Last week, my wife Asmaa Essakouti was re-reading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four for a class on censorship she teaches. I was reading over her shoulder and found it more timely than ever. Even more timely perhaps was his 1946 essay ”The Prevention of Literature”, which Asmaa sent me. An essayistic prequel to his classic novel, it is in many ways a dated piece, most importantly in its historical context of Orwell’s struggle against supporters of Stalin’s Soviet Union among the British left during and immediately after World War II. In other ways, it is surprisingly prescient, observing a tendency towards automation in text production that today has resulted in Large Language Models (also known as AI), and anticipating the gradual replacement of the printed book by the screen. Reading it in the autumn of 2025, Orwell’s essay inspires me to think three thoughts: one about language and power, another about truth and violence, and a third one about how I would like to write.
1. Language is power, or is it?
In two conversations with colleagues in the past couple of months, the discussion turned to the increasing strength of the ethnonationalist populist right in Europe and the Americas, and the relative weakness of progressive leftist politics in comparison. Specifically, we took up the attack from the right against what the latter once called ”political correctness” and now call ”woke.” The people I conversed with (who were European academics) saw especially in North American politics a certain tendency to ridiculous excess in the policing of words at the cost of structural issues, all the while the right wing was using those excesses as a propaganda tool for their successful conquest of institutions.
And yet, I do not think that silly exaggeration is the real problem. Others get away with it. Trump and Trumpists clearly have the lead when it comes to silly exaggeration, boastful disregard of facts, and shameless censorship of dissenting voices. And it does not work to their disadvantage. Trump and Trumpists have at the same time been able to seize the federal government and institutions in a remarkably short time, and forge alliances with major economic players. The self-praise of Gulf Monarchies in marketing themselves as exceptional and superlative is ridiculous, even embarrassing to anybody with a minimum of critical distance. But Gulf monarchies have the money to buy the outward loyalty of those working for them, and to enforce the silence of others with an apparatus of surveillance and violence. They can indulge in exaggerated self-praise because they have enough power to prevent others from challenging it.
This crucial importance of material means of domination accompanying the politics of words, I think, points at a key weakness of the progressive left. At a time when white working classes in the West are increasingly moving towards identitarian politics (which interestingly mirrors similar developments elsewhere, such as the ability of Islamist movements to mobilise across class divisions in many Muslim countries, and the ability of the Hindu right to gain mass support in India in spite of divisive economic policies), the working class that continues to vote for leftist parties in Europe consists increasingly of people of migrant origins who experience a combination of racist and class discrimination. In terms of ideology and values, many of them might feel more home with conservative parties if it weren’t for the unwillingness of the latter to welcome them. Outside that constituency, the progressive left today is overwhelmingly academic and/or urban bourgeois. And among the latter constituency, being able to fluently use the right words matters a lot; words are the way to prove one’s worth, to establish one’s position in class and professional hierarchies.
In this academic, urban bourgeois constituency something I call ”vulgar Foucauldianism” has established itself as a way of doing politics. Michel Foucault famously argued that words play a major role in the creation of institutions such as prisons and mental hospitals, and their subjects: criminals and mentally ill. Vulgar Foucauldianism is a version of the above where institutions and violence are an effect of language: a faith that by describing what kind of things exist and what kind of actions are possible, discourse can actually create reality. Therefore, key struggles are about words: we attack words that we believe to create a reality we oppose, our key victories are about the introduction of words that we believe to structure reality the way we want it to be. What is repeatedly forgotten, moved out of sight in those struggles (although old-school leftists keep ranting about it) are material relations of exploitation, privilege, and resources. Perhaps this is because many of the people who are vocal about verbal justice are quite privileged in terms of educational and economic capital. And perhaps it is simply much easier to change words and narratives than to change the structures that determine who has access to education, and who can get away with exploiting and killing other people.
In either case, what has made the progressive camp weak is not its discourse, but rather the absence of a sufficient popular base and material resources to create the material realities necessary to accompany the discourse. Radical discourse today has neither the finances nor the armies that would allow it to get away with ridiculous excesses. This seems to be why we often seek alliances with people who do have the armies and the mass support even when their aims are very different from ours – a feature of leftist intelligentsia that our time shares with Orwell’s.
