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Language, Identity & Politics
Orwell and the Diction of War
Language, Rhetoric, and the Linguistic Properties of Violence
Andrew N. Rubin
Sixty-five years after Orwell wrote “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell’s argument about the state of the
English language has more relevance than it did when it was
originally published in 1946 in Cyril Connolly’s magazine,
Horizon. Since then, the world has undergone monumental
technological changes, many of which Orwell foresaw. With
the rise of instant communication and other forms of mass
communication that lend themselves to the abbreviation and
curtailment of thought, we should be more attentive to how
the use of language has transformed our capacity for critical
thought, just as we should be equally concerned with the ways
in which dominant modes of thinking have reshaped the very
language that we use.
Belonging to a long tradition of cultural criticism that
took root in the late eighteenth century in response to both
the industrialization and democratization of European
society, Orwell’s essay claimed that the English language was
in a state of decay. Undermined by the indiscriminate use
of worn-out phrases, useless and meaningless words, and
lazy, prefabricated constructions, modern English, Orwell
argued, was in the grip of a dialectics that ensured the widespread use of empty abstractions that masked the realities of
Andrew N. Rubin is
an assistant professor
of English at Georgetown University. He is
the author of Archives of
Authority: Empire, Culture
and the Cold War (Princeton University Press,
forthcoming in 2012),
and Adorno: A Critical
Reader (Bedford, Mass.:
Blackwell, 2002). He
has also written for The
Nation, The New Statesman,
The South Atlantic Quarterly,
and Alif: A Journal of Comparative Poetics.
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ORWELL AND THE DICTION OF WAR
human experience and generally distorted political reality.
The question of linguistic decadence
was a deeply felt preoccupation for
Orwell in the 1940s. It was frequently
the subject of his “As I Please” columns
that he wrote for the Tribune, and it
was of course central to his imagination of “newspeak” in Nineteen EightyFour. Throughout the forties, his literary notebooks revealed that, much like
Jonathan Swift, he kept long and extensive lists of dead and dying metaphors
and meaningless and hackneyed phrases
that had entered the English language
from French, Latin, and German.
Of all of his linguistic commentaries, “Politics and the English Language”
remains his most important statement
on the relationship between ideology,
politics and language. According to
Orwell, a general tendency arose within
international politics in the 1940s of
relying heavily on imprecise prose. The
predominance of a particular style and
structure of political thought had, he
observed, fostered the spread of prefabricated phrases that distorted, concealed, and obfuscated reality because
of their vagueness. The tendency of
modern prose entailed a movement
away from the concrete and the objective. For him, modern writing no longer consisted of choosing words for
their exact meaning and then inventing
images to make that meaning clear,
but rather, it entailed the recycling of
phrases. The trouble with this reliance on phrases was that it considerably
narrowed and scattered the range of
thought. He wrote:
When one watches some tired
hack on the platform mechanically
repeating the familiar phrases—bes-
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tial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder
to shoulder–one often has the curious feeling that one is not watching
a live human being but some kind
of dummy: a feeling that suddenly
becomes stronger at the moments
when the light catches the speaker’s
eyes spectacles and turns them into
blank discs which seem to have no
eyes behind them…A speaker who
uses that kind of phraseology has
gone some distance towards turning himself into a machine.1
Orwell observed that public writers
and political leaders had been blinded
by their use of prefabricated phrases.
He argued that they had utterly lost their
agency as well as their capacity to choose
particular words to clarify and objectify
material reality. Such phrases, Orwell
wrote, “will construct your sentences
for you, even think your thoughts for
you, and they will perform the important service of concealing your meaning
even from yourself.”2
Rhetorical devices and conventions
like dying metaphors, false limbs,
pretentious diction, and meaningless
words were, according to Orwell, the
primary habits that contributed to the
distortion and obfuscation of meaning
in modern English and international
politics. Dying metaphors—such as the
talk of axis of evil, peace, and regime change
in our time—are phrases that have lost
their evocative power yet continue to
circulate unthinkingly within the English language because they spare writers
the trouble of inventing phrases for
themselves. Pretentious diction—words
such as phenomenon, element, individual, objective, categorical, virtual, basic, primary, effective,
and promote— are words that give the
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RUBIN
impression of a scientific impartiality
to what are in fact skewed judgments.
