Listen up.

[conuly]

"Passive voice" does not mean "any construction I think is deliberately vague".

"Palestinians died" is in the active voice, even if you think it should read "Palestinians were killed by Israeli soldiers" (which, fittingly, is a passive voice.) It's weaselly, but it's not a passive. (Or, on the flipside, "violence broke out" isn't a passive either, even if you think it should say "the Palestinians attacked the Israelis", but at least the suggested correction is also in the active voice.)

"Democrats allowed this situation [of migrant separation] to escalate" is an outright lie, but that doesn't make it a passive voice construction either.

"Don't use the passive voice!!!" is an absurd little bugaboo, but if you're going to religiously adhere to it you can at least learn how to properly identify passive and active clauses.

Comments

[malkingrey]

Right. The passive voice is a grammatical construction, not a moral choice.

(The so-called "agentless passive", where the "by X" part of the construction is omitted, is used a lot for responsibility-dodging of the "mistakes were made" variety, but that's the fault of the speaker, not the grammar. There are times when the identity of X is either unknown or irrelevant or both, and the agentless passive is the appropriate voice in those cases.)

[redbird]

Yes. Going back to my example above, if the sentence was "Olof Palme was assassinated," it could be expanded to something like "Olof Palme was assassinated by a still-unidentified gunman," but active voice wouldn't be enough to identify the killer. Active voice produces something like "an unidentified assassin shot Olof Palme," which is useful if the writer wants to call attention to the fact that the crime hasn't been solved, rather than to the victim, but I think "the prime minister has been shot" is a more likely and more emphatic sentence than "someone shot the prime minister." Unless it's so soon after the assassination that you want to convey "so be careful, there's an unidentified assassin somewhere in the city."