In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a ‘party line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White Papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech. ¹ When one watches some tired hack ² on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases – bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder – one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: ³ a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. ⁴ A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance towards turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters ⁵ the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with ⁶ the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer ⁷ cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging ⁸ along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy ⁹ in Arctic lumber camps: ¹⁰ this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

  1. turn of speech : way of speaking.

  2. hack : journalist.

  3. dummy : man of straw but also a sham or counterfeit article.

  4. fanciful : imaginary.

  5. utters : says.

  6. do not square with : are not in line with.

  7. sheer : pure, mere.

  8. trudging : walking with labour or effort.

  9. scurvy : disease due to lack of fresh vegetables.

10. lumber camps : prisons where the prisoners undergo forced labour (in this case cutting wood).