While there is an apparent similarity between today and the 1940’s in the prefabricated phrases of political language and the pressure to write in line with one’s political narrative, the differences are also evident. The conversations between my colleagues and me were framed by a sense of powerlessness in face of a successful grasp for institutional power by our enemies. Orwell, in contrast, wrote against the expectation of a successful totalitarian grasp for power by some of the same people who had been his comrades in the Spanish Civil War. By virtue of being a real state with real power, the Soviet Union seemed to hold the answer for the improvement of the human condition. Its crimes were known for those who cared to inquire, but its promises appeared greater because of the material progress it displayed (which Orwell acknowledged). Orwell did not accuse his opponents of getting lost in discourse, but of sacrificing the critical work of independent thinking to ideological orthodoxy and tactical justifications for whatever happened to be the party line:
”Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child’s Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship.
[...]
”Wherever there is an enforced orthodoxy — or even two orthodoxies, as often happens — good writing stops. This was well illustrated by the Spanish civil war. To many English intellectuals the war was a deeply moving experience, but not an experience about which they could write sincerely. There were only two things that you were allowed to say, and both of them were palpable lies: as a result, the war produced acres of print but almost nothing worth reading.”
The differences between his and our times notwithstanding, Orwell offers to a reader today a healthy measure of doubt towards all and any ideological narratives. In ”Politics and the English language”, another essay also published in 1946, he argues:
”Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
Orwell believed in the power of words to remember the past and to reflect the present. But contrary to the vulgar Foucauldian idea that language=power, he did not believe that words can create realities. Orwell’s concern was with the power of language to distort our access to reality by falsifying history and veiling the present. He offers us the useful recognition that much of political language consists of either lies or bullshit. In other words, it either claims something that is not true, or is unconcerned about being true or false. This is usually apparent to those who do not share the political narrative or position of the speaker.
This is not to say that political discourse is never constructive of reality. I do agree with feminists and Foucauldians about the role of language in social hierarchies and administrative practices. The way I speak about the world is a part of how I understand the world, which influences how I act in it. But that does not mean that world obeys my words. My understanding can be mistaken and my actions may fail. Therefore, insofar as it guides us towards mistaken understandings and failed actions, political discourse also has the power to destroy our access to reality. It veils structural dependencies, it presents realities in the shape of our wishful thinking, and by so doing, it gives us an exaggerated impression of our own power. This is not much of a problem for those who command other consequential means of power and domination. But for those who seek to challenge dominant powers, it can result in a catastrophic overestimation of one’s own strength.
2. How can they not see the obvious truth?
In contrast to Foucault who argued that there is no knowledge outside of the systems of power that produce it, Orwell insisted in his essay ”The prevention of literature” that it is possible and necessary to strive for a truthful account:
”What is really at issue is the right to report contemporary events truthfully, or as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias and self-deception from which every observer necessarily suffers.”
The problem I am struggling with in the here and now, while reading Orwell and his struggle against the totalitarian tendencies 80 years go, is what kind of truth is possible when bias and self-deception dominate, when the same words that make some people absolutely convinced can easily be identified as false or silly by others. What are we to do about the phenomenon that other people can be so convinced about things we find so obviously wrong, and so unwillingly to accept the evidence that we find so overwhelming?
In Orwell’s polemical analysis, a key productive feature of political language and ideological orthodoxies is that they make us able to support horrendous crimes in the name of what we consider righteous causes. First, they distract us by directing our thoughts and narratives towards what we want to believe in, and away from what we don’t want to think about. Secondly, they give our actions a moral cover. A particularly effective moral cover in our time is the focus on what the others did or wanted to do. Focusing on the wrongdoing of our enemies saves us the trouble of asking uncomfortable questions about our own actions. The obvious limit of such language of justification by distraction and opposition is that it only works for those who want to believe it. For others, it comes across as silly or incomprehensibly wrong. Within a circle of conversation such as an activist bubble, it is possible to not notice this. Outside such bubbles, substantial amounts of money, command over power to move things and people, and violence are needed able to make obvious bullshit either convincing or at least hard to counter.
