Welcome to Orwell’s World

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Katherine Faulkner in her blog states:

“This government’s ‘legacy’ will be the demise of plain English” referring to the British government, I believe, but fully applies to the United States. She goes on to say,

“The main point of political prose, said George Orwell more than half a century ago, was to give ‘an appearance of solidity to pure wind’. Orwell accused politicians of the being deliberately unclear in their prose, pretending to communicate but really aiming only to obscure.

You don’t need to look very far to see Orwellian echoes in the political language of our times. Take ‘credit crunch’, a word which popped up in newspapers as it became apparent that the country was facing recession. While ‘recession’ conjures unsightly images of bread lines and derelict factories, ‘credit crunch’ sounds inherently benign, like a breakfast cereal containing free toys in little plastic sachets.”

Another article by John Pilger on the same subject puts the Obama administration in perspective:

“In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate called Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that ‘passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’, ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’.”

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