#redefining words

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

The Politics of Linguistic Evasion

Why ideologues resist the names that accurately describe their own beliefs.

By: Helen Pluckrose

Published: Mar 15, 2026

We currently appear to have a problem with illiberal factions on the furthest right denying terms that accurately fit their own description of their positions. It makes communication very difficult. The terms most likely to be objected to and denied are “Racist”, “Far-Right” and “Ethnonationalist.”

The simplest and most widely used definition of ‘racism’ is “prejudice and/or discrimination on the grounds of race.” Yet, we currently have people who openly say that they believe certain races to be inferior and advocate discriminating against them hotly rejecting the term ‘racist’ to describe their stance.

The simplest definition of ‘far-right’ is ‘people on the furthest right end of the political spectrum.’ What this actually means in terms of values and beliefs is therefore dependent on the range of any political spectrum in any country in any period. The far-right in Saudi Arabia does not look like the far-right in the United States, and the far-right in the eighteenth century does not look like the far-right today. Nevertheless, we have people who openly acknowledge themselves to be on the right of the most right-wing parties in the UK or US objecting to being called ‘far-right’ and indicating that this is a slur.

In the same way, the word ‘ethnonationalist’ refers to people who are nationalists and whose perception of national belonging is centred on ethnicity. Yet we see people who hold precisely this position objecting to being described by the most literal term for it.

But if ‘ethnonationalist’ simply means ethnicity-centred concepts of nationalism, there is nothing more to unpack. This is not a complicated or ambiguous position. It’s irrelevant whether someone can imagine himself describing a Japanese person this way or not. If that is a Japanese person’s position, that is simply what they are.

There are, I would argue, three related reasons that people do this.

Firstly, there is the issue where these terms have been abused and fired at people whether they apply or not as a condemnation by activists of the Critical Social Justice movement. When a descriptive term becomes synonymous with ‘bad person’ this will produce instinctive ‘No, I’m not!” denials from people who are driven more by vibes and feelings than by definitions and reason. It also enables people with a more sophisticated but intellectually dishonest mindset who know very well what words mean to cynically redefine them as ‘terms that identify their speaker as the worst of our political opponents” to dismiss the accusation without addressing it. Wilfred Reilly is correct to note that this functions as the same kind of trap used by activists of the CSJ movement.

Secondly, and relatedly, ideologues are prone to denying labels which both apply to them and indicate that theirs is a fringe position. This is because they want their position to be understood as simply being the morally good, reasonable or evident one. We saw this with the Critical Social Justice movement too when it resisted any terms other than ‘Social Justice” to define itself. They claimed that what people began to call ‘woke’ to distinguish it from the aim for a just society (which is something we all want) was just being an empathetic person, addressing social realities and caring about their fellow human beings. Similarly, identitarian ideologues on the right want racism, far-right positions and ethnonationalism to be understood as simply reasonable, ethical and evidence-based views held by people who care about the good of society without doing the work of convincing people that this is, in fact, the case. Making fringe beliefs rejected by most people as unethical and divorced from reality harder to talk about by resisting definitions of them makes them harder to criticise and marginalise them out of mainstream political discourse.

Thirdly, there is the issue of shame and denial. These are people who are morally conflicted. They are typically genuinely very conservative and they feel a lot of anger with the identitarian left and a sense of urgency about immigration levels and problems with cultural cohesion particularly in relation to Islam. However, they are not naturally inclined either by disposition or by their longstanding principles to the radical, reactionary, collectivist mindset that enables a genuine commitment to racism, far-right views and ethnonationalism. They are not entirely convinced that this is who they want to be and that these values are ones they can ethically justify. Consequently, they are motivated to ‘soften’ and minimise the stance they are taking into something they consider more respectably conservative that they can live with and react defensively to having it pointed out that it is, in fact, far-right, racist ethnonationalism they are endorsing.

