[News] Say what?

[News at freedomarchives.org]

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 
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 régime 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. "



Excerpt from the essay Politics and the English Language by George Orwell

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Newspeak, indeed, differed from most all other languages in that its 
vocabulary grew smaller instead of larger every year. Each reduction was a 
gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to 
take thought. Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from 
the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all. This aim was 
frankly admitted in the Newspeak word duckspeak, meaning ' to quack like a 
duck'. Like various other words in the B vocabulary, duckspeak was 
ambivalent in meaning. Provided that the opinions which were quacked out 
were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but praise, and when the Times 
referred to one of the orators of the Party as a doubleplusgood duckspeaker 
it was paying a warm and valued compliment.



Excerpt from the appendix on Newspeak in 1984 by George Orwell.

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