If the old joke; “Q. How do you know when a politician is lying? A. His lips are movingâ€?, has not quite (yet?) become an axiom of modern political culture, it is certainly a truism that when a politician or public servant starts resorting to euphemisms then something is not all that it appears to be; even if one of the quirks of the British parliamentary system, an outright prohibition on referring to any member of parliament as a ‘liar’ while in the House of Commons chamber, actually makes the creative use of euphemisms obligatory for MPs.

Justin, over at Chicken Yoghurt, has very recently taken Dame Elizabeth Mannigham-Buller. Head of MI5, to task over yet another delightful new euphemism; “detainee reporting�.

It’s easy to laugh at the sheer absurdity of such euphemisms, even when they conceal a darker truth, as Justin notes is his article. Sometimes its the sheer farce of the linguistic entanglement that a ill-chosen euphemism forces on the speaker makes its humourous, as with Donald Rumsfeld’s now classic statement during a US Department of Defence news briefing:

“As we know, There are known knowns, there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, The ones we don’t know we don’t know.â€?

Translation: “We don’t know everythingâ€?

Actually the more I read that statement the more it reminds me of Neil the Hippy’s description of the joys of gardening in the BBC series ‘The Young Onesâ€?:

“First we sow the seeds, nature grows the seeds then we eat the seeds�

Not sure why, it just does.

At other times its the black humour we find in certain euphemisms that makes us laugh, albeit knowingly and in a manner which shows we know what the speaker really means.

So we know that ‘friendly fire’ translates as ‘getting shot in the back by US Apache helicopter gunship’; and ‘collateral damage’ really means ‘Oh fuck! You’re serious? That was a fucking children’s hospital we just bombed!’ just as we know that when a politician starts talking about ‘investing’ in something what he really means is ‘I’m going to be spending your money’.

Nevertheless, Justin hits the nail precisely on the head when he describes the term ‘detainee reporting’ as “a nice ambiguous, modern phrase that lets the likes of Manningham-Buller sleep at night.â€? For that is not only what it is but also nicely defines its purpose as well.

My two semesters of studying sociology at university – I dropped at the end of the first year the subject to concentrate on psychology and politics – left me with few vivid memories, aided immeasurably by the failure of the university in question; which was at that time a mere polytechnic, to succeed in recruiting any more than one lecturer with the ability to make the subject seem interests at a time.

This venerable position as the only interesting sociology lecturer in the university; which – admittedly – put the sociology department one up on the colleagues who taught economics, turned out to be the Professor of Sociology himself; a man who during his academic career and alighted upon two particular specialist field of study; “The Holocaustâ€? and “Thatcher’s Britainâ€? (you can make your own connections there).

His two lectures on the subject of the Holocaust were, by some distance, the most interesting (and best attended) lectures on the whole course; and was during one of these that he related, quite casually, the story of the interrogation, prior to the Nuremberg trials, of Albert Speer; Hitler’s chief architect, minister for armaments and the man whose organisation abilities made the chilling efficiency with which the Nazi’s pursued their goal of exterminating Europe’s Jews, Gypsys, etc – even if Speer’s personal contribution was only even proven to be the development and organisation of Nazi forced labour camps and not a direct involvement in ‘The Final Solution’ (another euphemism) itself.

What came over most strongly, and remarkably, about Speer was not merely that he was one of the few senior Nazis not to have been sentenced to a short visit to the hangman’s noose but that, while under interrogation, he both complained bitterly that he never received the same degree of recognition and praise from Hitler that was lavished on others within the Nazi regime; not because of his fervent belief in the Nazi cause but simply because he felt he did a damn job and should be rewarded for his efficient management of the forced labour camps and the production of munitions. Speer even seemed unaware of what was actually going on at certain of these camps, despite almost certainly having access to the full facts of Nazi policy towards Jews and others thought ‘undesirable’ in the new world order of the ‘Master Race’; none of this ever really registered, he just did his and did it well and that, to Speer, as all that mattered.

Reading that back to myself, there are other obvious parallels I could draw here on consideration of the extent to which ‘managerialism’ clearly influenced Speer’s view of his own role in the Holocaust; but again I leave it to you to find your own modern comparators.

My real point is that, exactly as Justin suggests, euphemisms such as ‘detainee reports’ and ‘extraordinary rendition’ genuinely do serve the purpose of allowing the likes of Elizabeth Manningham-Buller and her subordinates to sleep soundly at night, they serve a very specific psychological purpose which extends far beyond their value in terms of political expediency and public perception.

Over time euphemisms will tend to develop a life and a power all of there very own and assume their own internal veracity and sense of reality, Just as a lie told often enough may become the truth so a euphemism used often enough may come to develop its own sense of meaning that users perceive to be real – the knowingness of understanding that detainee reports may have been obtained through torture gradually diminishes with time until the individual using the terms comes to genuinely believe that detainee reports are exactly what the phrase itself suggests and nothing more; that in reality there is no obfuscated secondary meaning, that the euphemisms is not a euphemisms but a expression of actual truth.

I don’t doubt that, if not now then in the not-to-distant future, there will be many within the security services and the legal system who will see the term ‘detainee report’ and think nothing of it; they will take such things entirely at face value and in the genuinely held belief that the term relates to nothing more sinister the very same kind of evidence that is procured every day by British police officers conducting standard interrogations in full accordance with the provisions of UK law. Suggestions that such reports may possibly contain information obtained under torture would then engender a reaction ranging anywhere from shock to utter outrage – how dare anyone suggest such a thing, they are only detainee reports not the chronicles of the Spanish Inquisition.

One can see such a process explained here, by the American Psychological Association, in the context of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib – note the reference to Stephen Millgram’s use of the euphemisms ‘teachers’ and ‘learners’ in his classic study of the impact of authority on human behaviour.

Only when one understands the true power of euphemisms, particularly when coupled to the bureaucratic mindset of a state functionary – like Albert Speer – and how readily one man’s euphemism can become another’s absolute truth can one really appreciate how easily the joke falls flat when one considers the real nature of detainee reports.

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