We need those on the far-right taking these stances to own them honestly. Those who knee-jerk react to having the views they actually espouse named accurately with a defensive “No, I’m not!” because those views are widely considered bad need to recognise the difference between genuinely not holding them and believing them to actually be good. This is what they would do if they genuinely believed the ideas were morally good, reasonable and evidence-based in a way that should appeal to the majority of people of good will and common sense. Some already do, of course, and will proudly declare their racism, ethnonationalism and position on the far right. This is not pretty but it does at least allow them to be seen as they really are and to be accessed for strong and accurate criticism in a way that prevaricating about labels impedes. It also makes it much more difficult for the morally conflicted trying to deceive themselves about what these views actually are to do so. It enables conservatives who reject those stances to distinguish themselves from them and offer a better alternative.

Those of us trying to engage with people who hold racist, ethnonationalist far-right views from a critical standpoint need to be able to cut through this self-protective tactic of linguistic evasion. We need not to enable proponents of them to get away with obfuscating what they are advocating and merge these views with much more justifiable ones about immigration levels and cultural cohesion, and ask them to justify these positions specifically. This is very difficult when they will not allow them to be named, but not impossible.

I have, for some time, been avoiding the term ‘far-right’ because it simply makes people identify me as a leftist who dismisses everybody who disagrees with her as ‘far-right’ even though I am not. Instead I have been saying ‘those on the furthest right of the political spectrum.” Even though this means exactly the same thing, it does not trigger the same ‘discourse recognition’ reflex and makes people less likely to categorise me as a political enemy and more willing to acknowledge that this is what they are. In the same way “people who evaluate others by their race” and “people with an ethnicity-centred concept of nationalism” can convey exactly the same views as ‘racists’ and ‘ethnonationalists’ without triggering the same defensive denial response. This makes it more likely that you will be able to get to discussing the central issues of substance.

Insisting on addressing substance is the only way to get at bad ideas and defeat them. This, at root, is the primary reason that ideologues attempt to make their own ideas difficult to criticise, including by quibbling over what they are called. If someone truly believes their ideas are good, reasonable and supported by evidence, they should have no difficulty defending them clearly and honestly. The refusal to name those ideas accurately is a strong sign that the person advancing them is not entirely convinced themselves. Ethical conservatives will be best placed to challenge obfuscation on the illiberal right that seeks to conflate radical, fringe positions with their own defensible ones and make them mainstream, but to do that they will need to pin their proponents down. Political disagreement can only be productive when we are willing to describe positions plainly and defend them honestly. When the argument becomes about whether those positions may be named at all, discussion collapses into evasion.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

Redefining Words to Attack Israel, by Philip Carl Salzman

The letter makes the following claims: "The Israeli response to protests and attacks from Gaza has targeted residential areas, basic infrastructure, buildings housing the international media as well as medical clinics and hospitals. The Israeli claim that Hamas militants are using these targets as human shields for their operations does not justify their targeting under relevant laws of warfare that demand civilians be protected from harm."

In the letter, "indiscriminate" is defined, or rather redefined, as targeting buildings that have civilian uses. Yet the letter admits that the Israeli strikes are aimed at hostile Hamas terrorist operations and operatives. The Israeli targeting is the opposite of "indiscriminate"; it carefully discriminates between Hamas terrorists and Palestinian civilians, directing its attacks on the former only. It is also true that Hamas was shooting rockets into Israel in the hopes of killing Jewish Israelis, non-combatants, which was not "indiscriminate," but intentional. In contrast, Israel undertakes heroic efforts to avoid civilian casualties by targeting only Hamas and Islamic Jihadist operatives. Israel notifies non-combatants of strikes ahead of time by means of texts, phone calls, and non-explosive signal bombs.

Keep in mind that it is Hamas that places their operations in the midst of their own citizenry, whom they use as human shields. For Hamas, dead Palestinian non-combatants are good publicity, as Europeans and others will blame Israel, as we see in this naive letter.

