Since when were we at war with the fish?

Steven Poole's Unspeak is an insightful critique of the abuse of the English language for political use. Drawing on Orwell's concept of Newspeak, through which the State restricts individuals' boundaries of thought through the destruction of words, Poole's Unspeak presents a more subtle concept: the practice of influencing people's attitudes towards a policy or political objective by creating terms that attempt to hide often unspoken, but highly value-laden ideas.

Many such terms are, of course, well known, as in euphemisms designed to gloss over unspeakable acts of violence, such as 'ethnic cleansing' (as opposed to 'mass murder', or even 'genocide'), 'collateral damage' (which sounds more like someone keyed both doors of your car) and 'surgical strikes' (which rather ironically combines the tools of mass murder with the precision of the 'operating theatre', incidentally, a term also used in military circles to refer to an area in which, presumably, 'surgical strikes' are carried out to minimize 'collateral damage'). In Poole's view, the success of Unspeak relies on silencing any opposing view from the outset by re-framing the way in which a particular issue is discussed. Thus, we have terms such as 'tax relief', which implies that you should be grateful for your taxes to be lowered and that what the opposition is proposing constitutes a 'tax burden', or terms such as 'pro-choice', which re-frames the negativity of 'abortion' into the positivity of 'choice', while at the same time implying that if you are not 'pro-choice' then you must be 'anti-choice'. This, of course, is matched by the equally astute 'pro-life'. A common mechanism for Unspeak is to create such artificially extreme dichotomies that only one view can possibly be considered reasonable, much in the spirit of "If you're not with us, you're against us" and "The coalition of the willing", by which any opponents must by implication be unwilling and complicit in terrorism.

Much of the book focuses on propagandist terms that have become widespread in the 'War on Terror', but Poole also analyzes some surprisingly far more subtle (at least to me) terms. In particular, the apparently innocuous term 'community' turns out to be highly charged in political speak. 'Community' harks back to the days when we lived harmoniously in quaint little villages with a common set of moral values. You can thus "Go to any community", in which you'll encounter a sense of 'community spirit', and you can speak of "The biggest threat to our community". 'Community' in the sense implied, however, is rarely applicable these days, so while reminiscing about forms of life that no longer exist, we nevertheless use 'community' to label others whom we deem to be different from ourselves, as in 'the Muslim community', or 'the Chinese community' or 'the gay community'. The Unspeak quality here is that there exist such 'communities' that are, in some tangible way, different from our own, that are internally homogeneous, and whose defining characteristic is that of belonging to a different religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation. In this way, we cleverly place abstract boundaries between us and them, while congratulating ourselves on our sense of tolerance, as in "There is a large Chinese community in London" (but note that they're not quite part of our community). Our sense of tolerance does have its limits, however, for while we accept such communities, there are certain people we are certainly not prepared to accept, such as 'bogus asylum seekers' and 'illegal refugees', neither kind of which can actually be legally said to exist, since anyone is entitled to seek refuge and asylum without prejudice. The descriptions of 'bogus' and 'illegal' thus preclude the assumption of legitimacy that constitutes due process and an individual's right. And so it is with 'terrorist suspects' and so on. In fact, the desire of stripping individuals' legitimacy can be so extreme that, in order to remove any association between suicide and martyrdom, people have even attempted to use such blatantly absurd terms as 'homicide bombers'.

Poole's writing style can seem rather self-righteous and his sarcastic quips are at times an annoying distraction from what is, for the most part, an insightful and often unexpected critique of the language of spin. He cleverly links the different sections of the book from one Unspeak term to another, providing a number of interesting historical and journalistic details along the way. But the book is to be admired not simply because of its recording of linguistic abuses, but more importantly for its conviction that the responsibility to resist them rests with us - that to use terms such as 'ethnic cleansing' is to be complicit in acts of mass murder by legitimizing a term historically linked to the treatment of human beings as mere contaminants and a failure to recognize genocide.

So what about the fish? My favourite part of the book comes in the epilogue, in which Poole quotes from a speech during the 2000 election campaign, in which George W Bush rationalized his unwillingness to demolish hydroelectric dams in order to protect endangered fish thus: "I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully", to which Poole responds: "Since when were we at war with the fish?"