The Idiom of Political Violence: a Language Betrayed

October 30, 2015
The Idiom of Political Violence: a Language Betrayed

by Jason Hirthler



The Chinese philosopher Confucius famously explained to his disciples that social disorder could be repaired beginning with the “rectification of names.” The principle was described by the Master this way, “If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.” Laborious translations aside, Confucius had a point some 2500 years ago. One of the many consequences of an errant idiom, he said, was that punishments wouldn’t be properly distributed. In other words, the guilty would go free, while the innocent would be punished, perhaps—in a pique of cruel irony—by the oppressors that had victimized them in the first place. Think here of President Barack Obama soullessly admonishing the nation that it was better to look forward than to look back, as he let Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld slip out the back door of the White House, unpunished for their depravity. Confucius would surely have loathed the facile casuistry with which American leaders manipulate the lexicon of power. It calls to mind iconic Swedish actor Max Von Sydow, who played a memorably cranky artist manqué in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters. In one scene, after ranting about the decay of modern society, he informs his listener, “If Jesus came back and saw what’s going on in his name, he’d never stop throwing up.” Add the Eastern sage to the list of posthumously ill.

Probably no nation has harnessed language more skillfully and insidiously than the American empire. Listening with a modern ear, Nazi propaganda sounds appallingly crude today (laughably so, were it not for the horror which that pastiche of prejudices engendered). At any rate, much of Goebbels’ fearmongering narrative would stand little chance of slipping through the editorial net of the American doctrinal system without extensive revision. The practice of inversion, when outright mendacity won’t suffice, has reached a pinnacle in Western propaganda. Everywhere one looks along the horizon of American political discourse, words have come untethered from their meanings, having been set adrift on a sea of inverted allusions.

Murder By Any Other Name

From every corner of the talk spectrum—from foreign policy to finance—the language of the Mainstream Media (MSM) is failing us. Consider some of the refashioned vocabulary of the War on Terror, changes wrought to affect exactly the kind of passivity with which they are now received. Just last week, The Intercept published insider information about the President’s drone program. We learned, among other things, the essential difference between “targeted killings” and “assassination”. Namely, nothing. They are one in the same. For what is an assassination but a summary execution the victim of which is stripped of his or her right to habeas corpus or the right to a fair trial. The Intercept article demonstrated that in many instances, the Pentagon did not know whom it was killing. Those slain with a double tap hit—one following the initial strike—were said to be “enemies killed in action” by virtue of their proximity to the strike.

Water Torture

Likewise, what is the difference between waterboarding and “water dousing”? In an effort to limit its culpability for waterboarding, the CIA evidently drew mincing distinctions between waterboarding and water dousing, the latter of which adds hypothermia to the sense of suffocation induced by water torture. The Senate’s report on torture, released last year, included a quote from a CIA linguist about a “shower” given to Gul Rahman, the only detainee said to have died in CIA “custody”. The reference was to water dousing.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/30/the-idiom-of-political-violence-a-language-betrayed/