The language of 1984

One of the key features of George Orwell's book "1984" is the way language is distorted by power to mean something that it obviously doesn't mean.

For the last two weeks (and longer) I have listened to the Liberal party build up its language of criticism of the Government. Now this is OK on one level, as long as we the public are critical of language and don't just accept it on face value.

It is, for example, OK for them to simplify the Emissions Trading Scheme as a Big Fat Tax.

As a strategy it seems to be working well, but the more knowing public should at least try to take this simplistic analysis for what it is....simplistic. But I have heard all sorts of Liberals use it in the last few days, Abbott, Bishop, Joyce...and no doubt others.

What is not OK is the use of the term Stalinist to describe the Labor Party's decision making processes. This term is of course most derogatory. I have no doubt that some of that mud will stick. I have heard both Abbott and Pyne, and others, use that term in the last week.

History suggests that there is not much to pick between Hitler and Stalin, and no one could imagine that a slur that Labor Party processes were run like the Nazis would have just been allowed to go unchecked.

There is not much to pick between the Labor and the Liberal Party in terms of questions like, loyalty and consistency. And you wouldn't stand in front of many of them with an exposed back on a dark night, but let's not even begin to suggest that the term Stalinist should be applied to any Australian major party. It is at the very least belittling to any and/or all of those who were subject to the violence of Stalinism.

One day

Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote the masterly "One Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich". In this brief narrative of a 100 plus pages he narrates the account of what happens to Ivan in the course of 24 hours interred in a Stalinist camp.
It is fascinating,complex and convoluted. There is a brutality about it which almost seems unrealistic. At the end of of these few pages you are left wondering how so much can have happened in just 24 hours.
Then Solzhenitsyn adds his final paragraph which reveals that there are three extra days in Ivan Shukov's sentence caused by the existence of leap years! They seem unbelievable,he says

"There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days like that in his stretch. From the first clang of the rail to the last clang of the rail. Three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days. The three extra days were for leap years."

Those three days.They are eternity.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn died today.