British author and journalist Poole's thesis is that, "in the tradition of Orwell", the use of weasel words – words and phrases that appear to be neutral but are skewed to a particular ideology or do extra work that is obvious on the surface - is expanding at an exponential rate, shaping opinion and influencing perceptions of fact.
Although Orwell most notably coined the concept of double speak (holding two, contradictory concepts in mind simultaneously), Poole refers here to the general idea of making words perform extra duty.
Some of these are readily visible with the most cursory of examinations ('pro-life' opponents must clearly be anti-life, 'pro-choice' opponents similarly against life, 'Friends of the Earth' countered by earth's enemies), and the ideologies carried by the words are relatively unambiguous, while others require a little more thought. This is by no means a new proposition. In philosophy these terms are referred to as 'loaded' - they carry a load of implied ideology or a complicated, packed set of assumptions; and Australian writer Don Watson has written widely about the use of linguistic semantics to extricate politicians from unattractive scenarios. What sets Poole's work apart is the clarity of his writing and the broad scope that he addresses. Though set almost wholly in the politician realm, and unsurprisingly focused most heavily on the use of what he terms 'unspeak' by the Bush administration since September 11, the book begins by exploring imbedded terms in a variety of other settings, on both sides of the Atlantic.
The first chapter uses British ASBO legislation as an illustration and a springboard. Anti-social behaviour orders were introduced in 1998, and have essentially been used to criminalise behaviour that is not actually illegal. An ASBO recipient can be forbidden from performing certain behaviours for a period of two years, and jailed for up to five years if the order’s breached. While acknowledging that there may be some cases where an ASBO is appropriate, Poole gives several real examples, of which I will summarise four, where ASBOs were applied: an 87-year-old was ordered not to be sarcastic; two teenage brothers were banned from using the word ‘grass’; a young woman was forbidden to appear in her bedroom window wearing underwear; and another young woman, who had previously thrice attempted suicide by drowning, was forbidden to go “to any railway track, river, watercourse or canal in the whole of England and Wales. She was also forbidden to ‘loiter’ on bridges or go to a multi-storey car park on her own.”
The central problem, says Poole, is that the wording of the Act is so loosely worded, and the behaviours ASBOs can be used for so potentially far from actual criminal acts (being sarcastic? Lock me up now), that the range of an ASBO is unfeasibly wide. Whose sensibilities are we protecting? Whose freedoms do we infringe? Who decides what is and is not ‘anti-social’? After all, he points out, many things we now consider normal social functioning, like a Judeo-Christian framework, were once anti-social and heretical.
This is also an opening for Poole’s dissection of the political use of the term ‘community’, which Poole points out is used as though the group being so defined is a homogenous entity. This may be appropriate in some settings, like a community of football fans, homogenous in their team support, but can do extra duty when applied to a non-homogenous group, like gays or Muslims (or, indeed, Americans). We all, after all, belong to many communities, but “people who belong to ‘the gay community’ or ‘the Muslim community’ are allowed to belong to only one, which defines their whole identity.
This is a little like the word ‘tolerance’, which means ‘put up with’ rather than ‘accept’ – I might have to accept that there are people different than me living here but I don’t have to like it, and I don’t have to make them feel welcome, just refrain from actively doing anything to them.
Poole also explores shifting word use, like changing ‘refugee’ to ‘asylum seeker.’ In Australia there’s a notion of ‘queue jumping’, exemplified by the appalling Tampa/children overboard affair, where a government was re-elected on the back of xenophobic fear. Poole later talks about the notion of a ‘failed asylum seeker’ who, presumably, has not only been turned down by the Government but may have some moral failures and/or have contributed to their situation themselves.
Similarly, ‘global warming’ has been transitioned over the last decade (following, reports Poole, substantial campaigning from energy interest groups) to the more neutral and less alarmist ‘climate change’ – if the general population is less frightened they’re less likely to campaign strongly for improvements. This is akin to the switch from ‘creationism’ to ‘intelligent design’ – the underlying idea is identical (people came about as a deliberate plan by an omniscient being) but reframing it as a more neutral phrase (eliminating a Creator, not specifying who the intelligence belongs to, adding the more scientific, tech term ‘design’) make it sound more like a viable theory.
There’s also been a change in the way information is framed, so that when competing interests conflict with science (as in both global warming and creationism), demands are made that ‘both sides of the controversy’ be represented. Poole cites a response to a 2005 statement by George W Bush that “Both sides [of a debate, like evolution vs creationism] ought to be properly taught [to children]... to expose [them] to different schools of thought.” “But,” said US news anchor Ted Koppel, “not all schools of thought deserve the same level of attention.”
