Rob Hutton presents a glossary of verbal political props from the Newspeak of today, and decodes them
WHY BOTHER WITH censorship? It’s so much effort, with the firewalls, and the monitoring, and the prisons. Honestly guys (and you know who you are), you’d be much better off sticking to rebranding.
For instance, if your opponent is raising money in a way you don’t like, why not call it a “stealth tax”? It doesn’t even need to be a tax. In Britain, one of the Labour Party’s few achievements over the last five years was to successfully name a welfare cut “the bedroom tax”. After a while, that was even the name government officials used.
In the 20th century, the USSR “resettled” the Kulaks, wealthy peasants, beyond the Urals, and they were “liquidated as a class”. If a relative was arrested, and you were told they had “no right of correspondence”, it was because they had been shot.
When Soviet satellite states showed signs of moving too far towards democracy, they were given “fraternal assistance”: the tanks were sent in. President Putin would insist Russia today is only “fraternally” trying to protect Ukraine – while protecting the homeland from “foreign agents” (aka NGOs) and its “traditional values” from “gay propaganda” (universal human-rights claims).
So, in the hope of weaning oppressive states on to a more civilised method of thought control, here’s your handy glossary of words and phrases that can mean a little more or less than you think:
DEMOCRATIC: when it appears in a country’s name, “totalitarian”; as in the German Democratic Republic, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
DIKTAT: statement with which I disagree.
DOSSIER: any collection of allegations that we have written down.
EXTENDED READINESS: used by the Royal Navy to describe ships, “mothballed”.
GIMMICK: a popular idea we wish we’d thought of.
IDEOLOGICAL: someone with fixed ideas whom we dislike; if we do like them, try “committed”.
IMPOSED: the means by which things of which we disapprove are implemented.
INDUSTRIAL: the scale on which bad things have been happening.
MORE WIDELY: where we need to look for answers, because we don’t like the ones we’ve found in the places we’ve looked so far.
PER SE: ignore what I just said; as in, “we have no plans, per se”.
PLAYING POLITICS: an irregular verb, conjugated as follows: I am raising an important issue, you are scoring points, he is playing politics.
PROJECTING FORCE: attacking other countries.
PUBLIC DIPLOMACY: propaganda.
REGIME: government with which we disagree.
TECHNOCRAT: someone who understands the subject, but whom I wish you to ignore; antonym: ‘independent expert’.
WE MUST FOCUS ON THE IMMEDIATE ISSUE: and not the thing you keep asking about.
WE NEED A GROWN-UP DEBATE: I will only engage with people who agree with me.
WE NEED TO LOOK MORE WIDELY: until we find some evidence that supports my conclusions.
WE RULE NOTHING OUT: we’re ruling lots of things out, including the thing you just said, but this isn’t the moment to tell you.
Robert Hutton covers British politics for Bloomberg News. He is the author of Would They Lie To You? How To Spin Friends And Influence People, and Romps, Tots and Boffins: The Strange Language of News