Adjectives such as historic, unforgettable,
inevitable, veritable, and groundbreaking are
routinely uttered to refer to events
that are hardly historic, unforgettable, or
inevitable. Expressions such as, “Britain’s
historic defense of the Falklands and its
inevitable defeat of Argentina” could be
said, as Orwell would have remarked, to
“dignify the sordid processes of international politics.”3
Of all the infelicitous habits that
Orwell identifies, none is perhaps more
significant to international affairs than
his description of the usage of empty
rhetoric such as democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, and justice. These
all share the confounding complexity
of possessing several different meanings that cannot be reconciled with one
another. If the principle of democracy
refers to the full participation of citi-
Language, Identity & Politics
democrats until they were no longer of
use to the United States, at which point,
they were described as authoritarian
leaders and abusers of human rights,
which they of course always were.4 As
Orwell observed:
In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed
definition, but the attempt to
make one is resisted from all
sides. It is almost universally felt
that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every
kind of regime claim that it is
a democracy, and fear that they
might have to stop using the word
if it were tied down to any one
meaning.5
Orwell would have no doubt observed
that events such as the military invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq
and Afghanistan, Israel’s forty-four
Of all the infelicitous habits that Orwell
identifies, none is perhaps more significant
to international affairs than his description of
the usage of empty rhetoric such as democracy,
socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, and justice.
zens in the election of public officials
whom they choose to form a government, in our current reality, democracy
has come to mean whatever suits the
United States strategically. It is essentially a word that designates any nation
whose policies conform to the strategic
objectives of the United States. Former
leaders such as Ferdinand Marcos, Jean
Claude-Duvalier, Chun Doo-hwan,
and Suharto were all once embraced as
years of military occupation of the West
Bank and Gaza, and the United States’
detention of enemy combatants held
without habeas corpus or due process in Guantanamo and Bagram are
actions that can only be defended by
a language and rhetoric that camouflage a brute and cruel reality.6 Otherwise, who with any clear conscience
could defend airstrikes on defenseless
and impoverished villages with cluster
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ORWELL AND THE DICTION OF WAR
bombs and incendiary weapons? Who
possesses the malice to justify the mass
displacement of civilians from their
homes by millions? And who can sincerely defend the use of “enhanced
interrogation techniques” that are in
violation of the 1984 UN Convention
Against Torture, and Other Cruel,
Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or
Punishment? Instead, urban centers
are neutralized or pacified. The murder
of innocent human beings and civilians is collateral damage. The bombing of
poor towns from fifteen thousand feet
in the air is described as a surgical strike,
not a relentless bombing campaign that
unloads thousands of tons of explosives
and cluster bombs that, if undetonated,
transform entire fields of crops and
kinetic operations.”7 Military “newspeak”
is hardly a new or isolated phenomenon. Warfare, violence, torture, and
destruction demand the invention of
new euphemisms to enable their perpetration. No one mourns, for example,
collateral damage or worries that they will
be taking part in a kinetic operation. When
asked how to characterize the U.S.
involvement in Libya, Deputy National
Security Advisor Ben Rhodes declared,
“I think what we are doing is enforcing
a resolution that has a very clear set of
goals, which is protecting the Libyan
people, averting a humanitarian crisis,
and setting up a no-fly zone. Obviously that involves kinetic military action,
particularly on the front end.”8 A few
weeks earlier, the National Security
Warfare, violence, torture, and destruction
demand the invention of new euphemisms to
enable their perpetration.
orchards into a wasteland of landmines.