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

Merriam-Webster Redefines ‘They’ to Include a Non-Binary Person

The dictionary that traces its roots to 19th-century author and lexicographer Noah Webster now says “they” can refer to one person – instead of only multiple people, as previously defined.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

The Tyranny of Style Guides: Pronouns, Neopronouns, and the Power of Words

How linguistic manipulation reshapes reality through institutions and language itself

By: LGBT Courage Coalition

Published: Feb 13, 2025

Linguists have long understood that language is power. Words don’t just describe reality—they shape it. Style guides, dictionaries, and institutional norms have always played a crucial role in setting the boundaries of acceptable language. Yet when those boundaries are deliberately manipulated, language becomes a tool not for clarity, but for control.

The pronoun debate—starting with “preferred pronouns” and culminating in ze/zir, bunself, and tree/treeself—is not about kindness or inclusivity. It is about forcing compliance with an ideology by rewriting the rules of language.

This is where style guides come in.

Style Guides as Weapons of Authority

From The Associated Press Stylebook to The Chicago Manual of Style, professional style guides dictate how writers, journalists, and institutions use language. They provide the scaffolding of public communication: what to capitalize, how to use punctuation, and which words are acceptable for describing the world.

Historically, style guides have evolved slowly, reflecting cultural consensus rather than enforcing it. Yet in recent years, style guides have become weapons for activism—tools for linguistic revolution, often at the expense of clarity and truth.

The Associated Press Stylebook now mandates that writers respect “preferred pronouns” and use they/them as singular pronouns. A demand once relegated to niche activist circles is now a formalized rule in mainstream journalism. Reality is obfuscated by enforced language, as writers are instructed to prioritize identity claims over clear communication.

Consider the recent changes in academic publishing. The American Psychological Association (APA) Style Guide now suggests writers avoid terms like mother or father in favor of “gender-neutral” alternatives like parental figure. Similarly, the AMA Manual of Style, used in medical writing, encourages the avoidance of biological sex by substituting terms such as gestational parent for “mother.” A search of medical articles on Google Scholar for the phrase “pregnant people” in the title since 2018 yielded over 500 results. These are not neutral decisions. They strip words of their clarity and obscure material reality under the guise of inclusivity.

Even dictionaries have joined the fray. In 2020, Merriam-Webster added a new definition of they to mean “a single person whose gender identity is nonbinary.” While dictionaries once documented language as it evolved organically, they now play an active role in shaping cultural norms. Words are redefined not to clarify meaning, but to enforce ideological positions.

Neopronouns: From Style to Chaos

Once the linguistic dam broke, neopronouns flooded in. Ze/zir, fae/faer, bun/bunself—pronouns that bear no relation to sex, grammar, or reality—have now entered activist discourse. These words are not natural evolutions of language. They are ideological inventions.

Here’s the thing about style guides: by codifying language, they give it legitimacy. The mere act of inclusion transforms nonsense into something “official.” Once enough institutions normalize ze/zir as a pronoun set, refusing to use it will not just be unfashionable—it will be heresy.

This isn’t about linguistic diversity or creativity. It’s about control. Neopronouns serve no communicative purpose. They do not clarify who someone is. Instead, they demand that others participate in an individual’s self-concept—often at the expense of their own principles.

Linguistics and Reality: The Disruption of Shared Meaning

Linguist Ferdinand de Saussure taught us that language works through shared symbols. A tree is a tree because we agree that the word refers to a tall, woody plant. The system works because words have meaning—agreed-upon, stable meanings rooted in reality.

Pronouns historically functioned as linguistic shortcuts for biological sex. They help us navigate the world without constantly restating someone’s name or their sex. By insisting that pronouns no longer correlate to sex—or worse, by inventing entirely new sets of pronouns—we shatter that shared meaning.

The result is confusion. A pronoun like bun/bunself tells us nothing about the speaker except that they demand linguistic obedience. It is not descriptive, it is performative.

And when language ceases to describe reality, it becomes impossible to communicate it.

Who Decides? The Institutional Capture of Words

The style guide is not neutral. It carries authority because it tells writers what to do. But who gets to decide what the rules are?

Organizations like the AP, The New York Times, and GLAAD exert immense influence over language. Their decisions on pronouns, gender-neutral terms, and “inclusive” language are not reflections of organic linguistic change. They are ideological prescriptions, enforced from the top down.

