Poole should not be expected to be comprehensive, but his problem is the slant of his subjectivity. He attacks Western governments lecturing the Third World about something misnamed ‘free trade’. Where is his discussion about that yet more contentious term, ‘fair trade’? With very few exceptions, his villains are all the greed-drenched corporations and politicians of the Bush-Blair axis. Say what you will about Donald Rumsfeld, but can the current President of the United States really be a Texan Joe Goebbels of language manipulation? This, after all, is the man who reacted to news that hijacked airliners had slammed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon by referring to the perpetrators as ‘folks’.
More importantly, can it be — as the casual reader might assume — that human rights activists, NGOs and liberal interest groups do not also deploy words in a manner that advertises their virtues but not their vices? It is incredible that a book about the manipulation of language for political ends does not discuss the effect of political correctness. This, after all, is a theory that seeks, in part, to change behaviour by the prohibition and substitution of words. From campus to Congress, such a programme is far more systematic than anything achieved by the likes of Dick Cheney.
Indeed, most Conservatives are under the impression that one of the greatest problems they have faced over the past decade has been the extent to which the language of debate has been so effectively turned against them. The problem of ‘unspeak’ is far more widespread than Steven Poole would have us believe. Like the modified SS-1b Scud-A, he has largely missed his target.
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