Word: doubletalk
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...authorities decided to mount a military convoy, manned by unarmed soldiers, with supplies for the U.S. garrison in Berlin, and announced that it would be sent through as a "training convoy." This show of force, decorated with doubletalk, was something the Russians could understand. They waved the convoy through, and simultaneously quickened the inspection rate of the trucks at Helmstedt to one every three minutes...
Presumably, too, the Administration was dead set against another round of wage increases (see BUSINESS), but it just couldn't bring itself to say so. In trying to write around this painful subject, the President's economic advisers composed some masterful doubletalk. Sample: At the present time both employers and workers should strive to work out adjustments which will help to stimulate activity, bearing in mind the need both for holding business costs down and for maintaining consumer purchasing power at high levels...
...party line. He told the comrades: in their zeal to defeat Hitler, he and the other chieftains around headquarters had "dragged at the tail end of Roosevelt . . . did not adequately maintain our own Communist identity and vanguard role." This is the sin now known, in the Aesopian doubletalk of communism, as "tailism." Browder, said Dennis, was still hypnotized by his "original opportunist illusions." But Dennis' eyes had been opened. To the barricades...
Then wrapping himself in a cloak of political doubletalk, Henry grandly brushed aside criticism of Soviet totalitarianism. "The Russians," he explained, "approach the democratic principle through an economic dictatorship." Said Sol Bloom: "Oh, stop kidding...
...months a torrent of science propaganda has sluiced from Moscow's presses. Murky with Marxist doubletalk, it praises Soviet science, denounces Western science as the tool of capitalism and the slave of doctrinal errors, such as "idealism" and "formalism." Along with the orchids for Russia and brickbats for the West go long polemic discourses on such subjects as genetics and quantum mechanics. Most of it is far above the heads of the Russian (or any other) general public...