Worn-out words I’ll never use again

There are worn-out words and phrases which have come to mean anything and nothing. They have lost their original, powerful and precise meanings, and should never be used by those who wish to conduct an honest and civilised discussion. Here are a few.

ORWELLIAN
Is it Orwellian for a democratically elected Government to use emergency powers to ban demonstrations protesting against planned legislation, further limiting the right to protest against such legislation? Or is it Orwellian, as happened in Bristol, to burn police cars and attack both the police and police stations, in an unlawful protest against such legislation, in the name of democracy? Or both? You pays yer money and you takes yer choice.

Orwellian has become a meaningless “boo word” (as linguistic analysts would have put it), signalling any form of activity you dislike, trivial or horrific, whether you come from the Left or the Right. From Government or the governed. Thus the intimidating flow of Covid “advice”, rules, regulations, and enforceable orders of dubious legality, issued by our Government, is arguably Orwellian. So, I suppose less seriously, are Keep off the Grass notices in our parks. What about the ghastly behaviour of China (Communist) and of Myanmar’s (Right-wing) military regime? To say nothing of the fruitcake dictatorship in North Korea. And don’t forget those two overweight cops who forced a young women to the ground, sat on her and handcuffed her while attending a peaceful but unauthorised memorial meeting for Sarah Everard. Or the BLM groupies who tore down or defaced statues and monuments last year. Does any of this remind you of Winston Smith’s job in Nineteen Eighty-Four, rewriting history and destroying the original reports? It should.

Orwell’s own views evolved. But, by the time he died, they were focused, and clear. The message of Animal Farm is that Soviet Communism and Capitalism are much the same. Equally murderous and dictatorial. (Though he did accept that the Revolution had started with idealistic aims.) A few years later, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, he dropped the moral equivalence. Instead he outlined a Big Brother society, widely taken to be Soviet Communism, although it could equally well have been run by the Nazis. The book has absolutely no interest in how industry, agriculture and infrastructure are owned or run. Orwell had come to regard totalitarian government, (repeat: totalitarian, not democratic, government), however packaged and branded, as the enemy of humanity.

APARTHEID
Apartheid was a highly detailed, bureaucratic form of legal segregation, imposed by white South Africans on black Africans, Indians and those of mixed race. It boasted of “separate development”, setting up supposedly independent, though impoverished, tribal “homelands” in the most barren backwaters of South Africa. They were ruled by Quisling leaders. The unfortunate “citizens” of those puppet statelets were, logically, not citizens of White South Africa. So they could only enter White areas (almost all of the developed or fertile areas) with special passes to work at reserved (lowly) jobs. They could be expelled back to their homelands at any time.

Today apartheid has come to mean any form of behaviour of which you do not approve, especially if it has racial connotations. I have often heard Black activists describe the Metropolitan Police as an apartheid police force. You may not have a very high opinion of the Met (I don’t, at the moment). But an instrument of government-enforced, statutory apartheid? Come off it.

In particular the word “apartheid” has come to be used to smear Israel. However, more than 20 per cent of the population of Israel is Palestinian, aka Israeli Arab. They are full citizens and live, work and vote as they wish. In fact they have various privileges. They need not do national military service. They have, at their own request, separate schools, teaching Islam and an Arab view of the last hundred years. In contrast, those Palestinians who live in Gaza or on the West Bank (which are not parts of Israel) are, by definition, not Israeli citizens; most would not wish to be. They have their own administrations: the Hamas dictatorship and the bumbling, corrupt Palestinian Authority. Hamas, a terrorist organisation according to the UN, the EU, Britain and America, wants to wipe Israel off the map (or so it boasts). The PA says – sometimes – that it is interested in a peaceful, two state solution.

You may be fiercely critical of Israel’s approach to these two entities. But to call Israel an apartheid state is to demonstrate wilful ignorance or an ingrained dislike of the Jewish state. For all its faults, Israel is by far the most tolerant and democratic nation in an intolerant and undemocratic part of the world.

FASCIST
This was a loopy philosophy of government, based on a curious mix of medieval trade guilds and “national syndicalism”, under which councils representing employers and employees together decided the future of their industries. They in turn would help select an authoritarian ruler. The Italian fascist symbol — the Roman fasces or bunches of sticks bound together with an axe — demonstrated that acting individually you could be broken. Bound together by the state, you were invincible. Mussolini’s deeply unpleasant regime was a haphazard application of (parts of) this guff. And cruel and violent with it. But then it hardly merited the name “fascism”.

And to label as “red fascists” the motley crew of Toytown Trots and anti-Semitic bullies who slipped under the permissive net when Corbyn led the Labour Party is plain silly. (I was guilty of doing so on occasion.) As is the desire to label as fascist the small but obnoxious far-Right groups which have sprung up in recent years. Call them racists, thugs, Little Englanders as you wish. But they wouldn’t recognise a fascist if one belted them with his fasces.

POPULISM
Before the booze got to Boris (Yeltsin I mean, not Johnson) he was a bold, indeed heroic, reformer. As mayor of Moscow (strictly speaking, First Secretary of the Moscow City Committee of the Communist Party, a senior and massively powerful position) he wanted to use his role to undermine the grotesque luxury which the sheltered ruling class had given itself, and which the people so resented. He refused to travel to work in the fleet of luxury, bullet proof cars, as was the custom. He travelled on the subway and talked to ordinary folk. Unprecedented. He refused to accept a grand apartment but stayed in his modest flat. He did not accept the small army of domestic servants to which he was entitled. He ate in the office canteen, rather than in his private dining room. He did not shop at the secret stores reserved for the top brass. Finally he was hauled before a committee of the top brass and accused of populism. A capital offence in their eyes. One of his accusers said: “It is easy to be popular.” Boris replied. “Then why don’t you try it?”

That is my sort of populism.

But for the past couple of decades populism has become synonymous with that misused word “fascism” (see above). It has been used by some members of our own elite to condemn anybody who listens to the worries of ordinary people. Be it over the disruption caused to some communities by the poorly controlled influx of immigrants. Be it the widespread distaste for the overwhelming powers of the European Union. Be it the whole woke culture of no platforming, bullying and black listing. Be it the perceived contempt for the Union flag. (Yes, poll-tax funded BBC, I’m talking, most recently, about your breakfast show).

If that is populism, I want no part of it.

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