Advisor, Tom Donilon, had repeated
Rhodes’ understanding of the physThe New Rhetoric of War. War ics of the conflict as a kinetic operation
these days has largely become a sanitized declaring that “military steps—and they
affair fought at a distance by remote can be kinetic and non-kinetic, obviously
control with drones and smart weapons, and the full range—are not the only methreported on by embedded journalists od by which we and the international
whose views are largely shaped by the community are pressuring Qaddafi.”9
rhetoric of the very officials who decide In Donilon’s imagination, war apparwhat these reporters can and cannot ently is not, as international law would
see. Asked recently by the Associated have it, “armed conflict,” but defined
Press how the coalition forces were pre- by movement or kinesis. Kinesis, after
pared to protect the inadvertent killing all, is not about getting killed or killof civilians in Libya, Admiral Samuel ing other human beings, or invading
Locklear, commander of the Joint Task distant lands. It is not about shelling
Force Odyssey Dawn, remarked, “The civilians inadvertently, destroying the
coalition brings together a wide array infrastructure of a country, or leaving a
of capabilities that allow us to minimize nation in ruins to decay with the bodthe collateral damage when we have to take ies of the dead. Kinesis is about motion;
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RUBIN
using it to describe armed conflict conceals what Walt Whitman called “war’s
red business.” Even the former Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, said
recently that in Libya “we are involved
in a limited kinetic action.”10
There was a precedent to Gates’
choice of words. As Bob Woodward
has observed, kinetic action emerged as a
technical term to describe armed conflict shortly after 9/11. In Bush at War, he
wrote: “For many days the war cabinet
had been dancing around the basic
question: how long could they wait
after September 11 before the United
States started going kinetic, as they often
termed it, against al-Qaeda in a visible
way?”11 According to the Washington Post,
“Rumsfeld is said to have pushed for a
presidential directive that would contain clearer definitions and authority
for the Pentagon to carry out its kinetic
missions abroad.”12 Kinesis transforms
the realities of armed conflict into an
action that is invisible and concealed,
part of a feeble attempt to place armed
conflict outside the bounds of international law. Euphemisms such as kinetic
action belong to a similar category of
terms as the description of prisoners of
war as detainees, who lack even the status
of an individual charged with a crime,
which exempts them from judicial oversight in that they do not even have the
status of a human being.13 As Elaine
Scarry has observed, the very structure
of war and torture requires that injury
and brutal interrogation remain concealed or at least displaced. The logic
of war, she argues, requires both the
infliction of massive injury and “the
eventual disowning of the injury so
that its attributes can be transferred
elsewhere.” Hence, the injured are the
Language, Identity & Politics
disavowed byproducts of war and the
metaphor becomes part of a structural
logic whereby the concealed wounding
of the human body can “come to be the
freedom or ideological autonomy or
moral legitimacy of a country.”14
In a more subtle way, words such
as totalitarianism, Islam, and the West are
abstract generalizations that create their
own vocabularies and styles of thought,
which together establish new opportunities for discourses to be repeated
with little reference to the actual human
consequences of policies that have made
the twentieth century, in the words of
Eric Hobsbawm, the most violent in
human history.15 Such abstractions
are utterly meaningless. Islam is not a
singular form of belief, but the religion of over one billion Muslims who
by no means think or practice Islam
in the same way. The West, too, is
not monolithic, singular, or homogeneous. To speak possessively about
Western values, for example, conceals
a history of overlapping experiences
and cultural zones of contact that allow
us to understand that the so-called
West is composed of intermingling and
interdependent relationships between
peoples from different cultures that are
part of human history. If specific words
like totalitarianism have become vague and
imprecise, empty phrases like the War on
Terror or the War on Drugs only thicken the
haziness of thought. Examine either of
these phrases closely and you will soon
realize that you are in the presence of
words constructed by minds that cannot express their thoughts very clearly.
When scrutinizing the phrase the War on
Drugs, it is not unreasonable to wonder
what drugs the war is on. The repetitive
concealment, distortion, and misrep-
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ORWELL AND THE DICTION OF WAR
resentation of events are consolidated
by a rhetoric that relies upon abstract
generalizations and euphemisms that
structure, package and control discussion, despite the appearance of variety,
diversity, and history.
Conclusion. A critical and atten-
tive awareness to political rhetoric may
help to discern how the prevailing discourse is replete with euphemisms and
prepackaged phrases that help to keep
the human consequences of war camouflaged and at a distance, permitting
us to live in states of denial inherent to
our time.
