Look what they've done to my mother tongue

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is, we know there are some things we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the things we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter that tend to be the difficult ones.”
– Donald Rumsfeld
Whenever a writer starts attracting comparisons to George Orwell, it really is time to sit up and take notice. If the old dystopian visionary were still with us, there’s little doubt as to what would be his favourite publication of 2006. Guardian journalist Steven Poole’s second book Unspeak is an addictive, astoundingly forensic exploration of the various ways in which politicians warp, abuse and manipulate the English language.
Weighty stuff, you might think, perhaps erring on the side of dullness? Not a bit of it. Poole’s mordant wit is frequently very funny indeed, though the phrases he gleefully deconstructs (‘climate change’, ‘war on terror’, ‘ethnic cleansing’) are invariably no laughing matter. Like his attested hero Orwell, Poole shuns flowery decorative literary flourishes in favour of unadorned directness (‘Plainspeak’, you might say). Even the book’s title is a deliberate nod to Orwell’s concepts of ‘Newspeak’ and ‘Doublethink’, phenomena which flourish today like never before.
Steven Poole isn’t about to deny the similarities.
“Obviously I’m inspired by Orwell,” he says. “Today’s world is so similar to the one he envisaged in 1984. You have the distant, permanent war that never ends, many miles away, to keep everyone scared, and the enemy changes from time to time. One day it’s al-Qa’ida, the next it’s Iraq, the next it may be Iran. They’ve obviously learned their lessons very well.”
As you’ve probably suspected, the principal actors throughout Unspeak are those great statesmen Bush and Blair, and their various mouthpieces. Poole doesn’t deny that he finds these people extremely entertaining (“Donald Rumsfeld spins and dances through the pages of this book like the hyperactive photojournalist in Apocalypse Now, the Dennis Hopper to Dick Cheney’s Marlon Brando”). Hence, it comes as no huge surprise when he professes a soft spot for FOX News:
“Especially Bill O’Reilly: he’s fantastic. It’s stunning. It’s very impressive in a way. If you understand what they’re trying to do, they do it very well. But most people who watch it in America certainly don’t do so for the ironic enjoyment. It’s hard for me personally to get into the mindset of a Republican who watches O’Reilly and thinks, ‘Right on, buddy’ and agrees with every word, but there are clearly millions of people who do. Of course, if you disagree with him, he’s very entertaining in what he does.”
Still, the darker side of O’Reilly’s work hasn’t escaped Poole’s notice.
‘Sometimes he just stoops too low as a journalist,” he says. “I remember just before the Iraq war, he interviewed a man whose father was killed in the World Trade Centre attack. And this man was saying, ‘I don’t think we should invade Iraq; it’s got nothing to do with 9/11.’ And O’Reilly was just literally shouting him down, basically screaming, ‘Shut up!’ He was obviously wondering who’d let the guy past security, and eventually said, ‘I don’t think your father would be very proud of you, coming on today and saying this.’ The guy responded as anyone would: ‘Who are you to tell me what my father would have thought?’. But it was revolting to watch, and was one of those moments where knockabout political comedy becomes something nasty and distressing.”
In Orwell’s Eurasia, the highest form of praise the Party could bestow on anyone was to describe him or her as a ‘doubleplusgood duckspeaker’, meaning that instead of speaking with intonation or inflection, the individual concerned would quack like a duck as they parroted Party propaganda without thought or effort. There are many present-day specimens who fit the description perfectly, but Poole is in no doubt about who’s the most impressive:
“Tony Blair is absolutely brilliant at it, as are his speechwriters. He compresses everything down until there’s almost no verbs left, except the ones that describe him: ‘I believe’ and ‘I know’. My favourite Blair phrase is ‘I may be wrong in believing it, but I do believe it’. The question was about whether the war in Iraq was necessary, and the answer translates as ‘Don’t ask me, I don’t really know, and it doesn’t really matter if I’m wrong. But I do believe it. Trust me, I’m sincere. And if it turns out that I’m wrong, well you can’t criticise me anyway, because I was sincere.”
Meanwhile, the ‘War on Terror’ (which, it was felt, sounded too belligerent) has become ‘The Long War’:
“As in, be prepared for this to last for the rest of your life. It clearly implies that it’s a permanent state of war. This enables the administration’s lawyers to argue that Bush should have special executive powers because he’s a war president at a time of war, and should therefore have licence, basically, to do anything he likes. Hence the ‘unitary executive’, a shorthand for absolute Presidential power. Hence the ability to wiretap citizens. Hence the ability to torture – because, according to one of their lawyers, ‘Congress has no right to restrict the right of the President to conduct operations on the battlefield’. Translation: we can torture at will. All these euphemistic phrases carry the same implications: this is a permanent state of war, you should all be very frightened, and we can do whatever we like.”
