- JFairfax
- Oct 23, 2008
-
by FactsAreUseless
|
Perhaps it is significant that the most talked-of English murder of recent years should have been committed by an American and an English girl who had become partly Americanized. But it is difficult to believe that this case will be so long remembered as the old domestic poisoning dramas, product of a stable society where the all-prevailing hypocrisy did at least ensure that crimes as serious as murder should have strong emotions behind them.
|
#
¿
Mar 24, 2016 05:34
|
|
- Adbot
-
ADBOT LOVES YOU
|
|
|
#
¿
May 22, 2024 16:32
|
|
- JFairfax
- Oct 23, 2008
-
by FactsAreUseless
|
Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 24, 2016 16:20
|
|
- JFairfax
- Oct 23, 2008
-
by FactsAreUseless
|
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 the 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.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 24, 2016 16:23
|
|
#
¿
Mar 24, 2016 05:34
