Sunday, June 19, 2005

Orwell to the rescue ...

For those inclined to give Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin a pass on his remarks this past week comparing alleged bad behavior at Gitmo to the Holocaust, the Gulag, and the Cambodian Killing Fields, I link to George Orwell's Politics and the English Language.
Consider this: "A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."
And this: "When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy ... And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved ...."
But read the whole thing. It will do wonders for your prose.

3 comments:

  1. I was going to mention last week's Daily Show, but I got a little case of writer's block. (You did it much better than I would have, even sans-block.)

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  2. The army's criminal investigation into the brutal deaths of two detainees at detention center in Bagram, Afghanistan (NYT) said that the torture-murder of one innocent cabdriver by US Army interrogators "seemed driven by little more than boredom or cruelty, or both; one detainee [the cabdriver], who had been chained to the top of his cell by his wrists for many days, was taken for last abusive interrogation when most of interrogators believed he was innocent."

    This New York Times story made me face the fact that our troops are in some cases acting exactly like the Gestapo we learned to abhor as children. The army investigation was separate from the FBI reports on Guantanamo Bay which Durbin was quoting. Durbin's mistake was not in speaking out in revulsion over these reports, but in apologizing.

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  3. Dear John Hickey:
    The Gestapo's brutalities were the institution's trademarks. The incidents you cite are exceptions, not the rule. Of course, you're free to equate our military with the Gestapo. I just hope you remember to thank them for protecting your right to do so.

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