“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
George Orwell, 1984
That’s the opening sentence in George Orwell’s important dystopian novel 1984, one of the most significant literary events of the 20th Century and, I would argue, particularly relevant today.
June 8 is the 70th anniversary of the publication of 1984.
The setting of Orwell’s novel was a society where three large, authoritarian governments were vying for domination of the world. It was informed by his experience in World War II, including his service as a BBC broadcaster, and, most important, his enlistment in the Spanish Civil War before World War II. eHe He joined to defend the democratic and socialist government of Spain against the fascist usurper Francisco Franco. Orwell was shot in the throat, perhaps by one of communist factions supporting the government he was fighting to defend.
In my judgment, and I’m an Orwell (1903-1950) devotee, his best book was not his novel 1984, but Homage to Catalonia (1938), his personal account of his Spanish experiences, including the internecine battles among the forces of the left, which included British Stalinist and columnist Claud Cockburn (1904-1981),who slandered Orwell with lies and lies about the war.
Orwell’s most cherished views, found in his work in Spain and in 1984, centered on the role of language, which is why I am writing this blog, a variant of a blog I have written repeatedly for more than 20 years. The chief aim of Oceania, where hero? Winston Smith found himself, was to limit the English language to about 900 words. It also included government altering of current events and history, and suppression of anything with which it disagreed, which today in the hands of Donald Trump, has become “fake news.”
In this context, one of Orwell’s famous, and to my mind most important, essays was his 1946 “Politics and the English Language.” What he had to say then echoes today, as we see the coarsening of political language led by the White House and its supporters and contributing to our current inability to accomplish shared political goals. It also shows up in business, science, and academia,where language often appears to be aimed at obfuscating or settling grievances rather than advancing knowledge.
Orwell’s key insight was the bad, imprecise, and sloppy language leads to a bad, imprecise, and sloppy polity. “Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”
We can and must learn from this. Here’s the example of President Ronald Reagan’s address at the 40th D-Day ceremony at Normandy, written by the incomparable Peggy Noonan: “Behind me is a memorial that symbolizes the Ranger daggers that were thrust into the top of these cliffs. And before me are the men who put them there. These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.”
President Donald Trump sent out a tweet before speech on the occasion of the 75 anniversary of D-Day this week. In typical uncharitable irritation, he said, “Peggy Noonan, the simplistic writer for Trump Haters all, is stuck in the past glory of Reagan and has no idea what is happening with the Radical Left Democrats, or how vicious and desperate they are.”
He then gave a less eloquent but acceptable speech, a pale echo of Noonan. By the video it was clear he had not written nor seen it before he uttered the words he was reading, head down: “To the men who sit behind me and to the boys who rest in the field before me, your example will never, ever grow old, your legend will never tire, your spirit — brave, unyielding and true — will never die.”
As Orwell should remind us, words matter, as they reflect our best and worst thinking. For Donald Trump, words are largely bullets at diminishing his enemies, not at defining how we govern our country and the world but how we glorify and empower his ego.
— Kennedy Maize