Masterpiece Retouched

Orwell wrote in 1946 that political language is built to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, so listeners never picture the act. In his examples, bombing villages and machine gunning cattle was “pacification,” and clearing peasants off their land was “transfer of population.” More recently, Canada’s doctors killed 16,499 people in 2024 under the “medical assistance” label. In April 2021, the Biden administration ordered ICE and Border Patrol to drop “illegal alien” for “undocumented noncitizen,” after which the crossings continued at the same scale. Before that, in 2019, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors urged agencies to stop calling convicted felons “felons” and substitute “justice involved person” or “returning resident,” terms that remove any reference to victims. Orwell’s fix was plain English: “medical assistance in dying” is a lethal injection, and “undocumented” means illegal. The euphemisms exist so the act itself stays abstract.

>cap credit card rates at 10% >banks stop issuing cards to high risk borrowers >credit access restricted for the people who need it most >government mandates that banks must still lend to them >banks crash >Elizabeth Warren calls to nationalize them