Patterns of thought and reified
phrases, such as global leadership, are
hardly designed to stimulate thought.
They instead lull us into accepting the
very attitudes that are used to justify the
domination of distant lands through
the use of force, political collaboration,
or economic dependence. It is perhaps
a central feature of modernity that a
critical and attentive awareness to political rhetoric may help to discern how
the prevailing discourse permits us to
live in states of denial inherent to our
time. In this regard the philologist plays
a critical social function, dismantling
and resisting conventions of thought,
rhetorical practices, and cognitive
structures that are repeated by a handful of self-declared experts who carry a
disproportionate amount of authority,
shaped largely by corporate and military
interests—not by skepticism, free and
open inquiry, and critical thought. Our
age, as Eric Hobsbawm observes, is “a
century of extremes.”16
It may seem quaint to suggest that
nothing other than the study of lan-
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guage and literature can help reinvent
a vocabulary for alternative forms of
knowledge that might very well lead us
out of this state of perpetual crisis. As
the late critic Richard Poirier wrote in
The Renewal of Literature:
Unlike works of music, dance,
paintings or films, literature
depends for its principle or essential resource on materials that it
must share in an utterly gregarious
way with the society at large and
with its history. None can teach
us so much about what words do
to us and how, in turn, we might
try to do something to them which
will perhaps modify the order of
things on which they depend for
their meaning. To literature is left
the distinction that it invites the
reader into a dialectic relationship
to words with an intensity allowable nowhere else.17
In our age then, the intellectual and
the philologist bear the responsibility
of providing an analysis of the placement of words and their deployment
in social and physical place. Therefore,
Orwell’s essay on language has hardly
lost its relevance. In a world that has
suddenly witnessed the modes of social
communication multiply in ways that
were scarcely imaginable even a decade
ago, Orwell’s critical attention to words
and their deployment in social space
can raise us above the debased rhetoric
that usurps consciousness and disables
critique. Perhaps then we will more
fully realize how warfare is concealed by
metaphors and metonymies that help
to maintain the alienation of language
from reality and ourselves from the
world in which live.
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Language, Identity & Politics
NOTES
1 George Orwell, The Complete Works of George Orwell,
“Politics and the English Language,” Peter Davison,
ed., (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), 17: 427.
Hereafter CWGO.
2 Ibid., 17:427.
3 Ibid., 17:424.
4 David D. Newsom, former U.S. Underssecretary
of State for Political Affairs, wrote in 1983 of the
“democracy the United States established in the Phillipines.” In spite of Marcos’ persistent violation of
human rights, including his government’s assassination of its major opposition leader, Newsom somehow
found it consistent with the realities on the ground
to claim, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that
under Marcos there was “freedom of expression, freedom of choice, and a established basis for succession
to the presidency.” [Christian Science Monitor (September
1983): 23]. Several days after Newsom made his comment, the opposition leader Senator Jose Diokono,
head of the Movement for National Rights and Sovereignty, claimed that the U.S. was providing support
to his organization to help to maintain the “façade of
democracy.” [Christian Science Monitor (February 1984):
2].
A comparison to U.S. views on the regime of
Chun Doo-hwan in South Korea reveals a similar
pattern. On a visit to Seoul in 1986, Secretary of
State George P. Shultz praised the government of
Chun Doo-hwan, who seized power in South Korea
in 1980, only to soon thereafter be widely criticized
for his imposition of martial law and his brutish
repression of the democratic movement. Despite the
authoritarian nature of the U.S.’s South Korean ally,
Shultz had little difficulty turning a blind eye towards
Chun Doo-hwan’s penchant for censorship and his
far from gentle response to student protests. More
interested in maintaining a strategic relationship with
the Hwan government than suspending the millions
dollars of aid to encourage the dictator to embrace
some form of democratic government, which would
most likely involve Hwan ouster, Schultz confidently
declared that South Korea was doing a “terrific job in
… institutionalizing democracy.” Meanwhile, outside
the meeting between the officials, several thousand
workers and students clashed violently with police in
the town of Inchon. It was the most incendiary protest
that the country had seen under Hwan’s rule. [“Shultz
Arives in Seoul, Praises South Korean Government,”
The Washington Post, 7 May 1986.]
