Saturday, May 26, 2007
Springtime for Bushler
Many of us have long been aware of the Bush regime's Orwellian use of the English language. For example, "Social Security Reform" referred to a privatization scam that would have destroyed Social Security, the "Clear Skies Initiative" allowed power companies to pollute even more, and the "Healthy Forests Initiative" helped logging companies cut down old growth trees.
Well, now the Bush apparatchiks are referring to torture as "enhanced interrogation techniques" -- but it seems that they're not the first government to refer to torture in that manner. One of Andrew Sullivan's readers discovered that back in the good old 1930s and 1940s, the Gestapo's euphemism for torture was "verschaerfte Vernehmung"...which translates into English as, roughly, "enhanced interrogation techniques." (Sullivan checked this out, and I personally googled the phrase as well as ran it through the Alta Vista translator, where it came up as "intesified hearing.")
Given what the Bush regime has been doing the past 6 1/2 years, isn't it long past time for Godwin's Law to be repealed?
And now for something completely...uh, related...:
Well, now the Bush apparatchiks are referring to torture as "enhanced interrogation techniques" -- but it seems that they're not the first government to refer to torture in that manner. One of Andrew Sullivan's readers discovered that back in the good old 1930s and 1940s, the Gestapo's euphemism for torture was "verschaerfte Vernehmung"...which translates into English as, roughly, "enhanced interrogation techniques." (Sullivan checked this out, and I personally googled the phrase as well as ran it through the Alta Vista translator, where it came up as "intesified hearing.")
Given what the Bush regime has been doing the past 6 1/2 years, isn't it long past time for Godwin's Law to be repealed?
And now for something completely...uh, related...:
