Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > Translating 8 of the Media's Code Words to Reveal Their Imperial
Mindset
________________________________________
Translating 8 of the Media's Code Words to Reveal Their Imperial Mindset
By Adam Johnson [1] / AlterNet [2]
February 17, 2016
"If thought corrupts language," George Orwell once reasoned, "language can
also corrupt thought." This is how the immoral can seem banal, the cruel
sanitized and the trite profound. In his time these nuggets of discourse
included, "bestial atrocities," "iron heel," "bloodstained tyranny," and
"free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder."
Today these terms seem corny, foreign or both, but in the late 1940s they
passed for insight and conventional wisdom, and one had to more or less
parrot them in order to be taken seriously. Orwell lamented the hollowness
of these human propaganda conduits, which we generally call "pundits":
One often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being
[say these terms] but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes
stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and
turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them.
This tedium isn't just an offense to originality, but to the fabric of
democracy itself. Through repetition and folksy appeal, oft-repeated
expressions become not only intellectually corrosive, but political weapons.
They allow, as he put it, "the words to chose the meaning, not the other way
around."
And so it still goes in 2016. Here are eight toxic euphemisms American
empire uses to numb us to its brutality.
1. "Muscular foreign policy."
Actual meaning: Supports more mechanized violence against far off peoples.
Examples: Hillary Clinton gave a speech [3] in which she announced a
willingness to use more imperial violence than Obama and the Serious Foreign
Policy crowd was elated.
Political purpose: To employ macho-sounding euphemisms to sanitize the fact
that our political leaders are ordering someone to order someone to order
someone in an air-conditioned room to remotely bomb someone 5,000 miles
away. There is, of course, nothing tough about doing this.
2. "Stronghold."
Actual meaning: Civil area controlled by government we don't like.
Example: "Stronghold" is used in many contexts, but the most common is when
the New York Times and others employ it to describe any part of south
Lebanon controlled by Hezbollah. In addition to being a militia, Hezbollah
is also a civilian political party that is popular in Beirut, so when ISIL
blew up a civilian shopping center in Beirut, killing 43, many were shocked
and disgusted [4] the Times would refer to victims of an ISIL terror attack
shopping for fruit as being in a stronghold. After much protest, the
headline was changed and the Times issued a non-apology. The reality is, for
years the New York Times and many other outlets have used "Hezbollah
stronghold" to refer to civilian areas of Lebanon, though it's typically
done in the context of Israel bombing civilians, not ISIL.
Political purpose: To "militarized" civilians U.S. and its allies kill and
thus excuse their crimes.
3. "Populist."
Actual meaning: Democratically oriented politician who scares elites.
Examples: Domestically, we see it used to slander Bernie Sanders, but it's
most frequently used to smear elected governments the U.S. doesn't like,
namely socialist governments like Venezuela's.
Political purpose: In perfect Orwellian fashion, the goal is to turn the
entire notion of democratic government on its head and phrase it as a bad
thing. Populism, or appealing to what is popular, thus becomes a pejorative
and not desirable. The fact that Hugo Chavez is elected with 63% [5] of the
vote is somehow evidence of a system gone wrong rather than one that's
clearly doing its job by serving the people.
4. "Developing economy."
Actual meaning: Poor country the West plans to exploit in the form of heavy
interest on loans, cheap and unprotected labor and raw materials.
Example: China [6], India [7], all of Africa [8] and Latin America.
Political purpose: The term is actually more offensive than "third world"
because it treats other countries like children-or in this case teens-who
are in some type of adolescence, only to reach first-world adulthood in some
vague, unknown timeframe. In the interim, they must take out large loans
from the IMF and let American and European corporations have access to their
natural resources.
5. "Regime."
Actual meaning: Governments the U.S. and its allies don't like.
Example: Saddam regime, Assad regime and Gaddafi regime, all of which we
attempted to overthrow.
Political purpose: The use of "[Dictator X] regime" is a way to
anthropomorphize an entire political system, thus making regime change seem
effortless and personal in nature. If only we could kill the main bad guy,
the rest of the war will be simple. In a 2006 paper [9], former Obama aide
and economics professor Cass Sunstein laid out the importance of what he
called the "Goldstein Effect," based on Orwell's book 1984. In it, a
character, Emmanuel Goldstein, is used as the face of a far-off enemy and
helps motivate people to fight perpetual war. Sunstein insists that "the
ability to intensify public concern by giving a definite face to the
adversary, specifying a human source" was essential to rally the public
around an enemy.