Yes, in the back of my mind are the many conversations I have had during the destruction of Gaza in the past two years about ”how can they support that?” It is usually asked as a rhetorical question in the way of pointing blame, and not in the way of seeking an answer. But it can also be asked as a genuine question, in which case the answers are easily provided. An Egyptian office worker in the UAE with whom I shared the room asked me how come people in the West seem to care so much more for Jewish than for Palestinian lives. I answered that it was because of racism: in Europe, we have grown to think of the Jewish people of Israel as being ”us”; and many actually are double citizens of Western countries from which their grandparents once fled or migrated. We have learned to care more for them for that reason. My roommate found my answer informative but frustrating because he considered it a wrong way to think and act. In the context of the conversation, the question was a factual one, and so was my answer. They moved the conversation forward. Had the same question and answer been posed in a political conversation among academics in Germany or another European country, it would have been more likely charged with a tone of accusation and, in case there would have been people with opposing views in the room, counter-accusation and mutual incomprehension. In that context, racism is not a descriptive term nor an explanation. It is an accusation that denies the stances of those accused of it: racist views are not worth listening to in the first place. Therefore, the one accused of racism can only deny it. The conversation does not move forward. Political language, in that situation, becomes a marker of frontlines and not a means of communication.
”How can others not see the obvious truth?” is a question that also reminds us that Western progressives are not quite as lost in discourse as their critics claim. At least when it comes to the mass murder of Palestinians, many of them do believe in self-evident factual truth. But they also do care about speaking that truth in the right words. The question invites a counter-question: How can a truth that so many others fail to see be obvious?
Orwell reminds that the truth about facts is not the same thing as the truth of our politics. The facts, the material events on the ground, are largely uncontested in this case. Over 80 per cent of buildings in Gaza have been either destroyed or damaged. At least 3 per cent of the entire population of Gaza has been directly murdered by the Israeli army (according the current official body count of Gaza’s ministry of health, which only counts violent deaths and does not include excess mortality due to illness, starvation etc.). Other facts are contested but do not fundamentally change the big picture. When others fail to see the obvious truth, what they actually fail in is to agree with the narrative into which these facts are woven: a narrative that calls for liberation as the solution to end the genocide. Paradoxically, this makes it harder for people who do not support the narrative of Palestinian liberation to accept that Israel’s actions during the war indeed are suited to the aim of killing and deporting so many people of Gaza and destroying so much of its physical structure that if the actions were successfully completed, Gaza would no longer be a Palestinian city. And as far as I understand it, systematic killing, deportation and destruction until a city is no longer inhabited by its people is what genocide means according to the UN convention. However, when accepting that description becomes linked with the acceptance of a bigger political narrative about who is right and wrong and what should be the outcome of the struggle, it becomes more difficult for those who don’t share the bigger narrative to recognise the description.
Acknowledgedly, the public opinion in Europe has shifted in the two years of the war. The facts have perhaps not convinced the majority of Europeans of the narrative of Palestinian liberation, but Europeans have become much more sceptical than before about the story that Israel under Netanyahu’s leadership is promoting. And yet, this has not changed the racist hierarchy of lives. European sympathies only flipped when the ratio of killing between Palestinians and Jewish citizens of Israel reached and exceeded the relation of fifty to one. This does not give much cause to optimism.
3. To reach different conclusions
The question I ask myself after reading Orwell in autumn 2025 is: how can I write and describe the realities of which I have good enough knowledge in a way that what I say tells some truth that is intelligible also to people who do not share my narrative about what is right and wrong and what the outcome of our current struggles should be?
To overcome the tendency of political language to veil realities, Orwell calls for a way of writing and thinking language that is precise and original, that does not rely on recycled thoughts and expressions, and does not already know beforehand what it wants to arrive at. This is for me the gist of his essay ”The prevention of literature”:
”To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.”
In our day, the idea of plain language has been seized by the right wing. Some right-wing writers claim to speak in plain words about the natural order of reality as opposed to an alleged woke obsession to invent through words what does not exist in nature. Where the progressive left has sought to complicate our taken-for-granted assumptions, the right wing insists that it’s all really simple actually: some people are destined to rule and others to serve. But this is not what Orwell meant with plain language, which he described as the outcome of fearless thinking. Conservative right-wing thinking is fearful insofar as it is a thinking within limits and in support of limits. The language it produces is not plain but blunt. The populist right seeks to seize the power to speak bluntly, which would not be of so much consequence if it weren’t for their increasing success in seizing institutions that can back up blunt speech by blunt actions.
I have so far offered an unpalatable choice of options: mistaking one’s powerful words for power; making the recognition of factual truths conditional on the recognition of my narrative about them as true; and blunt thinking expressed in blunt language to promote blunt acts. So here comes the option I promote.
