George Orwell’s prophetic essay, “Politics and the English Language,” written after the conclusion of the Second World War, is quite right that the decay of language is connected to the chaotic atrocities perpetrated in the world. Sixty years later, his words are clear and fresh and more relevant than ever. Applied to the current ‘global economic crisis’ and the recent bank ‘bailouts’ going on all over the Western World, we can see that we are being disgracefully lied to by a deeply entrenched capitalist system, which depends on framing the indefensible, horrifying consequences of its existence in a way that is palatable to the people who are on the losing end; that is to say a system which uses vague, obscured language to present current events in terms that protect the international corporate agenda.

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Rosalie Maggio, in her essay “Bias-Free Language” has one thing right, and that is that language is a powerful thing. There can be little doubt that in the history of humankind, language has been used for freedom and for the purposes of those seeking power over others. Yet neutering language in order to weaken its ability to ‘offend’ minorities has other implicit consequences that need to be explored. Language is a powerful tool for liberation when it is culturally charged and socially relevant. Yet language can also be disempowered, words attacked and warped, so that the concepts necessary for a people to frame their problems (individual or collective) in such a way as they can be solved are missing.

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It is much too easy to see the blindness and ignorance of others than to see those who are awake – the blind see least of all those who are awake. Ignorance cannot fathom intelligence and thus can little value it.

The wise are moderate, and traces of them lost in the pitched arguments of the radicals and the reformers, who will always work to eradicate truth, whether intentionally or not. Whether the wise are indifferent to such wickedness, or transcended, who can know other than the wise?

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