While it's clear Saddam et al. ran their respective countries, reducing
their entire civil societies to one evil face made selling the destruction
of said country much easier to an increasingly war-weary public. "But these
are all bad men," you say. Well yes, but so are the men who run the Saudi
and Egyptian governments, yet they're almost never referred to as the Salman
regime and Sisi regime; instead the media refers to them as the Saudi and
Egyptian "governments." This belies any objective notion to the term. While
theoretically useful, "regime" is almost always used to prejudice the reader
against governments the United States deems unfriendly to our interests.
6. "Stability."
Actual meaning: Neoliberal economic order and NATO hegemony are
unchallenged.
Example: "Mr. Sisi has brought stability to Egypt," says the Economist [10]
of murderous dictator.
Political purpose: To try and pass off unsavory governments, leaders and
economic systems as, at the very least, predictable. To business-minded
types, this is the ultimate virtue since investments require some ability to
model out five, 10 years down the road. Therefore, the simple act of keeping
unrest at bay is seen as a positive quality, even if, as in the case of
Sisi, it requires extrajudicial killings, jailing journalists and snuffing
out democracy. As Morgan State professor Dr. Jared Ball once said [11] in
the context of policies directed at inner-city communities, "What they want
is 'stability', not freedom. Blacks walking around with their fist up, not
stable. Blacks killing each other, stable."
7. "No-fly zone."
Actual meaning: The right to fly over another country's territory unimpeded
for surveillance, bombing and transport, and control of other party's
efforts.
Example: No-fly zones in Libya and Syria.
Political purpose: "No-fly zone" is texbook Orwell because the phrase itself
implies it's a suspension of war rather than an escalation. A no-fly zone is
not actually a no-fly zone. It's an "only one country flies here" zone and
that country, more often than not, is the United States. No-fly zones
involve the destruction of another country's air capacity, typically
targeting military installations and aircraft. The no-fly zone in Libya
involved weeks of sustained bombing that killed hundreds. According to a
2013 Pentagon estimate [12], a no-fly zone in Syria would involve a greater
sustained air assault and as much as "70,000 servicemen." But none of these
messy facts are mentioned when politicians like Marco Rubio and Hillary
Clinton bandy around the term because they assume, rightly, that most people
don't actually know what a no-fly zone entails.
8. "Boots on the ground."
Actual meaning: A boot is announced to be on the ground when a U.S.
president sees that there's no political damage in public opinion to
announcing putting military boots on the ground. Otherwise military actions
take the announced form of terms that include trainers, experts, civilian
aid, rescue missions, and drone surveillance missions.
Example: Obama promises [13] no "boots on the ground" in Iraq.
Political purpose: No term better captures the combination of imperial
arrogance and pseudo-leftism that defines the current center-left discussion
of foreign policy than "boots on the ground." Somehow opposing boots on the
ground, or the deployment of American soldiers, became enough to render one
a "dove" despite being totally okay with using drones, F-22s and cruise
missiles to kill people from afar. There were no boots on the ground during
Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, or 9/11, but certainly no one considers these
events dovish in nature.
Adam Johnson is an associate editor at AlterNet. Follow him on Twitter at
@adamjohnsonnyc [14].
Share on Facebook Share
Share on Twitter Tweet
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [15]
[16]
________________________________________
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/media/translating-8-most-common-code-words-reveal-us
-medias-imperial-mindset
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/adam-johnson-0
[2] http://alternet.org
[3]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-iran-foreign-policy_us_5
5f05c2ae4b002d5c07786b2
[4]
http://fair.org/home/media-turn-civilian-isis-victims-in-beirut-into-hezboll
ah-human-shields/
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuelan_presidential_election,_2006
[6]
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-19/emerging-stocks-pare-weekl
y-gain-on-oil-retreat-ringgit-slumps
[7]
http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2014/apr/07/is
-india-still-a-developing-country
[8]
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/feb/19/closing-capital-drain-emergi
ng-markets-joseph-stiglitz
[9]
http://www.glerl.noaa.gov/seagrant/ClimateChangeWhiteboard/Resources/Uncerta
inty/Mac1/susteinPR.pdf
[10] https://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/652870231006822400
[11] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyDhxV3NMmw
[12]
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/23/world/middleeast/obamas-uncertain-path-ami
d-syria-bloodshed.html?referrer=&_r=3
[13]
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-says-it-again-no-ground-troops-in-iraq/
[14] https://twitter.com/adamjohnsonnyc
[15] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Translating 8 of the
Media's Code Words to Reveal Their Imperial Mindset
[16] http://www.alternet.org/
[17] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > Translating 8 of the Media's Code Words to Reveal Their Imperial
Mindset
Translating 8 of the Media's Code Words to Reveal Their Imperial Mindset
By Adam Johnson [1] / AlterNet [2]
February 17, 2016
"If thought corrupts language," George Orwell once reasoned, "language can
also corrupt thought." This is how the immoral can seem banal, the cruel
sanitized and the trite profound. In his time these nuggets of discourse
included, "bestial atrocities," "iron heel," "bloodstained tyranny," and
"free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder."