Consider recent developments in The Lancet, one of the most respected medical journals in the world. In a 2021 cover article, the journal referred to women as “bodies with vaginas,” reducing women to anatomical parts in the name of gender neutrality. Words that once communicated clear meaning—like “woman” or “mother”—are systematically erased.

Similarly, the National Institutes of Health now uses terms like egg-producer or chestfeeding parent in its official publications. These shifts are not evolution of language—they are political choices to obfuscate sex and replace it with gender ideology.

Style guides, medical journals, and dictionaries are institutions of authority. When they rewrite language, they rewrite reality.

The Consequences: Reality on the Chopping Block

When words lose their connection to reality, truth becomes subjective, and meaning becomes meaningless.

Women cease to exist as a coherent category because “woman” becomes “anyone who identifies as such.”

Lesbians—women attracted to women—are pressured to accept males who claim she/her pronouns as part of their orientation.

Children, confused by language and ideology, are told they can be ze, fae, or even catself—whatever they feel.

This linguistic breakdown does not free anyone. It traps us in a world where language reflects ideology, not reality.

Reclaiming Language: Resisting the New Rules

What can we do in the face of this linguistic revolution? We can refuse to comply.

Speak plainly. Call men “he” and women “she.”

Resist style guides that mandate ideological language.

Challenge the institutional capture of words and insist on their connection to material reality.

Language matters because words matter. When institutions redefine words to obscure sex, erase women, and confuse children, they are not helping society—they are dismantling its foundation.

It’s time to reclaim language as a tool for truth, not tyranny. The style guides don’t own our words.

In the end, this is about more than pronouns. It’s about the power of words to define reality—and the responsibility to resist when they are weaponized to erase it.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Social constructivism is a social construct.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

FYI, "gay" is also correctly defined as "own sex"-attracted, rather than referring to "gender" (opposite sex). Unclear if this was previously corrupted.

The fact this is even a thing is ridiculous but also indicative of where we are.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Language games do not grant wishes.

Reality cannot be bullied. Be who you want to be, but you are what you are.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Why Orwell matters

His defence of freedom flies in the face of all that is woke and regressive today.

By: Bruno Waterfield

Published: Sep 17, 2022

Most people think that George Orwell was writing about, and against, totalitarianism – especially when they encounter him through the prism of his great dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

This view of Orwell is not wrong, but it can miss something. For Orwell was concerned above all about the particular threat posed by totalitarianism to words and language. He was concerned about the threat it posed to our ability to think and speak freely and truthfully. About the threat it posed to our freedom.

He saw, clearly and vividly, that to lose control of words is to lose control of meaning. That is what frightened him about the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia – these regimes wanted to control the very linguistic substance of thought itself.

And that is why Orwell continues to speak to us so powerfully today. Because words, language and meaning are under threat once more.

Totalitarianism in Orwell’s time

The totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union represented something new and frightening for Orwell. Authoritarian dictatorships, in which power was wielded unaccountably and arbitrarily, had existed before, of course. But what made the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century different was the extent to which they demanded every individual’s complete subservience to the state. They sought to abolish the very basis of individual freedom and autonomy. They wanted to use dictatorial powers to socially engineer the human soul itself, changing and shaping how people think and behave.

Totalitarian regimes set about breaking up clubs, trade unions and other voluntary associations. They were effectively dismantling those areas of social and political life in which people were able to freely and spontaneously associate. The spaces, that is, in which local and national culture develops free of the state and officialdom. These cultural spaces were always tremendously important to Orwell. As he put it in his 1941 essay, ‘England Your England’: ‘All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official – the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the “nice cup of tea”.’

Totalitarianism may have reached its horrifying zenith in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR. But Orwell was worried about its effect in the West, too. He was concerned about the Sovietisation of Europe through the increasingly prominent and powerful Stalinist Communist Parties. He was also worried about what he saw as Britain’s leftwing ‘Europeanised intelligentsia’, which, like the Communist Parties of Western Europe, seemed to worship state power, particularly in the supranational form of the USSR. And he was concerned above all about the emergence of the totalitarian mindset, and the attempt to re-engineer the deep structures of mind and feeling that lie at the heart of autonomy and liberty.

