By John Pilger
In his essay "Politics and the English Language", George Orwell wrote: "Political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. When there is a gap between real and declared aims, one turns instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."
The cuttlefish are squirting out so much ink these days that some are understandably confused. In New Statesman & Society recently, Angus Roxburgh, a BBC journalist in Moscow, wondered why the word "reforms" should be reported in inverted commas. That he asks the question at all is an indication of the progress of organised obfuscation.
According to my Penguin dictionary, "reforms" are "measures intended to effect a removal or correction of an abuse". This bears no likeness to the "reforms" being imposed in Russia, which the British media, with honourable exceptions, report as both necessary and a good thing. In fact, these "reforms" are merely another set of abuses, the replacement of one form of totalitarianism with another. The new system is said to be a "market" economy. "Market" suggests the free movement of goods and services for all; in practice, as Russians who can barely afford to eat and stay warm know well, it means the opposite.
In Britain, too, such words have lost their dictionary sense and have become propaganda. "Reforms" now means people dying on NHS waiting lists while services are destroyed. A "reformed" City of London is one in which 40,000 company directors declared unfit to run a company, according to a recent report by the comptroller and auditor-general, are allowed to do so.
In the "information society" of the 1990s, the manipulation of language has become a principal political weapon. The vocabulary of the advertising and public relation industries has spread to the news management industry, known as the media. The "reforming" of British public services â that is, the pirating and destruction of them â was executed behind a pervasive advertising and PR campaign funded by public money: so pervasive that, in the late 1980s, a massive amount of advertising revenue was funded by the government.
In the news management industry, the use of euphemism is not new. But the denial of context is now unremitting. "Terrorists", a current favourite, are those who oppose the state, never the state itself. Thus, the Irish are perennial "terrorists", while the British state, regardless of its enthusiastic participation in the slaughter of 200,000 people in the Gulf, is not. The atrocities committed by Irish paramilitaries can never compete with those of the state. More members of the Ulster Regiment were killed on the western front in the 1914-18 state terror than have since died in all the "terrorist outrages" in and related to Ireland.
"Human rights" is another product of the cuttlefish. This fashionable term is used by those who have no interest in its literal meaning. Last April, the foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, assured the Indonesian tyrant General Suharto: "Western countries cannot export Western values [of human rights] to developing nations without making adjustments to local economies". Translated, this means that human rights have no relevance unless the right of international capital to exploit a nation's resources is threatened.
With the right to exploit guaranteed by Suharto, Hurd gave him 65 million in British aid and removed any obstacle to the sale of 500 million worth of British Hawk fighter planes, which will be used against those resisting the genocidal regime in Jakarta.
It was President Jimmy Carter who, in the late 1970s, popularised "human rights". While Carter expressed grave concern about the abuse of human rights by America's enemies, he worked assiduously to protect the right of America's clients to abuse them. While damning the Soviet Union and Iran, he gave Indonesia all the lethal means it needed to wipe out a third of the population of East Timor. So delighted were the Indonesians with this Orwellian interpretation that they adopted it themselves, claiming that by invading East Timor, they were bringing "human rights" to the East Timorese.
In his novel 1984, Orwell called this "reality control" and "doublethink". War became peace, and vice versa. The present-day application of this excites almost no discussion in this country. This is not so in the US, where Noam Chomsky's prodigious work has demonstrated how Western propaganda works. Chomsky's collaborator is Edward Herman; their joint book The Manufacturing of Consent is a classic of its kind. Now Herman has written Beyond Hypocrisy: de-coding the news in an age of propaganda. Published by the Boston collective, South End Press, Beyond Hypocrisy deals primarily with the US, but most of it can be easily applied to Britain.
Central to modern propaganda, writes Herman, are "purr" and "snarl" words that carry implicit approval or disappointment. "Moderate", for example, is a purr word and "extremist" is a snarl word. Applying what Herman calls "doublespeak", genuine extremists like Suharto (and Yeltsin) become moderates, and a genuine moderate, like the late Salvador Allende, becomes an extremist. "Tragic" is another purr word, "barbaric" a snarl word. Thus, the shooting down of a Korean airliner by the Soviet Union in 1983 was "barbaric" while the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by the United States in 1988 was a "tragic error".
The Middle East, says Herman, "has yielded a cornucopia of doublespeak", exemplified by the term "peace process". "This endearing phrase", he writes, "tells us that the Camp David agreements were 'a good thing'. In fact, Camp David successfully pulled Egypt out of effective opposition to Israeli policies." In this way the "peace process" became an efficient war process. I would add that the peace process worked so well in Israel's favour that the Palestinians were forced to accept the current "settlement", which gives them little.
According to Herman, actual censorship plays an insignificant part in modern brainwashing. Official censors merely ensure the telling of "little lies" â such as the Ministry of Defence's rules for reporting the Gulf War â while "super lies" require no such assistance and are propagated freely and naturally by the mass media. The "super lie" of the Gulf War, as told by President Bush and parroted by John Major, was that "all diplomatic options have been exhausted" and there was no alternative to war.
In Beyond Hypocrisy, Herman presents a wonderful "doublespeak dictionary of the 1990s". Here are selections:
Another Hitler: last year's moderate, now threatening US interests (e.g. Saddam Hussein)
Crisis of democracy: the emergence of the majority from a state of political apathy, along with their threatening attempts to understand, organise and participate in their own governance.
Democracy: a system that allows the people to vote for their leaders from among a set cleared by the political investment community.
Development: putting to profitable use; exploitation.
Fair trade: trade in which my own country's advantages are deemed natural, but those of other countries must be rectified by threats and unilateral retaliation.
Propaganda: their lies.
Restructuring: closing down, or dramatically reducing employment.
Self-defence: Our right to attack anybody for any reason satisfactory to ourselves.
Self-determination: the right of a people to select a government acceptable to us.
Truth: emissions from the mouths of the powerful.
Victory: annihilation.
[This article was first published in New Statesman & Society.]