This came out when I was in high school. That’s when I was a Communist, Feminist, Atheist, Black Panther and Viet Cong sympathizer, as well as a dadaist inspired by Hans Richter’s book Art and Anti-Art found in my school library. If I had had the money, I probably would've also been a Volvo-driving, sushi-eating, urban liberal, as I was so aptly called by proxy in a Republican election ad during, I think, the GW Bush era. It’s a good call actually, I’ll give ‘em that. I was most certainly a Salon Radical fueled with adolescent morality, someone who matured into a downtown “creative”.
And also a good call by Ramparts: the slippage of wealth to the rich and away from the rest of us began with Nixon and the surreptitious erosion of The New Deal. But I do have some quibbling about the project’s completion dates - I think 1984 has taken longer than Wells expected. It’s 2024 that looks more like a realistic approach to a full dystopia.
But this isn’t about Orwell’s 1984, or even Huxley’s Brave New World. It’s about Politics and the English Language, a 1946 essay by H. G. Wells. Its advice is important right now:
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 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 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 phraseolgy 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 get good results by doing so". Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
While freely conceding that the Soviet regime 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 rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.
The inflated style is itself 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. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics". All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.
Wells sarcastically shows us the dangers of avoiding the hard work of clarifying your ideas, and instead relying on often-used metaphors. Both writers and readers will suffer on this account:
“But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you, think your thoughts for you to a certain extent, and at need, they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement or language becomes clear.”
A very merry Christmas / And a happy New Year / Let's hope it's a good one / Without any fear
Sources
H. G. Wells, “Politics and the English Language” in The Collected Essays , Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 4, (Sonia Orwell and Ian Angos eds), (New York : Harcourt , Brace , Javanovich, 1968), pp 136-7.
So This Is Christmas, John Lennon.
Ramparts cover, November 17, 1968, pulled from my shelf (I don’t throw much away).
H.G. and John spinning in their graves...😕
As citizens of this world we have to be paying attention to what leaders are trying to sell us. I also sadly understand that some people have no time for this kind of conceptual exercise in there life ( holding down 2 or 3 part time jobs) or even worse not caring or not knowing what kind of crap our “world leaders” are tossing at us.