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Which side you came down on really depended
on whether you thought Post-September 11th, we had to be change makers
or whether we could still be managers.
Up to September 11th we'd been managing this issue
After September 11th we decided we had to confront and change.
When Tony Blair was trying yet again to justify the invasion of Iraq
he said he just had to be a change maker.
This phrase exploits the happy implications of freedom and improvement
in the term change,
while at the same time obscuring or unspeaking
the uncomfortable truth. The change actually meant
starting a war.
Take the issue of abortion. In America in the 1970s,
people who thought abortion should be legal started calling themselves
pro-choice,
focusing their argument on a woman's autonomy. Their opponents rapidly
responded by saying they were pro-life.
Well, who would admit to being anti-life?
And surely life is more important than mere choice.
Pro-life is a good example of how, in Unspeak,
it's a winning strategy to say you're in favor of something that no one in their
right mind would be against.
If you disagree with the environmental group called Friends of the Earth
then you must be an Enemy of the Earth. If you don't like Greenpeace
you must want Brownwar.
And if you were skeptical about Obama's gloriously
vacuous election slogan, Yes We Can, then you were just some
unwashed pessimist squatting in the corner, grumbling
"No, actually, we can't"
Unspeak is also useful for covering up blame. Since the financial crisis struck
we've heard repeatedly that many thousands of jobs have been lost
The use of "loss" here is Unspeak.
It implies unlucky accident and it conceals responsibility
What has actually been happening is that companies have been deliberately firing
their workers.
So there is an asymmetry in the public language. Employers like to claim credit
when they hire people for job creation
But when they sack people, the media doesn't talk about widespread job
destruction
We don't hear that thousands of jobs have been destroyed
Instead we're told the jobs are merely being lost
Perhaps down the back of the sofa.
So Unspeak is a name for something but it's not a neutral name
It's trying to smuggle in the particular point of view and silence any possible
dissent
It's specially useful when you want to divert attention from violence
as when Tony Blair claimed that attacking Iraq was just being a change
maker.
Blair has also often said that he had to remove Saddam Hussein,
as though a giant hand just descended from the sky
and delicately plucked the dictator out of one of his palaces.
George Orwell thought that, in the right hands, language could be as clear as a
windowpane.
It can't, every word is a rhetorical choice
and comes cocooned in a web of associations and ideas
but the choice of these associations can be more or less deceptive.
Unspeak is language that deliberately loads the dice.
War on Terror, Weapons of Mass Destruction,
Climate Change, Failed Asylum Seekers,
File-sharing, Austerity Measures
Oil Spill, Erectile Dysfunction,
Once we tune into Unspeak, we start seeing and hearing it everywhere
and then perhaps we can fight back.