Obfuscation and Demonization

June 17, 2021 by Maggie McNeill

To a writer, words are tools intended to convey meaning and express beauty; to governments, words are tools intended to obscure meaning and oppress nonconformity. To writers, language is the means by which we attempt to convey our thoughts to others; when we succeed, we introduce others to new ideas and possibly give them a new way of looking at a particular topic they may not have considered before. But to authoritarians, language is a means of contraining thought and smothering new ideas. Proper use of language opens minds; improper use closes them down.

The obfuscatory language government uses to obscure violence is a prime example. There are a host of special words by which governments cloak their barbarities: abduction is euphemized as "arrest", robbery as "confiscation" or "asset forfeiture", sexual assault as "searching", and murder as "execution". But those traditional terms are quaint and relatively clear in comparison to the obfuscatory language invented by modern propagandists to conceal evils in sterile, bloodless, technical-sounding terminology. Intentionally ramming another car at freeway speeds with the specific intention of causing someone to crash is cloaked under the boring-sounding phrase "performed a PIT maneuver". Firing barbed probes carrying 50,000 volts into another human being is desribed by the apparently-mundane "deploying a taser". An armed government thug intentionally murdering someone in the street is called an "officer-involved shooting". A sadistic thug paid to torture and rape human beings held in cages against their will is a "correctional officer", and so on.

The longer and more clinical a phrase, the less emotional weight it carries; Orwell would've well understood why the government wants to replace the word "ram" (short, direct, terse, active, hits like a punch) with the phrase "perform a PIT maneuver" (long, indirect, mushy, passive, hits like a nerf ball). But it's even more instructive to compare these phrases government operatives use to whitwash their own behavior with those used to demonize "enemies of the state". How do cops describe a legally-innocent person they choose to accuse of some crime? "Perp". What about a person who refuses to allow puritanical busybodies to control their consensual, private behavior? "Criminal" (There are a number of even shorter, punchier words for "sex criminals"). And those who refuse to comply with what they believe to be tyranny? "Traitors". Government actors aren't incapable of using direct, easy-to-understand language; they're perfectly capable when they want to represent an ethically-complex situation as a black-and-white one. But disguising their own abominations requires exactly the opposite approach: confusing simple minds with complex phrases so as to create ambiguity where little exists.