Lexington

摘要

"Political language", wrote George Orwell, "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." No leader will admit to having had people tortured, but Dick Cheney did say: "I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation programme"-which means the same thing. Notice how, as Orwell put it, "A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details." Wars sound horrible in plain English, so they have always generated a smokescreen of euphemism. "Kinetic action" means "killing people". "Collateral damage" means "killing people accidentally". Politicians typically use the word "kill" only to describe what our enemies do to us; not what we do to them. In a speech in May explaining his drone warfare policy, for example, Barack Obama spoke of "lethal, targeted action against al-Qaeda and its associated forces". As Orwell said, when "certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract".