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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 36, Number 22. 1973

Readers Guide

Readers Guide

Dear Sirs,

Your guide to vocabulary in Salient; I don't want to scratch all that handyman's gloss sprayed over the complicated world, only to note your claim that "questions and criticisms will be published and answered as is necessary". As is necessary? If you like them? If you think you can edit or discredit them easily? Anyway, try the following quote for size. It's certainly not at all "necessary" to publish it, as it's by that old hack Orwell; none of your favoured governments sees it as "necessary" to allow their citizens to read him, so I guess you'll forget to publish this too.

"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible... thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless 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 arc 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.... When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."

You, if not your readers, might like to look at your own collection of dead lumber in the light of those principles. Marx actually wrote well in German; what you can't understand is that a term like bourgeois died as a meaningful word or concept a long time ago. You're using it as a Catholic mutters responses to the Mass, essentially because you can't be buggered thinking or analysing freshly for yourselves.

Right on, comrades,

Alec Don.

This criticism will be answered in the "Readers Guide Forum" next issue. D'F'