Unspeak
By Steven Poole
Little, Brown and Company 2006
282 pages, $24.95 (hb)
REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
"War on terror", "coalition of the willing", "weapons of mass destruction", "surgical strike", welfare and labour market "reform" — these familiar droplets of terminology have been our constant companion in recent years, like a gloomy and perpetual winter rain. What we have here, says an irate Steven Poole in Unspeak, is something more than lies, something surpassing propaganda. We have "Unspeak".
For its task of the political manipulation of ideas, Unspeak gives us "precision-tooled soundbites" from the mouths of presidents, prime ministers and assorted publicists from the corporate and state media which, through unremitting repetition, "saturate the mind with one viewpoint and make an opposing view ever more difficult to enunciate".
By passing unexamined into wider public use, Unspeak has "already won an important propaganda battle". The Unspeak term, now seemingly on everyone's lips, smuggles in its political message, with its assumptions and evidence untested. Unspeak politicians do not (just) engage in the empty, meaningless waffle of what George Orwell described as "euphemism and cloudy vagueness". There is, instead, a conscious and deceptive chain of reasoning behind a piece of Unspeak.
Unspeak thrives in wartime. First, an overture sets the theme — "weapons of mass destruction", for example, reiterates at volume the purely fictional construct asserting a terrible arsenal to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, whilst also serving the dual purpose of de-vilifying "conventional" weapons, particularly the most massively destructive of all (nuclear weapons), most of them held by the US.
After the fanfare, the war opera hits its stride, christened with Unspeak names justifying the military aggression (with "freedom" working overtime from the Washington war-planners' phrasebook, as in "Operation Iraqi Freedom", and "Operation Enduring Freedom" in Afghanistan). Enter "surgical strike", "smart bombs" and "collateral damage", all sanitising the job of butchering and killing whilst, in the chorus line, war cheerleaders like Fox News instruct their reporters in Iraq to refer to US Marine snipers as "sharpshooters", as if celebrating the hearty sporting excellence of "Olympic athletes practising on clay pigeons".
"Terrorism" is a prized specimen in the Unspeaker's vocabulary. The US state, says Poole, wins the battle of definitions by exempting its own violence against civilians from being perceived as terrorism, indeed dressing up its terrorism as "anti-terrorism". The word "terrorist" also acts as "simplistic ideological sleight of hand" as in ascribing the resistance to brutal US military occupation in Iraq solely to terrorists, thus providing ongoing and retrospective justification for an illegal war.
"Terrorist suspects" are damned by the adjective, a powerful presumption of guilt used to justify detention without trial, the erosion of civil liberties and the use of torture (or "repetitive administration of legitimate force" to a Pentagon Unspeaker). Washington-defined terrorists are "bad people" and "illegal enemy combatants" and therefore not worth the protection of international rules for the treatment of prisoners of war.
Sometimes "abuse" of such people is reluctantly acknowledged by those in power but "abuse" is a carefully chosen piece of Unspeak, a vague and not too condemnatory term implying an unauthorised and atypical departure from normal protocols, its use displacing blame onto a few "bad apples" and low level scapegoats. Using "abuse" helps to turn a blind eye to the "beating to death of blameless taxi drivers" and other innocent victims of the "War on Terror". "Words", says Poole, "have consequences in the world".
Shooting other innocents, like Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician shot seven times in the head on a London Underground train by police who wrongly suspected him of complicity in terrorism, becomes a "tragic mistake", not the predictable murder arising from a shoot-to-kill policy in an overheated climate of "anti-terrorist" hysteria.
In the corporate war against the planet, too, Unspeak reigns. "Global warming" has been surreptitiously turned into the more benign-sounding "climate change", a conscious strategy of the Bush administration, which, with Saudi help, has pressured the United Nations to eliminate "global warming" from its environmental lexicon.
"Energy" has also won its Unspeak spurs. When "energy policy" and "energy security" are used by the US government, the term means one thing only: oil. When the US vice-president and former CEO of Halliburton, Dick Cheney, says that the US must "explore for energy", he was not suggesting "his colleagues go hunting for sunlight to shine on solar photovoltaic panels".
Also on the environmental front, "genetic engineering" has been linguistically softened in the face of popular opposition, transformed into "genetic modification", implying mere tinkering (always for the better), although the biotech industry is warming up an even better piece of Unspeak with the focus-group tested "genetically enhanced" warming up in the wings.
Poole deftly unravels a number of other Unspeak favourites — the appropriation of "reform", with its connotation of "improvement", by reactionaries to gloss their anti-labour and anti-welfare programs, and "intelligent design" which clothes old-fashioned creationist pseudo-science in Unspeak garb to steal a place in high-school biology classes.
Poole takes bizarre aim at Friends of the Earth as an Unspeakable organisation whose very name damns everyone who is not a member of FOE as an enemy of the Earth. Poole's semantic concept of Unspeak lacks a grounding in an analytical framework of power. If the oil, coal or nuclear industry were to call themselves "friends of the Earth", this would be Unpseak in spades but those not actually responsible for despoiling the environment and who are organising to stop it seem entitled to the name. Sometimes words mean what they say.
This conceptual defect, and Poole's tendency to, at times, over-analyse language interferes with the conciseness and clarity of his otherwise incisively satirical message. He risks lapsing into a negative cynicism rather than an empowering scepticism towards the verbal obfuscations of those wielding power for their own selfish ends.