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Human rights or rites?

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From: Quadrant
Date: 20060501
Author:Izzard, John

IN HIS 1951 BOOK Two Cheers for Democracy, E.M. Forster devoted a short essay to George Orwell which included these lines:

 
   Liberty, he [Orwell] argues, is connected with 
   prose, and bureaucrats who want to destroy liberty 
   tend to write and speak badly, and to use pompous 
   and woolly or portmanteau phrases in which their 
   true meaning or any meaning disappears. It is the 
   duty of the citizen, and particularly the practising 
   journalist, to be on the lookout for such phrases and 
   words and rend them to pieces. 

But that was in the early 1950s, before ...

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