“Positive Action” = Negative Action

As George Orwell and others have long pointed out, euphemisms flourish where people feel it necessary to obfuscate or disguise what they’re really doing or proposing. Thus racial preference is described as “equal opportunity” or “affirmative action,” quotas are called “goals,” etc.

Now from the land of Orwell, courtesy of reader Fred Ray, comes this example of the “Gloucestershire police force … illegally rejecting 108 job applicants because they were white men.” And Gloucestershire was not alone: “The case comes six months after Avon and Somerset Police admitted it had illegally rejected almost 200 applications from white men for the same reason.”

And what was the reason?

Police are under pressure to meet the government target, set in 1999, that by 2009, 7% of police officers in England and Wales should be from ethnic minority groups….

Ian Anderson, chairman of Gloucestershire Police Federation blamed unrealistic government targets for their illegal recruitment drive.

Orwell would have loved the Gloucestershire police.

Earlier this year, Gloucestershire’s Assistant Chief Constable Michael Matthews admitted ‘positive action’ had been taken to recruit more women and from ethnic minorities.

“It is essential in a democratic policing environment to ensure that under-represented groups are prioritised in our recruitment drives,” he said.

The United States and England have been described as two countries divided by the same language, and that is certainly true in the current euphemism-infused language of race. We have “affirmative action”; they have “positive action.” Neither of us has “quotas”: we have “goals”; they have “targets.” We give preferences to our favored minorities; they “prioritise” them.

Allow me to stay on my language kick for another minute (but all you can do if you won’t is to stop reading…). Just as hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, euphemism is the tribute those who violate a widely shared value pay to the value they violate.

But why bastardize Orwell when I can quote him? Go back and re-read the passage above by the prioritising assistant police chief and then read Orwell’s anticipatory evisceration of it in his masterful essay on “Politics and the English Language” (1946):

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. 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. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.” Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

“While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.”

In the United States a vast majority of the people continue to believe (despite a generation of instruction to the contrary from their betters in academia, editorial offices, corporate board rooms, etc.) that everyone should be treated “without regard” to race, religion, or ethnicity. That’s why racial preferences must be disguised as “affirmative action,” quotas as “goals,” etc.

It’s also why the revolutionary effort to substitute group rights for individual rights is called “diversity.”

Say What? (3)

  1. Cobra September 23, 2006 at 12:20 pm | | Reply

    John writes:

    >>>”In the United States a vast majority of the people continue to believe (despite a generation of instruction to the contrary from their betters in academia, editorial offices, corporate board rooms, etc.) that everyone should be treated “without regard” to race, religion, or ethnicity. That’s why racial preferences must be disguised as “affirmative action,” quotas as “goals,” etc.”

    Can you provide some evidence of this? If anything, I’m seeing a popular conservative movement in favor racial and religious profiling. I’m seeing figures like Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin promoting ethnophobic cause to the delight of millions. I would just like to know where you find confidence in the notion that “the vast majority” runs counter to the afforementioned pundits.

    –Cobra

  2. John Rosenberg September 23, 2006 at 10:51 pm | | Reply

    I’m not aware that Buchanan, Coulter, et. al. favor racial profiling. But it is true, I think, that many conservatives (and probably as many liberals) do favor extra scrutiny for Arab-looking males getting on airplanes. If that’s an exception to my generalization, then that’s what it is — an exception.

  3. David Nieporent September 24, 2006 at 6:26 am | | Reply

    Can you provide some evidence of this?

    Sure. Prop 209 in California. I-200 in Washington. And the desperation of BAMN to keep Michiganders from voting on the MCRI.

    Incidentally, you might not have noticed, but none of Buchanan, Coulter, or Malkin have ever been elected to anything.

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