Thank you. Excellent site,
Colorado!!!
And another Orwell quote from his essay, “Politics and the English Language”. Why this? because all people who are persuaded to vote against their very own interests, do so mainly by being blinded by political language, and the inability to understand it.
“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 the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer 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 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 in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.”
And we can include the infamous euphemism for killing innocent civilians in war, popularized by The Shrub (aka–W) during 2nd Iraq War, “collateral damage.”
http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit