Orwell's 1946 Warning on Language and Thought

Opening

“It doesn’t align with public sentiment.”

You’ve probably heard politicians reach for this line before. Doesn’t something about it always feel off? I feel a flicker of discomfort every time I hear it. Whose public, from which era, feeling exactly what sentiment — none of that is ever specified.

Someone had already dissected this exact discomfort back in 1946, with surgical precision. That someone was George Orwell¹​. Yes, the same Orwell known for Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four wrote a 24-page essay right after World War II ended, called “Politics and the English Language.”

Today I want to talk about why this essay still holds up 80 years later, and what we should take from it.

What Orwell Saw: Nazis, Soviets, and the British Government

Orwell wrote this essay out of intellectual fury directed at three groups.

Nazi Germany’s propaganda²​, Soviet doublespeak³​, and the British government’s euphemistic manipulation of language. These three camps stood on opposite sides politically, but to Orwell’s eye, they were all doing the same thing: wrapping uncomfortable realities in language so that people couldn’t think clearly about them.

Orwell’s own examples make the sharpness of his point land harder. Official documents of the time described the total aerial destruction of entire villages as “pacification.” Forcibly expelling farmers was called “transfer of population.” Executing political opponents was “elimination of unreliable elements.”

In the face of brutal reality, language had become an anesthetic.

What makes this essay even more uncomfortable is that Orwell’s gaze didn’t stop at the Nazis and the Soviets. He believed the British government — which called itself part of the “free world” — suffered from the same disease. In his view, this wasn’t a matter of ideology. It was a structural instinct of anyone holding power.