Political prose is built to make lies respectable and murder tolerable, chiefly through abstraction and the passive voice.
Orwell's 1946 essay. His examples are still current: the passive voice removes the actor, and abstraction removes the victim, so both together make an atrocity reportable as a development.
In practice
- A memo reporting that headcount was optimised leaves the reader unable to say who decided, who left, or when.
- "Mistakes were made", "collateral damage" and "workforce realignment" all name events while removing everyone who caused them.