Poole uses statements from public figures to illustrate his underlying thesis, perhaps nowhere better than in his analysis of the death of Jean Charles de Menezes. Three weeks after the July 7 London tube and bus bombings, and one day after the events of July 21, Mr de Menedez, a Brazilian electrician was shot and killed by police because the jacket (unseasonably warm according to police, denim according to his cousin) could have been concealing a belt of explosives.
Poole doesn’t substantially address the many distressing issues leading up to this event, but concentrates instead on what was said afterward. He dissects the official police statement: “We are now satisfied that he was not connected with the incidents of Thursday, 21 July 2005. For someone to lose their life in such a circumstance is a tragedy and one the Metropolitan Police Service regrets.” As a result of this scrutiny, we see that ‘now satisfied’ does extra duty (we weren’t initially satisfied and, says Poole, that’s his fault); ‘lose his life’ removes agency from the police (they didn’t kill him, he “somehow mislaid his health with no outside help”), and ‘regret’ carries a neutrality and lukewarm distance incommensurate with the significance of what was a screw up. Then PM Blair went one step further, “referring to ‘the death that has happened,’ as though, perhaps, it had been the result of natural causes.”
Poole explores the aftermath of this widely criticised post-7/7 shoot-to-kill policy, and discusses the attempted re-framing of it as undeserved because, if de Menezes “had been a terrorist, police would have been criticised for not shooting him,” as though the criticism and not the killing were the real tragedy. And, with then-London mayor Ken Livingston’s statement that “this tragedy has added another victim to the toll of deaths for which the terrorists bear responsibility,” British authorities even re-framed the distal, if not proximal, culprits.
I am less than half way through my notes, and this review is already too lengthy. In summary: Poole also examines:
- how ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘cauldron’ metaphors remove the impetus to act that ‘genocide’ would impel (“What do you do with a cauldron? You certainly don’t jump in, since you would just be cooked along with its contents. You put the lid on it, perhaps, and hope it simmers down”);
- how terming relatively recent and/or deliberately fomented interethnic hatred (like that in Rwanda, Yugoslavia and the Middle East) as “ancient tribal hatreds” allows the rest of the world to throw up their hands in helplessness (he also comments on the interesting use of biblical language and metaphor that carry their own sub-texts);
- the medicalisation of was language, from (presumably metastatic) cancers that need irradicating to ‘surgical strikes’; and
- the implications of ‘collateral damage’ and the Vietnam War concept that “if it’s dead and Vietnamese, it’s [Viet Cong];” and
- the shift from “acts of terrorism” to “terrorists”;
The War on Terror, unsurprisingly, is the key focus of Unspeak, culminating in a truly sickening chapter on how the US government illegally weaselled its way around the Geneva convention on torture and treatment of prisoners of war. The failures of torture are discussed, from Napoleon (who said it just yielded what false information the prisoner though would make his captors stop) to modern military experts, and this position is supported by the fact that there has not been any terrorist activity actually halted or reported as a result of torture (per an FBI report in 2003).
This is shortly followed by a discussion of the post-9/11 term ‘enemy combatant’. According to Judge Joyce H Green, among other hypotheticals, this could apply to an elderly Swiss resident who thinks she’s writing cheques to an Afghan children’s charity. If it’s really, unbeknownst to her, an al-Qaeda front then, though neither “an ‘enemy’ nor a ‘combatant’, [she] could nevertheless by deemed by fiat as an ‘enemy combatant’, and therefore a candidate for torture.”
There is a particularly powerful section evaluating a 2005 column by Christopher Hitchens about why the outrage over Guantanamo Bay was unwarranted; some of this has since been retracted by Hitchens, in an article that makes interesting reading on its own, and which has been heavily discussed on Poole’s website.
In the second edition postscript Poole recounts how the hanging suicides of three prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, held indefinitely without charge and legally (according to the US government) able to be tortured, was framed by Rear Admiral Harry Harris (Joint Task Force Guanatanamo commander) as an assault: “I believe this was not an act of desperation, rather an act of asymmetric warfare against us.” That’s right – the prisoners weren’t despairing and traumatised, they hung themselves to somehow injure the military.
One wonders, reading some of Poole’s quotes (all of which are extensively supported) how often some of these people think before they open their mouths. While Poole is able to let some of them pass, indictments on themselves in themselves, on other occasions he’s moved to comment, with amusing if chilling sarcasm: when former President Bush noted that he “made some difficult decisions that made diplomacy hard in the Arab world,” adding ruefully that “One was, of course, attacking Iraq,” Poole notes “That must indeed have been disappointing.” - Alex
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