word: speak the truth, live as human beings.

‘In the midst of babel, speak the truth.'”