“In our time, political speech and writing are largely a defence of the indefensible… Political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and cloudy vagueness.”
--George Orwell, Politics & the English Language
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Two of the examples Orwell gives are:
"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…
"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."
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Why, then, do politicians use doublespeak? “Such phraseology is needed,” Orwell concludes, “if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them…”
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