>>A war involves a minimum of two nations deploying their armed forces against each other: This could be only a technically apt description of hostilities as between the United States and its allies and the private army of Saddam Hussein. It would be just as accurate to say, "No quarrel with Saddam Hussein," as it would be to say, "No war on Iraq." And it might not be a euphemism to describe the impending event as a forcible removal of a hostile regime. It would certainly be at least as accurate as a description of the political objective.<<
haha hahahaha oh please, my aching sides
http://slate.msn.com/id/2078512/
>> [...] When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically
repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial, atrocities, iron heel,
bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder
-- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human
being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at
moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into
blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not
altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone
some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises
are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be
if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is
one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost
unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses
in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable,
is at any rate favorable to political conformity.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.[...] <<
-- George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language"
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