Dänk 42Ø
2012-08-07 17:50:54 UTC
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.'
Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up
mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English
professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, 'I
believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by
doing so.' Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
'While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain
features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we
must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right
to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of
transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian
people have been called upon to undergo have been amply
justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.'
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words
falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up
all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When
there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as
it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a
cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as
'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics
itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.
When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.
-- George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language" (1946)
http://orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit
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.'
Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up
mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English
professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, 'I
believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by
doing so.' Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
'While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain
features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we
must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right
to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of
transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian
people have been called upon to undergo have been amply
justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.'
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words
falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up
all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When
there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as
it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a
cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as
'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics
itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.
When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.
-- George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language" (1946)
http://orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit