Tag: George Orwell

Suddenly, the term “spying” was declared as categorically exclusive of any intelligence surveillance. He explained that he did not just get the conclusions of Robert Mueller but that the basic findings had been disclosed weeks earlier. It did not matter that Rosenstein described the questioning of the intentions of Barr or the necessity for redactions as “completely bizarre” and that, in his view, Barr has been “as forthcoming as he can.” The narrative has continued unabated, and billionaire Tom Steyer has even funded a national commercial repeating how ridiculous it is that Barr could have determined the conclusions of the special counsel report in just two days. Senator Jeanne Shaheen asked why the attorney general was evidently looking into the basis for the secret investigation into the 2016 campaign. Barr explained that he was concerned about any kind of spying, foreign or domestic, on our political process. Indeed, Democrats and the media have used the terms interchangeably, until another language change was spontaneously declared this week. “Wiretapping” was previously often used as a generality for surveillance. The media discussed whether Trump was guilty of collusion, despite there being no such crime in the federal code. Speech codes are now common and the meaning of terms is based on how language is received rather than intended. In the same way, it does not matter that what Barr meant was reasonable or that he immediately clarified “wiretapping” as “improper surveillance.” It was important to portray as an absurdity any suggestion of the Obama administration spying on a Republican campaign, even though two key officials were targeted during the campaign.

The real villains here aren’t the journalists who pushed for innocent kids to be expelled from school and punched in the face. One of those students, a boy called Nick Sandmann, made the mistake of going on NBC. NBC is fine with people standing around, most people anyway. NBC just doesn’t think that people like Nick Sandmann should stand in place. "And I think a lot of folks were asking the question, when — why do we always do this, in these sorts of cases, when white boys are involved? ... We give privilege to these white kids. The Ivy League professor has far less privilege than Nick Sandmann, who is a Catholic school student from one of the country’s poorest states. Once people start believing that some groups are inherently inferior to other groups — “They have more privilege." People start hating each other. Identity politics will destroy this country faster than a foreign invasion.

CNN's Alisyn Camerota compares the White House's omission of Russian President Vladimir Putin's verbal support for President Trump in the 2016 election from the Helsinki summit transcript to something that could have happened in a George Orwell novel.

Evan Vucci | AP FBI agent Peter Strzok’s testimony last week before the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees reminded me of that old warhorse of college freshman composition, “Politics and the English Language.” In 1946, British writer George Orwell connected the disorder of contemporary politics with the decay of clear, expressive language. The English language, Orwell said, “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” In other words, imprecise language spawns imprecise thinking — and vice versa. Strzok was accused by House Republicans of “bias,” based on emails that Strzok exchanged with his mistress expressing his distaste for presidential candidate Donald Trump. Strzok’s late-night emails to his mistress were ill-advised, but there’s no reason to think that his political perspective on a potential Trump presidency was prejudiced, preconceived or unreasonable. But perspective and opinion are not bias. What Strzok is guilty of is having an opinion, and then using poor judgment in expressing his opinion to his mistress in writing. We might imagine the universe in which intelligent, informed, concerned people like Strzok could not possibly have an opinion about the wisdom of electing a man like Trump, but such a place is a fantasy. What we can expect — and demand — is that their political opinions have no impact on their commitment to the FBI’s mission. And the evidence indicates that Strzok’s opinions did not affect his investigative work. The other great enemy of clear language and good politics is the use of imprecise language to achieve a political end.

George Orwell was serious about politics. During the war he was sharply critical of anarchist war resisters, but when Scotland Yard raided their press in 1944, Orwell published a stinging criticism in the socialist Tribune. Organizing takes effort and courage, and Orwell saw no shame in starting small. He collected pamphlets from even the smallest groups, and he took them seriously. Fischer, who had briefly been the General Secretary of the German Communist Party — before breaking with Russia in 1926 — had just published a massive study, Stalin and German Communism, published in 1948. A month later, shortly after Fischer visited him, Orwell wrote to his friend Tosco Fyvel, who had originally sent him Fischer’s book: “it was fun meeting somebody who had known Radek & Bukharin & others intimately.” In July, Orwell and Fischer exchanged gifts (Burmese Days from Orwell, chocolates from Fischer) and Orwell sought Fischer’s advice about a request he had received from a journal, POSSEV, which had just been founded by displaced Russians in Frankfurt. Orwell first used the phrase “oligarchical collectivism” in an appreciative review of one of Borkenau’s books, and he warmly reviewed several of Borkenau’s other books as well, including Borkenau’s critical history of the Communist International from 1938. Later that month, Fischer wrote to Lasky from Paris: “I am running about with the project for the Berlin Congress and find sympathy everywhere and response. For instance, with Koestler, whom I saw yesterday.” Two days later, Koestler sent Fischer a typed proposal for a human rights league “which some years ago I wanted to found with Russell and Orwell. Rather than taking Orwell seriously, he simply maligned him as a quirky innocent, a lovable eccentric.