Politics and the English Language

Sashin's notes

Update 16/8/2023: I don't like George Orwell very much these days and view Animal Farm as explicit anticommunist propaganda. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Gz0I_X_nfo

You can read an online copy of this essay here.

It is less than thirty pages and can very easily be read in under an hour (you should definitely read it).

This 1946 essay by George Orwell is more relevant than ever today. The way we use language changes the way we think about things and therefore the way we run the world.

Here are a few quotes from the the piece:

"The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies 'something not desirable'."

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. 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."

"Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."