Further notes on bureaucratese

Last week I wrote here about Chesterton and Orwell’s objections to long words, especially the typically Latin-rooted jargon of the bureaucrat or the man with something to hide. I’m currently reading Prit Buttar’s history Battleground Prussia: The Assault on Germany’s Eastern Front 1944-45, and, via some reading adjacent to that book, came across a perfect example of the kind of obfuscating bureaucratese that Chesterton and Orwell had in mind.

Buttar has mentioned Soviet propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg several times so far, always in the context of Ehrenburg’s popularity among Red Army troops and the influence his writing—in Soviet rags like Krasnaya Zvezda—had on the troops. Look Ehrenburg up on Wikipedia and you will find this in the article’s introductory paragraphs:

His incendiary articles calling for vengeance against the German enemy during the Great Patriotic War won him a huge following among front-line Soviet troops, but also caused controversy due to perceived anti-German sentiment.

Emphasis mine.

Both Chesterton and Orwell note how the roundabout, euphemistic vocabulary of the bureaucrat or journalist—or Wikipedia editor?—can obscure simple truths we’d rather not acknowledge. So how much can be obscured by a phrase like the one italicized above? Here are some of the passages from Ehrenburg’s pamphlets and columns that Buttar quotes.

Writing in Krasnaya Zvezda in 1942:

We know all. We remember all. We have understood: the Germans are not human beings. From now on the word German means to use the most terrible oath. From now on the word German strikes us to the quick. We shall not speak any more. We shall not get excited. We shall kill. . . . If you kill one German, kill another—there is nothing more amusing for us than a heap of German corpses. Do not count days, do not count kilometers. Count only the number of Germans killed by you. Kill the German—that is your grandmother’s request. Kill the German—that is your child’s prayer. Kill the German—that is your motherland’s loud request. Do not miss. Do not let up. Kill.

And from a leaflet distributed to the Red Army in October 1944:

Kill! Kill! In the German race there is nothing but evil; not one among the living, not one among the yet unborn is anything but evil! Follow the precepts of Comrade Stalin. Stamp out the fascist beast once and for all in its lair! Use force and break the racial pride of these German women. Take them as your lawful booty. Kill! As you storm onward, kill, you gallant soldiers of the Red Army.

“Perceived anti-German sentiment,” indeed.

Buttar cites the latter passage in connection with the atrocities committed at Nemmersdorf in East Prussia the same month. The Red Army would go on to rape as many as two million German women, an estimated quarter million of whom died as a result.