Trump and Blanche’s Orwellian Language 

President Donald Trump and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche claim they are worried about hidden homicidal language. Their Department of Justice is prosecuting former FBI Director James Comey, the former FBI Director, for allegedly spelling out 86 as a code word in seashells for murdering the 47th president—even though for more than a century the number has simply meant to stop serving alcohol to an unruly patron, or bar them from a restaurant or tavern. If Comey is convicted, he could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison. 

The Trump/Blanche super sensitivity to allegedly homicidal language is both ludicrous and chilling. But it does raise much larger and genuine truths. Trump, his administration, and mainstream media figures are deploying euphemism to sanitize real and widespread violence in the war against Iran. Let’s start with the benign-sounding expression took them out to describe what the U.S. and Israel have been doing to Iran’s leaders—when, in fact, our air forces were “killing” them. Taking him out is only the worst of several expressions meant to cover up what was really happening in this ugly and illegal war.  

You didn’t just hear take them out from Trump’s allies and mouthpieces in right-wing media. If you watched a stretch of cable television news, even on the supposedly more progressive MS NOW, you would have heard some of the on-air presenters repeat it regularly. By contrast, you rarely, if ever, would stumble across the truth in plain English: “The U.S. and Israel launched this war by assassinating Iran’s leader, along with members of his family, and they continued to kill other top officials.”  

So far, the linguistic dishonesty has gone unnoticed, but George Orwell would have recognized it immediately. His classic 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language,” is a brilliant indictment of how language is used to hide ugly truths. Here are a couple of his examples: “Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: This is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers.” 

Taking them out has a shameful history. I first heard it in the late 1970s, while reporting from southern Africa. In Rhodesia, a Black guerrilla movement was challenging the white minority regime after peaceful efforts at change had failed. White “troopies” openly boasted about how many “terrs,” (short for “terrorists,”) they had “taken out” on their last patrol. The minority regime lost; Rhodesia became independent Zimbabwe in 1980. But, over time, the euphemism has spread. 

All along, the intent has been the same: dehumanize the people you are killing and hide that you are taking human lives.  

Back to Iran. There, taking them out also helps to conceal another truth: “assassinating” foreign leaders is actually prohibited under American law, a fact that was barely reported as the U.S./Israeli attacks continued for weeks. 

There has been more Orwellian language. Decapitate also replaced “kill Iran’s political and military leaders.” The word literally means “cut off their heads,” but probably no one who hears it is visualizing a guillotine. Instead, it sounds somewhat benign, more like a personnel reshuffle in a dysfunctional office.  

Collateral damage to cover up “accidentally killing civilians” appeared during the first Gulf War back in 1990-91. This time around, it at first seemed to have been discarded, but as the U.S./Israeli war shuddered on, you started to hear it again.  

Military assets are another Orwellian example. Its meaning includes “warplanes” and “deadly missiles.” Targets and high-value targets also help to hide the actual human beings whom Israel and the U.S. were killing; by one estimate, 1701 Iranian civilians have already died since the war started. Degrading targets is destroying bridges, damaging electric power plants, and bombing more than 20 Iranian universities and research centers.  

Mowing the grass originated in Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel a decade or so ago. What it means is: “The Israeli army regularly invaded Gaza, killing enough Palestinian people to dampen down resistance, and then left until the ‘grass’ grew back.” But now the euphemism has begun to rear its head in the war against Iran.  

There’s still another Orwellian term—saying boots on the ground when you mean a “military land invasion.” The expression sounds something like an innocent group hike through the Iranian countryside. A euphemistic alternative, ground operations, also seems innocuous.  

In fact, a U.S. invasion would mean hugely increased death and injuries to American soldiers, Iranian defenders, and many more Iranian civilians. The U.S. Army’s M134 machine gun can actually fire between 2000 and 6000 bullets per minute. No doubt the Iranians who would be defending their own country also have similar lethal weapons. Several factors will have contributed if the U.S. and Israel restart their war against Iran. But hiding hard, brutal truths behind Orwellian language will be one of them. 

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