George Orwell's Essays: Politics And Language In Vietnam

Politics and Language in Vietnam George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language” written in 1946 discusses how language can be used to obscure what one is saying. Orwell states that language can be snow obscuring details (2). He talks of how politicians use this to their advantage when trying to win the public's opinion. Some twenty years this is exemplified by the US’s involvement in Veitnam. The famous statement “We had to destroy the village in order to save” is what Orwell was describing in his essay. Although the origin and authenticity of this statement is often challenged it does does summarize the U.S.’s stance on the Veitnam war; meaning the use of deception through media, and the disregard of Vietnamese civilians wellbeing. The statement first appeared in Pete Arnett’s 1968 NYT article “Major Describes Move”. The original quote appeared as “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” Arnett says the quote is from an unidentified GI, this has has sparked a bit of controversy on how authentic the statement is. Although the in 2006 the statement was confirmed by a veteran that was at the Ben Tre press conference (Wisdom). The village that was destroyed is Ben Tre; This happened during the Tet Offensive. The U.S. bombed the city to almost complete ruble in attempt to take out Viet Cong. In reality they killed more
The Vietnam war was called an “Undeclared war” by Jeffery W. Helsing (Proctor 89). This was because Johnson purposely led the american public to believe they were less involved than they really were. This is best seen by the attempted concealment of Rolling Thunder’s serious implications. The Johnson administration tried to assert that the sustained bombing of north Vietnam was not a change in policy when in fact it was. “Johnson refused to make the expanded air war clear to the public” (Dalleck qtd. Proctor