More than fifty years have passed since Orwell wrote of “the need to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end …” Tendentious political language, he went on, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” This was written in 1946 at the height of Stalin’s power, and Orwell later developed his thoughts on this issue in his novel 1984. In the book’s appendix on The Principles of Newspeak he wrote that the special function of Oceania’s vocabulary “was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them.” Words could be destroyed, he said, by wantonly expanding their meanings so that they came completely to replace a whole range of older, more specific, and more definite terms and usages. This all sounds painfully familiar. One sees the term ‘civilization’ being deliberately expanded in order to embrace some very uncivilized behavior indeed.

interesting discussion of that "added s" on huntingtoss "clash of civilisations