George Orwell remains an inextinguishable guide to clarity when it comes to thinking about politics or just about anything else. See his classic essay, "Politics and the English Language," in which be notes that the first, indispensable step to clear thought is to call things by their right names. Fail to do that, or just try to blur the elemental meanings of words, substituting long-winded euphemisms or vague approximations of their definitions, and . . . . abandon hope, all ye who enter this verbal wasteland.
To quote Orwell, "The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines 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 squirting out ink."
Orwell, thou shouldst be living at this hour! English hath need of thee: she is a fen of stagnant waters, as the most pretentious, transparent evasions smother all real meaning. And political correctness overwhelms the plain meaning of words. For example, the current president of the United States dares not clearly identify the enemy who has launched a worldwide series of attacks against this country and the idea of freedom itself: Islamic fanaticism.
Instead, he takes refuge in generalities like "extremism" without specifying what kind of extremism it is--ethnic, religious, national or what. He seems unable to see or at least admit its character, roots, source or purpose. The same goes for the well-trained bien-pensant of the all too sophisticated Western world as a whole, who seem willing to go to any circuitous length to avoid admitting what is right in front of their noses. For that would be indiscreet, tactless, the simple truth.
And so our sophists abjure the plain meaning of words. For example, when a Muslim assassin attacked a conference on freedom of speech in Copenhagen the other day, the New York Times ran a front-page headline explaining: "Anger of Suspect in Danish Killings Is Seen as Only Loosely Tied to Islam." Never mind the witness who heard him shouting "Allahu Akbar!" as he gunned down three policemen, and then went on to kill somebody else outside a synagogue.
No doubt it was just a coincidence. The way that homicidal Army major and "psychiatrist," another Muslim fanatic, took out some 13 innocent victims and wounded more than 30 others at Fort Hood in 2009--in what the Army still insists was just another incident of "workplace violence." Such phrases fool no one but only emphasize the vacuity and fatuity, or maybe just cowardice, of those employing them.
It's as if, during the Second World War, the American people were told the United States was at war not with German Nazis or Japanese imperialists but some vague, undefined "extremism" of no clear source or character.
This refusal to believe what the enemy says, or to make excuses for it, is scarcely a new phenomenon--at least where the elite media are concerned. Here is a quote from a 1922 news story (in the New York Times, of course) headlined: "New Popular Idol Rises in Bavaria" about the emergence of a German rabble-rouser. His name: A. Hitler, and as the Times informed its readers at the time:
"Several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler's anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using ant-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers."
The more things change, the more the English language deteriorates into a haze of meaningless rationalizations and empty euphemisms. Orwell would understand, even if our sophisticates don't.
Editorial on 03/30/2015