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03/07/2006:

"The Value of George Orwell"

George Orwell remains a valuable writer, though he died in 1950. He was a man who was an active participant in his times, and since the new century appears to be going down the same road as the last one, we can still learn from him.

His essay "Politics and the English Language" ought to be read by every journalist and by everyone who reads journalists or listens to the babble on television.

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity," he wrote. "When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."

"In our age, there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia," Orwell wrote. Earlier in the essay he had said, "In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible."

Our time and his time remain the same. We invade a sovereign nation based on lies, destroy its infrastructure, depose its government and kill 30,000 of its people, and we call that "spreading democracy" or "defending freedom."

The phrase "war on terror" is a phony metaphor. We are not at war. Ninety-nine and 99/100ths percent of the American people are living the same way they've always lived. We have troops in Afghanistan and Iraq fighting an insurrection that our invasions of those countries caused. They are at war – a war of their own country's making – but the rest of us are not. Waving a flag or putting a bumper sticker on one's car cannot be called a war effort.

The "war" is being relegated to the inside pages, and it's a safe bet that no matter what happens in Baghdad, the Academy Awards will receive more coverage and notice than the war. In our nutty society, the choice of a comedian to emcee a Hollywood trade show is considered big, national news.
antiwar.com