The fall of the Soviet Union was a disaster for the Holocaust business. The Russians turned over to the International Red Cross all the German “Death Registers” they had seized in 1944 when they overran Auschwitz in 1944. The Germans, with typical German efficiency, had scrupulously documented all the deaths at Auschwitz. Not four and […]

George Orwell is one of my favourite authors. 1984 is, of course, his most famous work but to my mind the simplicity and truth of Animal Farm makes it a superior work in the way it explores the corrupting nature of power. I’ve been thinking of Animal Farm a lot this week as I watched […]

To the four governmental bodies that belie their names in his dystopian novel “1984” – the Ministry of Love, which oversees torture; the Ministry of Peace, which conducts war; the Ministry of Plenty, which rations food; and the Ministry of Truth, which disseminates lies – George Orwell could have appended a fifth: the United Nations […]

Quick, which one of these statements does NOT come from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four? WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH INCANDESCENT BULBS AREN’T GETTING BANNED…IN FACT, THEY ARE GETTING BETTER. Tough choice?  OK—take a few more seconds. Time’s up.  The answer is number 4—it’s from a new mass email from ACEEE (the […]

The answer might depend on which media outlet you rely on. I read the headline at Democracy Now! on Friday: “Justice Dept Drops 99 of 101 Cases Against CIA for Abuse and Torture” The New York Times, on the other hand, offered a different sort of emphasis: “U.S. Widens Inquiries Into 2 Jail Deaths” via […]

Rather than call the conflict in Libya a war, the Obama administration has introduced a new phrase into the popular lexicon. “The way I like to put it is, from our standpoint at the Pentagon, we’re involved in a limited kinetic operation,” says Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. President Obama has consistently used the same […]

In the housing sector we are sometimes rather keen on words and phrases that either mean the opposite of their true meaning or that make “lies sound truthful”…..At Harrogate a couple of weeks ago there was much discussion about re-naming the affordable rent regime. A few suggestions were: “so-called affordable rents”, “naffordable”, or simply “unaffordable […]