17 / 06 / 2009
When truth becomes a commodity manufactured by spin doctors and aided and abetted by government departments and political minions afraid to tell it like it is [we are] in a powerless moral state…
Masters of Deception
In the 1930s George Orwell, well aware of contemporary politics, particularly the propaganda of Fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, and the contenders in the Spanish Civil War, became concerned with the corruption of language and communications.
Work for the BBC during the Second World War increased these concerns, to the extent that he wrote an essay titled Politics and the English Language in 1946, in which he asserted: “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”.
He argued that “one ought to recognise that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end”. This concern became widely shared during the Cold War, when words became weapons and vast propaganda edifices were created to brand opponents and justify policies. The same process quickly became central to “the war on terrorism”.
However, the conduct of public affairs, particularly the language of political communication, has reached new depths of duplicity in the past twelve months. An all-pervasive “culture of spin” has smothered rational analysis and debate. All the talk about “weapons of mass destruction”, “links with international terrorism”, “acquisition of nuclear weapons” and so on was based on deliberate misrepresentation. All their insistence that, despite extensive “pre-deployment” of massive military forces, Bush and Blair and Howard were “men of peace” who had not yet made a “final decision” about war, was utter falsehood. Much of the material presented to the public to justify the need for war in Iraq was equally false. This was made abundantly clear during the Hutton Inquiry in the United Kingdom, into the public naming (and subsequent suicide) of weapons expert Dr Kelly, whose concerns about the misuse of “intelligence” were used by a journalist to claim that the famous Blair Dossier had been “sexed up” for political purposes. The Inquiry revealed the machinations through which the Blair dossier on Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” was fabricated using information known to be spurious.
Equally creative effort and disregard for truth has gone into the American saga of “Saving Private Lynch”. This lack of regard for integrity has promoted even greater lack of public respect for the political process itself. In July this year, outgoing head of the Uniting Church in Australia, the Reverend James Haire, told the Church’s National Assembly that the recent policies of the Howard government (and the inability of the Opposition to do its job properly) had plunged the nation into “new depths of moral depravity”. A range of policies, from the Tampa incident through welfare matters to the war on Iraq, displayed “abysmal moral standards”. He went on: “When truth becomes a commodity manufactured by spin doctors and aided and abetted by government departments and political minions afraid to tell it like it is [we are] in a powerless moral state.” Similar “abysmal moral standards” were being displayed in the United States and the United Kingdom.
HellenesOnline | 17 / 06 / 2009 | PRESS CENTRE | Tags: Bush and Blair, George Orwell, political language, Propaganda |
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