A turning point in my career as an academic writer was when I realised that people in Egypt and other Arab countries who are not professional academics were reading things I wrote: specifically, things that were more narrative and descriptive, and sought to recount and understand what I saw in Egypt during and after the revolution, and with Egyptian workers in the Gulf. In those writings, I combined much narrative detail with sparse theoretical analysis trying to understand what was going on. The arguments I make in those writings are often not well-contained. Instead of making a water-proof argument, they are somewhat all over the place. A friendly reviewer once wrote that “it often feels that Schielke has too many ideas.” I have taken this as a positive endorsement. Perhaps there is value in writing in a way that is not waterproof, not concerned with already excluding possible objections, a way that offers more evidence than is necessary to prove my point. By offering more detailed stories and more possible ideas than is necessary for a scientific argument, I hope to offer the reader an opportunity to reach different conclusions than those I am presenting.
As academics, and as citizens speaking in the public, we are trained in fearful thinking. We should be afraid of being proven wrong, afraid of using the wrong words, afraid of serving the wrong narratives, afraid of risking our careers. I understand why such fear is a necessary part of political language. But I prefer it not to be part of our social scientific analysis of the world we live in nor of our literature. This does not mean that I promote sloppy thinking. In a plenary presentation at the conference of the German Anthropological Association in early October this year, Ghassan Hage proposed that our task as scholars is to “think hard”. I understand “thinking hard” as a call to not accept things at face value, to not take ideas and narratives for granted, to not be certain of what we think we know. Instead – at least this is how I understand him – we should take our time, encounter places and people, listen to them, take seriously the possibility that as experts of their own lives they are likely to have the best understanding available, but also be willing to disagree with them if I have reason to, and try to add an insight that others did not yet think of.
Orwell argued for original writing and thinking against a tendency towards automated and standardised text production in his time. That tendency has been radically amplified by Large Language Models. Language models are able to write smoother text than the vast majority of humans, which makes them excellent editors and good translators. They do so by an algorithmic magnification of what Orwell attested to political orthodoxy and commercial culture of his time: as probability engines, they produce the likely next sentence to all sentences previously recorded on the internet, and articulate the likely next thought to thoughts previously articulated. They do so in a smooth and pleasing fashion, and with unprecedented ease. That ease dramatically increases the scope and range of our expression and communication, turning people with no knowledge of coding into successful programmers and others with a difficulty to find the right words into fluent writers. But they do not invite us to think hard, and they do not encourage fearless thinking. The role of literary and scientific writing by humans, if it has any future at all in the age of large language models and decreasing attention spans, is to think unpredictable thoughts and express them in unlikely words. Otherwise we will be confined in an echo-chamber of the Internet citing itself.
When I studied philosophy at the university in the 1990’s, I was taught that a philosophical theory must also apply to itself. In this essay, I have tried to follow different leads that Orwell’s essay invited me to think about. The question of language and power, the question of truth about horrible crimes and proposed solutions to overcome them, and the question of how to write today as an empirical academic researcher together do not add up to one waterproof point. There is too much to say, too much going on at the same time for me to be able to provide that point.
The tentative answers I offer do, however, add up to a proposal: to insist that our words can indeed convey some truth about the world implies a two-fold recognition: first, that the world is not simply an effect of our words and therefore cannot be structured at will without major material resources; and second, the fact that our words can convey some truth does not mean that this truth will ever be obvious to others. Much inspired by Donna Haraway’s idea of situated knowledge, I rather propose that a shared acknowledgement of realities is possible, but also cumbersome and fragile due to the different positionalities of all those who share in the act of knowing and communication. It is also constantly under threat by the ease with which the power of the stronger can overrule the power of evidence and replace the fruits of hard thinking by ready-made slogans that work as long as the processes of violent confrontation and exploitation work.
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Acknowledgements: The first draft of this essay was read by Asmaa Essakouti and Google Gemini whom I asked to point out weaknesses and inconsistencies. I have implemented the suggestions by Asmaa but largely ignored those by Gemini. In addition to the people mentioned or alluded to in the text (those whose names are not mentioned will hopefully recognise themselves), my thanks go to Wael Al Soukkary, Elena Chiti, Pascale Ghazaleh, and Harri Juntunen who by thinking differently from me, have influenced my thinking more than they may know.
