“One of the great Catholic philosophers of our day reflects on the way language has been abused so that, instead of being a means of communicating the truth and entering more deeply into it, and of the acquisition of wisdom, it is being used to control people and manipulate them to achieve practical ends. Reality becomes intelligible through words. Man speaks so that through naming things, what is real may become intelligible.

This mediating character of language, however, is being increasingly corrupted. Tyranny, propaganda, mass-media destroy and distort words. They offer us apparent realities whose fictive character threatens to become opaque. Josef Pieper shows with energetic zeal, but also with ascetical restraint, the path out of this dangerous situation. We are constrained to see things again as they are and from the truth thus grasped, to live and to work” — Ignatius Press

In the political world of lying propaganda, ever has it been that,

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.” — George Orwell, 1984

— When the State is Ultimate

The photo of Lenin above references the Soviet ideological manipulation of political rhetoric in the 20th century, and not the present Russia-Ukraine crisis.

— The Seven Biblical Penitential Psalms