The language of politics is too often insincerity which we have perhaps too easily accepted but which to the young is particularly offensive. George Orwell wrote a generation ago; “In our time, political speeches and writings are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuation of British rule in India, the Russia purges and deportation, the dropping of atom bomb in Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by argument which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitant driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set ablaze 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 populations 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 undesirable elements. The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words fall upon the facts, like soft snow blurring the outline and covering up the details”. In this respect, politics has not changed since Orwell wrote. And if we add the insincerity and the absence of dialogue, the absurdity of the politics in which elected officials find sport in joking about insurgence taken over parts of the country, we can understand why so many of our young have turned from engagement to estrangement, from hope to nihilism, from church to drug bunks.
Posted on: Thu, 06 Jun 2013 10:15:36 +0000
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