Writing in Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple examines the language used by police in the aftermath of the killing of eight children in Shreveport, Louisiana, finding in its bureaucratic euphemisms a symptom of the deeper moral evasion that Orwell warned of in Politics and the English Language.
A later statement by the police said that the suspect had been “neutralized.” This is appalling: it speaks of a human life as if it were an acid to which a base had been added to result in a pH of 7. It is the adoption by the police of the language of dictators.