Noam Chomsky once said that in conventional news discourse, a moderate is anyone who supports the exercise of US military force, and an extremist is anyone who disagrees with it. In Unspeak’s final chapter, Poole goes into some detail about this ‘moderate’/’extremist’ spectrum:
“In order to turn apologists for violence and aggression into ‘moderates’,” he points out, “all you have to do is invent two positions at either extreme. It doesn’t really matter if they’re imaginary. Then you place yourself in the middle of the debate and suddenly, you’re a moderate. You frame the debate like so: ‘Some people think we should nuke Iraq, and some people think we should send Saddam flowers every day. I just want to invade Iraq and depose Saddam. Therefore, I’m a moderate.’”
Far from limiting its focus to the war propaganda machine, Unspeak explores a multitude of wider issues: the use of ASBOs in Britain, the world’s painfully slow response to global warming (renamed ‘climate change’ to make it less scary) and the abortion debate. The latter is a classic illustration of the perversion of language, as Poole explains:
“Both the terms ‘pro-life’ and ‘pro-choice’ are clearly reductive euphemisms. The former implies that their opponents are anti-life, pro-death. The other side’s language is similarly loaded: they speak of ‘termination’ and ‘reproductive choice’. The term ‘pro-choice’ obviously came about in order to avoid use of the upsetting term ‘abortion’, but it offered up a hostage to fortune, because if you’re going to describe what’s a very complex moral issue in terms of simple ‘choice’, it makes it sound consumerist, like a supermarket. Everyone loves choice. And it very much invited the creation of an opposing euphemism. Of course, everyone loves life. So you have these completely irreconcilable positions cloaked in remarkably similar phrases. Naturally, ‘life’ itself seems more all-important than ‘choice’. And so ‘pro-life’ is undoubtedly the stronger and more persuasive of the two phrases. But the actions of either side, in describing this issue in terms of abstract ideals with which no-one can disagree, just serve to ensure that we can’t have a civilised debate about the issue. If you agree that a spade should be called a spade, then the only valid terms here are ‘pro-abortion’ and ‘anti-abortion’.”
Even fiscal policy is subject to the spin. Conservatives in America have started referring to the inheritance tax as the death tax “because they want to do away with it. Because it affects rich people, who support them. So they make it sound as horrifying as possible. At one stroke you have two hated and feared words lined up side by side, and you also convey that, ‘My God, they’re taxing death’, like taxing the air we breathe.”
Which explains why the phrases ‘tax relief’ and ‘the tax burden’ make taxation sound like a killer disease…
“Yes, something you’d prefer wasn’t there. So you say ‘tax relief’, immediately implying that it should be reduced wherever possible, and never increased. That’s the mark of an especially ingenious bit of Unspeak: it names something, and simultaneously smuggles in an inherent political opinion. If you succeed in getting people to adopt your phrase, then every time they say it, it’s subconsciously working on them. The argument is already in their heads because they’re using the phrase, and it becomes difficult for anyone to backtrack: ‘Oh hang on, I’ve just realised there’s an assumption buried in there I don’t agree with.’ It becomes difficult to extricate yourself from the implied acceptance of whatever the phrase is trying to hint at.”
Poole readily accepts that, amidst all the spin, there are some genuinely trustworthy news outlets out there:
‘The Guardian, The Independent, Newsnight, Channel Four News – and in America, there are some oases of good reporting. Ted Koppel on ABC, The Washington Post and The New York Times are as good as anything we’ve got here. Also, in America the libel laws are very relaxed, which is great for free speech. Essentially you can say anything you like about anyone, short of accusing them of being child murderers. It’s very difficult to win a libel action. In England – and I understand Ireland is similarly strict – the burden of proof is on the defendant, so journalists are far more scared of saying things about public figures, and much more circumspect. This ensures that scandals and wrongdoing frequently aren’t revealed here. In a sense, American journalism has emerged with much credit from this war. What’s extraordinary is that all the facts about the administration’s policy of torture, and about its deliberate misinformation in the lead-up to the war, have all been published in the American press – it’s all there if you look for it. And yet nothing happens. Nobody gets indicted, apart from a few sacrificial lambs lower down the ladder. Bush gets a second term, and people carry on as normal. I can’t understand that.’
Had Poole expected the Abu Ghraib scandal to bring down the government?
“You would think so. But in fact, Unspeak helped them again. It was ‘abuse’ rather than ‘torture’, so the implication was that – as with ‘collusion’ in Northern Ireland – this was the work of a few bad apples in an otherwise healthy barrel. That it was just a case of a few individual soldiers here and there, not following orders, and that there was nothing systematic or widespread about it. When they beat a prisoner to death, it was explained away as ‘the repetitive administration of legitimate force’. It was a systematic policy of torture, which has been proven beyond doubt. But the media presented it as an isolated occurrence – skilfully creating the impression in the public eye that it was just this one time, in these twelve photographs. Orwell would have been impressed.”