The Voice Of Tyranny

							                  The Voice Of Tyranny
by Mike Reid
September 4, 2012

The reporting on a violent incident at the Occupy
protests last year reveals the linguistic lengths to which
newspapers can go to hide responsibility. A Reuters story
in National Post said it best:
     Scott Olsen, 24, a former U.S. Marine who served two
     tours of duty in Iraq, was struck in the head by a tear
     gas canister fired on Tuesday by police trying to
     prevent protesters from reclaiming a public square.

Olsen was standing about 30 feet from the police barricades
at Occupy Oakland when the cops launched tear gas and
fired “bean-bag” rounds into the crowd. The hit to Olsen’s
forehead knocked him down on the concrete and fractured
his skull.
Passive-Voice Violence
This is pretty high-action stuff. A simple way to say it would be: “On Tuesday, police struggling with
protesters hit two-tour U.S. Marine vet Scott Olsen in the head with a tear-gas canister.”
Regardless of whether the police action was legal or justified, such an opening would at least shine the
light on who did what to whom.
But instead Reuters chose to use the passive voice, a way of writing that emphasizes the thing acted on
rather than the thing or person acting. Olsen “was struck in the head” (he was struck, you see; nobody
struck him) “by a tear gas canister” (darned thing), which was itself “fired on Tuesday by police.”
In George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, he lists the passive voice as part of a “catalogue
of swindles and perversions,” techniques in political writing “designed to make lies sound truthful and
murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
                                                        In the active voice, the subject of the sentence
                                                        takes a direct action. For example, you might
                                                        say Richard Nixon made a mistake. Or a
                                                        policeman hit Olsen with a tear-gas canister.
                                                        In the passive voice, the subject of the sentence
                                                        is the recipient of the action.1 Mistakes were
                                                        made. Olsen was struck in the head.
                                                        Responsibility was avoided.
                                                        Telling a story of violence in the passive voice
                                                        is like putting on a play in which figures in
                                                        shadow beat a man lying in the spotlight. The
                                                        dramatic focus is on the injured party, and the
                                                        attackers remain undefined.
Underprivileged Subjects
The passive voice and constructions related to it are good and proper in many contexts. Scientists, for
instance, emphasize the neutrality of their experiments by saying things like, “Twenty milligrams of
uranium were placed in the centrifuge.”
But passives are also devilishly useful for expressing imprecise collectivist thoughts; they squeeze the
human action out of an event, taking responsibility away from real persons and casting it into thin air or
onto vague collectives.
Orwell wrote that this is a vicious cycle: Our language “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our
thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish
thoughts.”
Consider the term “disadvantaged.” When we say, “this child was disadvantaged,” it’s an adjectival
passive: The kid has been disadvantaged by some unknown persons.
Really, “disadvantaged” is a euphemism for “poor,” but through its passivity it packs in the implication
of collective responsibility. For an example of how this trick works, take a look at the beginning of a
petition on the leftist site ForceChange.com.
Underprivileged individuals who are addicted to drugs and alcohol are being subjected to a form of
class oppression.
The “underprivileged,” one has to guess, are those who are not privileged enough. But who’s doing the
privileging? And who on Earth is subjecting them to “class oppression”? The petition continues:
      The underprivileged tend not to have the same support system that
      privileged people have. We should not oppress them further by keeping
      good drug and alcohol addiction rehabilitation programs out of their
      reach.

Aha! Apparently, “we” (meaning “privileged persons”) oppressed those poorer
than us. That’s why “we” (meaning the state) must subsidize these rehab
programs to help them.
The passive constructions at the beginning of the petition set it up for this
doublethink by slipping past the question of who actually inflicted harm on
these poor drug addicts.
Who criminalizes drugs? Who targets drug-law enforcement against poor (and
black) drug users? Who keeps the price of psychiatric counseling high by
maintaining a licensed cartel?
If we noticed that state officials had contributed to the problem, we might be more skeptical about their
ability to fix it.
But once you start on the track of the “underprivileged,” it’s easy to think of economic success as a
privilege that never-specified but all-powerful persons either give you or deny you.
                                                                   This language snuffs out the light of
                                                                   economic, praxeological analysis and
                                                                   ushers in a world of shadowy
                                                                   collectives and Marxist myths.
                                                                   Straining To Speak
                                                                   The excessive use of the passive
                                                                   voice does not dam up the flow of
                                                                   words with straightforward
                                                                   censorship. It merely damns us to
                                                                   mealymouthed platitudes. We still
                                                                   speak about poverty and violence, but
                                                                   we huddle around the victims of
                                                                   oppression without looking straight at
                                                                   their oppressors.
                                                                   The article on the Olsen incident is
                                                                   titled “Iraq War Veteran Suffers Life-
                                                                   Threatening Injuries after Being
                                                                   Struck in the Head at Occupy
                                                                   Oakland Protest.” Here in the active
                                                                   voice, at the front of the title, is the
                                                                   veteran “suffering.” At the back is
                                                                   him “being struck.” We are vaguely
                                                                   aware that somebody must have
                                                                   struck him, but who was it?
                                                                   Olsen’s head injury rendered him
                                                                   unable to speak for days; and though
                                                                   he could write, he lost the ability to
spell properly. Six weeks later, his speech was still
“halting and flattened.”2
Those of us still possessed of our faculties of speech and
writing might want to use them to communicate as
vividly as we can about the real human actions shaping
our world.
Protesters are not struck by tear-gas canisters flying
around on their own. Classes and collectives are not
privileged or underprivileged by one another.
Individual, acting men and women shape the world for
good and ill, relying on ideas as they have thought them
and expressed them.
In a fit of optimism, Orwell concluded that “the present
political chaos is connected with the decay of language,”3
and, therefore, “one can probably bring about some
improvement by starting at the verbal end.”
–Mike Reid
Notes
1 This   isn’t a complete definition. A “voice” in grammar has to do with the semantic relationship
                                                      between a verb and its subject. Subjects can have
                                                      several different semantic “roles” with respect to a
                                                      verb. For instance, an agent subject does the verb’s
                                                      action, while a patient subject has it done to him.
                                                      The passive voice is a construction in which the
                                                      subject’s role is different than it would be in the
                                                      active voice.
                                                        2 He seems to have made a full recovery. Here he is
                                                        in an interview with Russia Today.
                                                        3Orwell also wrote, “Look back through this essay,
                                                        and for certain you will find that I have again and
                                                        again committed the very faults I am protesting
                                                        against.”




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