Orwell could see this mindset flourishing among Britain’s intellectual elite, from the eugenics and top-down socialism of Fabians, like Sidney and Beatrice Webb and HG Wells, to the broader technocratic impulses of the intelligentsia in general. They wanted to remake people ‘for their own good’, or for the benefit of the race or state power. They therefore saw it as desirable to force people to conform to certain prescribed behaviours and attitudes. This threatened the everyday freedom of people who wanted, as Orwell put it, ‘the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above’.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, this new intellectual elite started to gain ascendancy. It was effectively a clerisy – a cultural and ruling elite defined by its academic achievements. It had been forged through higher education and academia rather than through traditional forms of privilege and wealth, such as public schools.

Orwell was naturally predisposed against this emergent clerisy. He may have attended Eton, but that’s where Orwell’s education stopped. He was not part of the clerisy’s world. He was not an academic writer, nor did he position himself as such. On the contrary, he saw himself as a popular writer, addressing a broad, non-university-educated audience.

Moreover, Orwell’s antipathy towards this new elite type was long-standing. He had bristled against the rigidity and pomposity of imperial officialdom as a minor colonial police official in Burma between 1922 and 1927. And he had always battled against the top-down socialist great and good, and much of academia, too, who were often very much hand in glove with the Stalinised left.

The hostility was mutual. Indeed, it accounts for the disdain that many academics and their fellow travellers continue to display towards Orwell today.

The importance of words

Nowadays we are all too familiar with this university-educated ruling caste, and its desire to control words and meaning. Just think, for example, of the way in which our cultural and educational elites have turned ‘fascism’ from a historically specific phenomenon into a pejorative that has lost all meaning, to be used to describe anything from Brexit to Boris Johnson’s Tory government – a process Orwell saw beginning with the Stalinist practice of calling Spanish democratic revolutionaries ‘Trotsky-fascists’ (which he documented in Homage to Catalonia (1938)).

Or think of the way in which our cultural and educational elites have transformed the very meanings of the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’, divesting them of any connection to biological reality. Orwell would not have been surprised by this development. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, he shows how the totalitarian state and its intellectuals will try to suppress real facts, and even natural laws, if they diverge from their worldview. Through exerting power over ideas, they seek to shape reality. ‘Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together in new shapes of your own choosing’, says O’Brien, the sinister party intellectual. ‘We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull… You must get rid of these 19th-century ideas about the laws of nature.’

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the totalitarian regime tries to subject history to similar manipulation. As anti-hero Winston Smith tells his lover, Julia:

‘Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.’

As Orwell wrote elsewhere, ‘the historian believes that the past cannot be altered and that a correct knowledge of history is valuable as a matter of course. From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned.’

This totalitarian approach to history is dominant today, from the New York Times’ 1619 Project to statue-toppling. History is something to be erased or conjured up or reshaped as a moral lesson for today. It is used to demonstrate the rectitude of the contemporary establishment.

But it is language that is central to Orwell’s analysis of this form of intellectual manipulation and thought-control. Take ‘Ingsoc’, the philosophy that the regime follows and enforces through the linguistic system of Newspeak. Newspeak is more than mere censorship. It is an attempt to make certain ideas – freedom, autonomy and so on – actually unthinkable or impossible. It is an attempt to eliminate the very possibility of dissent (or ‘thoughtcrime’).

As Syme, who is working on a Newspeak dictionary, tells Winston Smith:

‘The whole aim… is to narrow the range of thought. In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller… Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?’

The parallels between Orwell’s nightmarish vision of totalitarianism and the totalitarian mindset of today, in which language is policed and controlled, should not be overstated. In the dystopia of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the project of eliminating freedom and dissent, as in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, was backed up by a brutal, murderous secret police. There is little of that in our societies today – people are not forcibly silenced or disappeared.

However, they are cancelled, pushed out of their jobs, and sometimes even arrested by the police for what amounts to thoughtcrime. And many more people simply self-censor out of fear of saying the ‘wrong’ thing. Orwell’s concern that words could be erased or their meaning altered, and thought controlled, is not being realised in an openly dictatorial manner. No, it’s being achieved through a creeping cultural and intellectual conformism.