Other dictators have been routinely praised as
beacons of democracy in spite of their poor record of
respecting even the most basic of human rights. On
his first visit to Indonesia in 1986, president Reagan
spoke highly of Suharto’s government’s global role
as a “most responsible influence in world affairs.”
Overlooking Suharto’s decades of brutal repression in
East Timor that claimed over 102,800 lives according
to the Commission for Reception, Truth, and Reconciliation in the occupied territories, a White House
spokesman regarded the Indonesian government as
fulfilling, “a great humanitarian service” by allowing
refugees leaving the war-torn country of East Timor
to enter Indonesia. [“Reagan Faces Balancing Trip in
Asia,” The Washington Post, 27 April 1986]
5 CWGO, 17:425.
6 Ilan Pappé, The Bureaucracy of Evil: The History of the
Israeli Occupation (Arizona: Oneworld, 2011); Saree
Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (New
York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008); Adam
Horowitz and others, The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of
the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict (New York:
Nation Books, 2011); Avi Shlaim, Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations (New York: Verso,
2010). International Committee for the Red Cross,
“ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen ‘High
Value Detainees’ in CIA Custody by the International
Committee of the Red Cross,” Internet, http://www.
nybooks.com/media/doc/2010/04/22/icrc-report.
pdf, 14 February 2007, (date accessed: September 23,
2011); David Cole, “They Did Authorize Torture,
But…” Internet, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/
archives/2010/apr/08/they-did-authorize-torturebut/ (date accessed: ); David Cole, “Getting Away with
Torture,” Internet, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/
archives/2010/jan/14/getting-away-with-torture/, 14
January 2010, (date accessed: September 23, 2011 ).
7 “DOD News Briefing with Adm. Locklear
via Telephone from USS Mount Whitney,” Internet, http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.
aspx?transcriptid=4793, 22 March 2011, (date
accessed: September 23, 2011 ).
8 “Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jay Carney,
Senior Director for Western Hemisphere Affairs
Dan Restrepo and Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes,”
Internet, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-pressoffice/2011/03/23/press-briefing-press-secretaryjay-carney-senior-director-western-hemisp, 23
March 2011, (date accessed: September 23, 2011 ).
9 “Briefing by National Security Advisor Tom
Donilon and Deputy National Security Advisor Ben
Rhodes on Libya and the Middle East,” Internet, http://
www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/03/10/
briefing-national-security-advisor-tom-donilonand-deputy-national-secur, 10 March 2011, (date
accessed: September 23, 2011)
10 “Gates Defends U.S. Libya Involvement,” The
Wall Street Journal, Internet http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2011/06/19/gates-defends-u-s-libya-involvement/, June 2011, (date accessed: September 23,
2011).
11 Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2002), 150 [emphasis mine]
12 Jim Hoagland, “Terror Turf Wars,” The
Washington Post, Internet http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/14/
AR2006041401899.html, 16 Apri 2006, (date
accessed: ). [emphasis mine]
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ORWELL AND THE DICTION OF WAR
13 This linguistic designation, which emerged in
the form of a military order issued on 11 November
2001 by President Bush, effectively elided the legal
status of the detained individual, who neither stood
accused of committing a crime nor was considered a
prisoner of war, subject to the protocols of the Geneva
Convention. Exceptional measures, such as Bush’s
military decree, have, as Giorgio Agamben argues,
not only become the fundamental practice of states
in the twenty-first century, but they have also radically transformed the structure of traditional constitutional forms, inhabiting a zone of uncertainty between
democracy and absolutism. As a structure by which
the law incorporates human life by means of its own
[ 1 4 ] Georgetown Journal of International Affairs
suspension as the law, the state of exception has thus
become the dominant paradigm of government in the
early twenty-first century. See Giorgio Agamben, State
of Exception, Kevin Attell (trans) (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005), 3–5.
14 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and
Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1987), 81.
15 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the
World, 1914-1991 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994).
16 Hobsbawm, 3.
17 Richard Poirier, The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian
Reflections (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).