the Politics of Newspeak

This book, or rather an appendix to the novel 1984 by George Orwell (not one in any edition I've ever seen - available as a free .pdf on the link above) is a pretty apt corollary to his essay Politics and the English Language, as it details his application of his political thinking as regards language to the fictionalized totalitarian mode of English, or IngSoc, that is used in aforementioned novel. He walks us through a rough overview of the vocabulary amputations that are made to English in order to achieve the mental effectiveness of Big Brother's totalitarian regime, explaining as he goes the thinking between the removal of certain words and the curtailing of others' meanings to the absolute minimum. The overall effect of which, by distorting language, is to reduce the capacity for abstract thought among a population to only modes which are conducive to the continuance of the regime. It's a powerful and insightful reflection on both the power of language to shape thought and the power of politics to shape language - and IngSoc is a perfect example, if admittedly fictional, of this taken to deliberate extremes. Following the discussions of vocabulary and grammars permitted or disallowed there is a fairly extensive dictionary of IngSoc terms used in 1984 with explanations as to their meanings under Big Brother - with their actual meanings to us living under liberal democracy arguable. Overall this is a really interesting take on how to fictionalise language, as Orwell here isn't making up a new interpretation of dialect or inventing a new language, but butchering an existing one for political purposes. Anyone interested in how politics and linguistics intersect would get a kick out of reading this, and it will certainly add a new layer of intrigue to the novel it derives from.

Politics and the English Language

This book - well, rather a long essay - by George Orwell, has become something of a talking-point across the political spectrum in recent years, for interesting reasons. The right seem to think that it upholds their stance against "politically correct" speech policing, while the left seem to feel it upholds their idea that all too often vague populistic and non-committal speech is supplanting public honesty. Exactly where Orwell himself would have lain in this argument we will never know, as he's been dead for seventy years, but still people on all sides of all political spectrums love to claim this man who fought for an anarchist army against Spanish fascists is on their side.

   I'll quit rambling. This is an essay about vagueness; the ways in which the English language can be made flimsy, indeterminate, in order to couch the political ambitions and goals of the speaker - regardless of their ideology. Some of the most insidious ways in which this happens are dying metaphors, operators or verbal false limbs, pretentious diction, and meaningless words. If these terms mean nothing to you then I suggest you click on the link at the very start of this post and read the free-online .pdf of this very essay so that Orwell himself can elucidate you. After explicating the ways in which these linguistic tactics can be used to obfuscate and befuddle, Orwell goes on to retranslate a passage he had quoted "in political language" earlier into normal, honest English - and the differences are quite startling. Even as someone who was a keen student of linguistics at college, I was startled at how much of a difference can be made pragmatically to the same semantic statement through a handful of minor tweaks. But all of this is moot. The world has moved on a great deal since Orwell passed on; we have been living in the "post-truth" era for about eight years now, and I dread to think what George would make of the political-linguistic landscape if he could see it today.

   Read this if you want for historical curiosity. It's a somewhat interesting insight into the past evolution of populist propaganda-speech. But it won't help you all that much in navigating the shitshow that is how politicians use language today. Unless, that is, you trust them, in which case, God help you.

Homage to Catalonia

This book, an eyewitness account of a small sliver of the Spanish civil war told by George Orwell, is probably my favourite of his books that I've read yet. I read it because of the admittedly-not-as-extensive-as-I'd-hoped parallels between the circumstances of Catalonia's workers' revolution (driven as much by anarchists as communists) in the midst of a complex civil war and the current situation in Rojava - and, somewhat appropriately, read the bulk of it during four days spent at a grassroots environmentalist training camp last week.
   It is an enlightening and intriguing perspective on an aspect of one of the 20th-centuries' defining conflicts often airbrushed out of historical remembrance - the Spanish civil war is framed in mainstream memory as a straightforward conflict between the established republican government and an upstart traditionalist proto-fascist general; as Orwell so deftly explores, the reality was immensely more complex and convoluted than this,* but one of the largest precipitating events in the situation was this worker-led revolution in Catalonia - in which locals rejected what they perceived as the stagnant exploitative hierarchies of centralized organised religion and industrial capitalism, instead establishing secular egalitarian communities where decisions were made  and work was done (down to the voluntary formation of militias to join in the fighting against Franco's forces) and resources were shared collectively - is not as widely known, despite being a key aspect of the scenario. Noam Chomsky argues that mainstream academia of the Spanish war neglected to pay sufficient attention to this part of the story because they were writing in institutions to some degree tied up in the perpetuation of nationalist or capitalist or otherwise status quo hegemonies - and so even mentioning anarchist revolutions, not least ones in which "one realised afterwards that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable... a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism"; where George Orwell along with tens of thousands of Catalan and Spanish and international volunteers answering the conscience-call of solidarity had, if for only several months, and in the midst of a destructive and treacherous civil war (against not only fascists but against the machinations and subterfuge of other factions ostensibly on the same side), truly felt that they had breathed the air of equality that was the immediate aftermath of revolution, where all previously unquestioned structures of power and inequality had been levelled and there was nowhere to go but forwards, to win the fight against Franco and continue developing an experimentally bottom-up democratic socialist society, as hand-in-hand projects - obviously this isn't the kind of thing that mainstream academics would want to pay attention to for fear it inspire its recurrence, or even simply remind people of its possibility. Anyway, as expected, Orwell writes with an incisiveness and clarity, with a humbly-grounded-in-subjectivity yet attempting-to-make-substantive-claims-about-overall-situations approach to his perspective that is frank and honest and as educational as it is forthright; his descriptive and reflective passages on the nature of the conflict itself are lyrical, brutal, and bleak. One is left with a powerful and unpleasant aftertaste of the utter dank futility of war - yet also, in certain horrendously final circumstances, of its utter necessity. This was not straightforwardly a war of fascism against democracy - there are far too many twisted corners to the historical context for it to be framed as such - but ultimately Orwell, in this book, shows us the simple human grandeur of what we can achieve together when we try and how it is worth fighting for,** even when those efforts feel pointless given how far they are stilted by the actual fighting and despite the experiential drudge and vague terror of the fighting itself.
   I'd recommend this book to anyone with an interest in European history, well-written eyewitness accounts of under-reported events, anarchism and democracy and socialism and fascism and whatnot; anyone who's read either of Orwell's best-known works*** will see just to what extent his experiences in Catalonia (especially the paranoia-inducing days spent floating about between rumours, misinformation, and secret police during the Barcelona fighting and the later repression of the anarchist militia) shaped his political consciousness, lending a great deal of colour and shape to what must have been an incredibly formative time in the life of a man who went on to write some of the most poignant fiction-fable takedowns of totalitarianism ever penned.



* Two chapters dealing in-depth with the twisted 'plague of initialisms' that became of Spain's political landscape during this time, and the endless spewage of rumour and treachery and propaganda between and about each of these, forms a helpful appendix.

** As a pacifist but with a fairly similar political outlook to Orwell in certain respects (at least chiefly those that form the thematic and topical nexus of this book), I was brought a few times into quite introspective consideration of what, if anything, I would deem worth fighting (in an actual violent warfare sense) for - and I'm still working on this answer.

*** I can't remember what they're called. 1973 and Animal House?