The intellectual turn against freedom

But then that was always Orwell’s worry – that intellectuals giving up on freedom would allow a Big Brother Britain to flourish. As he saw it in The Prevention of Literature (1946), the biggest danger to freedom of speech and thought came not from the threat of dictatorship (which was receding by then) but from intellectuals giving up on freedom, or worse, seeing it as an obstacle to the realisation of their worldview.

Interestingly, his concerns about an intellectual betrayal of freedom were reinforced by a 1944 meeting of the anti-censorship organisation, English PEN. Attending an event to mark the 300th anniversary of Milton’s Areopagitica, Milton’s famous 1644 speech making the case for the ‘Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing’, Orwell noted that many of the left-wing intellectuals present were unwilling to criticise Soviet Russia or wartime censorship. Indeed, they had become profoundly indifferent or hostile to the question of political liberty and press freedom.

‘In England, the immediate enemies of truthfulness, and hence of freedom of thought, are the press lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrats’, Orwell wrote, ‘but that on a long view the weakening of the desire for liberty among the intellectuals themselves is the most serious symptom of all’.

Orwell was concerned by the increasing popularity among influential left-wing intellectuals of ‘the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness’. The exercise of freedom of speech and thought, the willingness to speak truth to power, was even then becoming seen as something to be frowned upon, a selfish, even elitist act.

An individual speaking freely and honestly, wrote Orwell, is ‘accused of either wanting to shut himself up in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display of his own personality, or of resisting the inevitable current of history in an attempt to cling to unjustified privilege’.

These are insights which have stood the test of time. Just think of the imprecations against those who challenge the consensus. They are dismissed as ‘contrarians’ and accused of selfishly upsetting people.

And worst of all, think of the way free speech is damned as the right of the privileged. This is possibly one of the greatest lies of our age. Free speech does not support privilege. We all have the capacity to speak, write, think and argue. We might not, as individuals or small groups, have the platforms of a press baron or the BBC. But it is only through our freedom to speak freely that we can challenge those with greater power.

Orwell’s legacy

Orwell is everywhere today. He is taught in schools and his ideas and phrases are part of our common culture. But his value and importance to us lies in his defence of freedom, especially the freedom to speak and write.

His outstanding 1946 essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’, can actually be read as a freedom manual. It is a guide on how to use words and language to fight back.

Of course, it is attacked today as an expression of privilege and of bigotry. Author and commentator Will Self cited ‘Politics and the English Language’ in a 2014 BBC Radio 4 show as proof that Orwell was an ‘authoritarian elitist’. He said: ‘Reading Orwell at his most lucid you can have the distinct impression he’s saying these things, in precisely this way, because he knows that you – and you alone – are exactly the sort of person who’s sufficiently intelligent to comprehend the very essence of what he’s trying to communicate. It’s this the mediocrity-loving English masses respond to – the talented dog-whistler calling them to chow down on a big bowl of conformity.’

Lionel Trilling, another writer and thinker, made a similar point to Self, but in a far more insightful, enlightening way. ‘[Orwell] liberates us’, he wrote in 1952:

‘He tells us that we can understand our political and social life merely by looking around us, he frees us from the need for the inside dope. He implies that our job is not to be intellectual, certainly not to be intellectual in this fashion or that, but merely to be intelligent according to our lights – he restores the old sense of the democracy of the mind, releasing us from the belief that the mind can work only in a technical, professional way and that it must work competitively. He has the effect of making us believe that we may become full members of the society of thinking men. That is why he is a figure for us.’

Orwell should be a figure for us, too – in our battle to restore the democracy of the mind and resist the totalitarian mindset of today. But this will require having the courage of our convictions and our words, as he so often did himself. As he put it in The Prevention of Literature, ‘To write in plain vigorous language one has to think fearlessly’. That Orwell did precisely that was a testament to his belief in the public just as much as his belief in himself. He sets an example and a challenge to us all.