Orwell summarized aerial policing’s abuse of humanity and language: “Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.” These British innovations would deeply influence the development of American military and policing power. In this period, in the Middle East, on the Indian frontier, and in East Africa, work previously performed “by policemen and sticks” was undertaken by the Royal Air Force, with aircraft and bombs. What if all police officers heeded the pangs of conscience as Orwell did?Ĭolonial policing also sharpened Orwell’s awareness of the anesthetizing effects of sanitized language, whose apotheosis, he showed us, was the soulless Newspeak of 1984.
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