[Peace-discuss] Orwellian language

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Listening this afternoon to Obama's rather smarmy self-
congratulation ("I'm just one senator" ... "I can't stop the
war" ... "I want to do what's best for the Iraqi people" ...
"I think Judge Roberts went to a pretty good law school
[wink-wink, who else went there?]), I was reminded of Orwell's
famous description of political speech (from Politics and the
English Language, 1946), which we heard rather a lot of today.
 --CGE]

"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the
defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of
British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations,
the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be
defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most
people to face, and which do not square with the professed
aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to
consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer
cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the
air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the
cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary
bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are
robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with
no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of
population or rectification of frontiers. People are
imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the
neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is
called elimination of unreliable elements... Political
language -- and with variations this is true of all political
parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to
make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give
an appearance of solidity to pure wind."