I heard Roy Hattersley on the radio the other day. The
old tub of lard spluttered out aphorisms with his usual bluster and what one
can only assume is unthinking optimism regarding Labour's electroal chances. He even felt comfortable enough to use
a favourite lefty word and described his beleaguered leader, Ed Miliband as ‘progressive’.
Progressive is, of course, a coded word intended to convey the exact opposite
of the real intent; political taqiyya, dissimulation designed to mislead. A
hallmark of the Labour stalwart is the degree to which they believe the
deception themselves.
Once again we are drawn inexorably to draw comparisons
with Winston Smith’s dark world of withdrawn words, altered meanings and unsubtle
subterfuge to conceal the reality of lives controlled entirely by committees.
Hattersley and the other relics of Labour’s militant Marxist past are beyond
redemption and should heed well the George Eliot quotation: “Blessed is the
man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the
fact.” Or as Churchill may have put it: "… he has so much
to be modest about."
Distorting the truth by mangling, or re-purposing words
is nothing new, indeed it has probably been happening since soon after language
came about. In the world of the progressive, language is just another tool
whose ‘weaponisation’ is at its peak in politics. In Orwell’s Politics and the English Language he translates
a verse from the bible: “I returned and
saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the
strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding,
nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”
The result in modern English is the asinine “Objective consideration of contemporary
phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive
activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but
that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into
account.” It’s uncanny… almost as if Chuka Umunna himself had entered the
blog.
To a politico making a commitment to anything means
almost the exact opposite of ‘promising’. ‘Full and frank discussions’, while
sounding like robust debate means a monologue was delivered and ‘cast-iron’ may
as well be a form of silly putty, malleable to resemble any form other than,
say, cast-iron. When people mutter gruffly that they don’t believe a word
politicians say they perhaps ought to rephrase the sentiment to indicate that
they are most likely to believe the exact opposite.
Come on Roy, spit it out!
So maybe, in order to best understand what our so-called
leaders are saying to us we ought to filter their words through Google Translate with the destination language set to ‘antonym’. Or in the case of 'Woy' Hattersley perhaps we should filter his words through a sieve – if words are
weapons his come with lumps thrown in.
Waythist.
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