Orwelled

The title of What Orwell Didn't Know (PublicAffairs, $14.95) suggests a catalog of facts that Orwell overlooked, like how India benefited from British colonization or the upside of constant video surveillance. In fact, most of the book's twenty essays--a significant minority of them by Nation contributors--focus on the present-day usefulness of Orwell's brand of vigilant skepticism about language, politics and the media. Orwell, no doubt, would have thanked everyone involved for the attention--and may have even nitpicked about the book's title. What Orwell Didn't Know? What? Why not What Orwell Knew Generally but Not Specifically or Conclusions Orwell Might Have Reached but Never Did Because He Died Fifty Years Ago?

The collection's animating spirit is Orwell's 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language." In it, he argued that corrupt political thought creates and is furthered by sloppy language. Since so much orthodox political communication entails "the defence of the indefensible," politicians and their apologists in the press, the business world and elsewhere regularly rely on "euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness" to "name things without calling up mental pictures of them." Slogans and ready-made phrases allow and encourage the public to bypass the hard mental work of identifying and judging the often abhorrent details behind vague statements. Orwell noticed that when millions of peasants were "robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry" it was called "transfer of population or rectification of frontiers." Today "rendition" goes down easier than "torture." The public winds up only half-aware of what government is up to and, what's worse, poorly equipped to speak against it. "They will construct your sentences for you," Orwell wrote, "and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself."

The conceit of many of the essays is, basically, were Orwell around today, he would surely deplore X, Y and Z aspects of political language as follows. Nation columnist Patricia J. Williams updates Orwell's categories of linguistic deceit. To his "dying metaphors" and "pretentious diction," she adds "the wishful immediate" of "Mission Accomplished"; the "passive explosive" that made the US invasion of Iraq "Saddam's choice"; the "epochal tense" that banishes our national transgressions to the faraway past; and the American vocabulary of God-approved "just deserts." These tools of distortion, she writes, do Big Brother's work individual by individual. In the absence of an actual police state, Americans passively receive a "privatized but global corporate oligarchy whose police power comes wrapped in a sheepish ideology of laissez-faire, sanctified as God's will." It's doubtful these conclusions will surprise liberal readers of Orwell (or of this magazine), but Williams's rhetorical elegance and vigilant ear for trickery are their own rewards.

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