Edward S. Herman, author of "From Ingsoc and Newspeak to Amcap, Amerigood and Marketspeak", discusses how the United States is actually more proficient in using propaganda similar to those described in 1984 than both the Soviet Union and Ingsoc, intended as a satirizationin of the Soviet Union. Before packing and moving back to Russia, however, I decided to search Edward S. Herman on Google to gain background information in order to better understand his perspective. The second result was a page offering Herman's writings on the middle east. This essay entitled "Israel's Ethnic Cleansing" begins as follows: "Israel's treatment of the Palestinians has always presented a moral problem to the West, as that treatment has violated every law and moral standard on the books." The continuation proved even more enlightening:
"The racist discrimination in pushing out Palestinians in favor of Jews is cruel, scandalous, and reminiscent of the behavior of the Nazis (a comparison made often in the Israeli press, but not in the U.S. mainstream media). It was Nazi practice in occupied territories to dispossess the locals from homes to provide "lebensraum" for the "ubermenschen"... Shamir goes on to say that Israeli racism is "not less wide-spread and poisonous" than that of the German Nazis, citing a number of genocidal opinions of Russian-Israeli Jews and stating that today: "The Jewish state is the only place in the world possessing legitimate killer squads, embracing a policy of assassinations, and practicing torture on a medieval scale. But do not worry dear Jewish readers, we torture and assassinate Gentiles only."

In this light it is easier to understand how the United States=Soviet Union. If Jews=Nazis, the rest all follows rationally. In fact Herman's argument itself is reminiscent of the claims of Ingsoc in 1984. In other words, the irony is not that the United States is worse than a satire of a totalitarian regime, but that that a writer who claims to model himself after Orwell is more guilty of Newspeak than Big Brother.

Orwell's essay, meanwhile, is a thoughtful attack on the kind of stuff I'm about to write. But aside from arguing against cliched writing, he eloquently expresses his frustration with political writing. Political writing, for example, of the type that fills every page of every book every politician has ever written. His optimism is somewhat surprising, and unsurprisingly "political speech" has only expanded into more areas of life in the time that has gone by since Orwell wrote his essay. It has already become cliche to attack political correctness, so I will end merely by noting that it is broadly true that class-assignment writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a "party line."