Newspeak or genocide?

In his famous 1946 essay ‘Politics and the English Language’, George Orwell wrote about how language was being corrupted in “the defence of the indefensible”.

- SHASHI THAROOR

When people were driven out of their homes, he wrote, it was euphemistically called “transfer of population”; the killings of people by totalitarian regimes was described as “elimination of unreliable elements”. Orwell developed this idea further in his dystopian novel 1984, when he wrote about how, in his fictional tyranny of the future, Oceania would have a new language called Newspeak, in which the ‘Ministry of Love’ was responsible for brainwashing the citizens, the ‘Ministry of Truth’ rewrote history to suit the Party, and the “Thought Police” arrested those charged with “thoughtcrime”. This brilliant and chilling novel gave the English language several new words, including “doublethink”— simultaneous belief in two contradictory ideas, which, in 1984, made critical thinking impossible. Newspeak seems to be back in today’s world.