Orwellian war on words backs troubling actions
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta (CDC) is the United States’ leading public health institute. It’s the place where scrappy survivors head in every apocalyptic movie. When systems fail and populations collapse, the last hope for humanity lies in science.
Naturally, people reacted with outrage to reports the Trump administration had directed the CDC to avoid seven words and phrases in documents being prepared for next year’s budget. CDC policy analysts were briefed by budget oversight administrators to avoid: “Diversity,” “transgender,” “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “fetus,” “evidencebased” and “science-based,” the Washington Post reported.
The absurd constraint was reminiscent of George Carlin’s seven words you can’t say on television.
In his appendix to Nineteen EightyFour, George Orwell explained the principles of “Newspeak”: Once the restrictive state language is fully embraced, a heretical thought “should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.”
In this administration, there is no greater heresy than climate change. Reference to its consequences was purged from White House and Interior Department websites. The Environmental Protection Agency banished climate change pages to the archives while updating the site “to reflect EPA’s priorities under the leadership of U.S. President Trump and Administrator Pruitt.” The war on climate science seems to have opened a second front against evidence itself.
CDC director Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald sent an email reassuring staff
“science is and will remain the foundation of our work,” and endorsed the Department of Health and Human Services response: “Banned words’ is a complete mischaracterization of discussions regarding the budget formulation process.”
Some CDC officials who spoke to the New York Times characterized the list as “not so much a ban on words but recommendations to avoid some language to ease the path toward budget approval by Republicans.” In other words, the types of research reflected in budget documents will be limited by selfcensorship in a climate of fear. The guy who knows “the best words” doesn’t want to hear them from his scientists.
One imagines how tough it would be for the CDC to justify funding for continued research into preventing HIV transmission in transgender populations, without acknowledging them by name.
The ever-shrinking Newspeak dictionary constantly strives to eliminate threatening terms. Words like “vulnerable” suggest a bias in favour of recognizing the social determinants of health. The phrases “science-based” and “evidencebased,” of course, suggest a bias in favour of science and evidence, which play badly in the new world order.
Newspeak ambassadors reportedly proffered the following alternative phrase: “CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes.”
The approach is not isolated. The Natural Resources Conservation Service encouraged staff to substitute “weather extremes” for “climate change” and avoid “reduce greenhouse gases” in favour of the doublethink triumph, “increase nutrient use efficiency.”
This war on words is backed by action, reversing decades of evidencebased (whoops) environmental reforms: dismantling the Clean
Power Plan, lifting a ban on a harmful agricultural pesticide, repealing wildlife protection laws, illegally suspending rules to reduce methane emissions — the list goes on.
The war on coal is over, the president intoned. But the war on science is digging in for a long fight.