Orwell, 62 years later
Blown-up building with Iraqi woman. (From photojournalist Zoriah's Iraq portfolio)
Citizens of the world, rejoice!
Tomorrow, George W. Bush will be out of office and the members of his unsavory Administration, responsible for bringing you Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, nuclear proliferation, rendition programs, water boarding, warrantless domestic wiretapping programs and countless other horrors, will at long last lose the power to inflict more distress and damage upon the world’s population.
(Unless of course your name is Robert Gates and Obama’s nefarious visions for “change” involve keeping you on as Secretary of Defense. But that’s another story.)
While nothing immediately indicates that much rosier times lie ahead, there are reasonable grounds to hope the American empire will show a friendlier face this time around. I know this is not earth-shattering, as far as Obamaptimism is concerned, but you muster the hope you can, in this day and age.
One thing I would personally enjoy seeing from the new gang in Washington is a commitment to reintroduce actual meaning in language. I was recently reminded of the perils of divorcing the two in George Orwell’s stunningly relevant 1946 article, “Politics and the English language.”
Honestly, one would be hard-pressed to find another 8-year span in history where language has been so thoroughly raped and pillaged of all meaning. From cunningly preventing any real definition of torture to enter the discussion; to reworking the definition of PTSD to snake away from treating war veterans; to the assault on the prime, most traumatized civilian casualty of them all, the word “democracy”; the Bush Presidency has taken language on a pretty rough ride.
And it’s not like the President was the only guilty party. In today’s Globe and Mail, an article on page A9 heckled the reader: “Has Bush been judged too soon?” the title went. Followed by the subhead: “Democracy in Iraq would force a reassessmen of a presidency widely seen as a failure.” What? Democracy as in… everybody too malnourished to lift an AK47 and shoot?
In a section titled “Meaningless Words”, Orwell decries the trend of using words and crafting sentences that mean absolutely nothing. Apparently, this sort of deliberate obfuscation was just as commonplace 62 years ago as it is today.
Read for yourself and tell me if it’s not a little reminiscent of recent global woes:
Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.
Further, he goes on to discuss how sterilized, vague euphemisms are routinely conjured to better say the unsayable:
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence 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. Defenceless 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.
This last sentence struck me because it called to mind one of the mottos we hear most often in J-school, “Show, don’t tell.” This basically says “use such vivid language and prose that the reader sees the scene you are describing, not the writing.” The whole point of writing, it seems, is to call up mental pictures of things.
That being said, I doubt the new US President will actually mean what he says and say what he means all of the time, but if we can finally resume calling “torture” “torture” and stop equating “massacre of civilians” with “just retaliation”, I just might have to put my cynicism on hold for a sec and perform a little celebratory hope-dance.