Today these terms seem corny, foreign or both, but in the late 1940s they
passed for insight and conventional wisdom, and one had to more or less
parrot them in order to be taken seriously. Orwell lamented the hollowness
of these human propaganda conduits, which we generally call "pundits":
One often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being
[say these terms] but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes
stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and
turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them.
This tedium isn't just an offense to originality, but to the fabric of
democracy itself. Through repetition and folksy appeal, oft-repeated
expressions become not only intellectually corrosive, but political weapons.
They allow, as he put it, "the words to chose the meaning, not the other way
around."
And so it still goes in 2016. Here are eight toxic euphemisms American
empire uses to numb us to its brutality.
1. "Muscular foreign policy."
Actual meaning: Supports more mechanized violence against far off peoples.
Examples: Hillary Clinton gave a speech [3] in which she announced a
willingness to use more imperial violence than Obama and the Serious Foreign
Policy crowd was elated.
Political purpose: To employ macho-sounding euphemisms to sanitize the fact
that our political leaders are ordering someone to order someone to order
someone in an air-conditioned room to remotely bomb someone 5,000 miles
away. There is, of course, nothing tough about doing this.
2. "Stronghold."
Actual meaning: Civil area controlled by government we don't like.
Example: "Stronghold" is used in many contexts, but the most common is when
the New York Times and others employ it to describe any part of south
Lebanon controlled by Hezbollah. In addition to being a militia, Hezbollah
is also a civilian political party that is popular in Beirut, so when ISIL
blew up a civilian shopping center in Beirut, killing 43, many were shocked
and disgusted [4] the Times would refer to victims of an ISIL terror attack
shopping for fruit as being in a stronghold. After much protest, the
headline was changed and the Times issued a non-apology. The reality is, for
years the New York Times and many other outlets have used "Hezbollah
stronghold" to refer to civilian areas of Lebanon, though it's typically
done in the context of Israel bombing civilians, not ISIL.
Political purpose: To "militarized" civilians U.S. and its allies kill and
thus excuse their crimes.
3. "Populist."
Actual meaning: Democratically oriented politician who scares elites.
Examples: Domestically, we see it used to slander Bernie Sanders, but it's
most frequently used to smear elected governments the U.S. doesn't like,
namely socialist governments like Venezuela's.
Political purpose: In perfect Orwellian fashion, the goal is to turn the
entire notion of democratic government on its head and phrase it as a bad
thing. Populism, or appealing to what is popular, thus becomes a pejorative
and not desirable. The fact that Hugo Chavez is elected with 63% [5] of the
vote is somehow evidence of a system gone wrong rather than one that's
clearly doing its job by serving the people.
4. "Developing economy."
Actual meaning: Poor country the West plans to exploit in the form of heavy
interest on loans, cheap and unprotected labor and raw materials.
Example: China [6], India [7], all of Africa [8] and Latin America.
Political purpose: The term is actually more offensive than "third world"
because it treats other countries like children-or in this case teens-who
are in some type of adolescence, only to reach first-world adulthood in some
vague, unknown timeframe. In the interim, they must take out large loans
from the IMF and let American and European corporations have access to their
natural resources.
5. "Regime."
Actual meaning: Governments the U.S. and its allies don't like.
Example: Saddam regime, Assad regime and Gaddafi regime, all of which we
attempted to overthrow.
Political purpose: The use of "[Dictator X] regime" is a way to
anthropomorphize an entire political system, thus making regime change seem
effortless and personal in nature. If only we could kill the main bad guy,
the rest of the war will be simple. In a 2006 paper [9], former Obama aide
and economics professor Cass Sunstein laid out the importance of what he
called the "Goldstein Effect," based on Orwell's book 1984. In it, a
character, Emmanuel Goldstein, is used as the face of a far-off enemy and
helps motivate people to fight perpetual war. Sunstein insists that "the
ability to intensify public concern by giving a definite face to the
adversary, specifying a human source" was essential to rally the public
around an enemy.
While it's clear Saddam et al. ran their respective countries, reducing
their entire civil societies to one evil face made selling the destruction
of said country much easier to an increasingly war-weary public. "But these
are all bad men," you say. Well yes, but so are the men who run the Saudi
and Egyptian governments, yet they're almost never referred to as the Salman
regime and Sisi regime; instead the media refers to them as the Saudi and
Egyptian "governments." This belies any objective notion to the term. While
theoretically useful, "regime" is almost always used to prejudice the reader
against governments the United States deems unfriendly to our interests.
6. "Stability."
Actual meaning: Neoliberal economic order and NATO hegemony are
unchallenged.
Example: "Mr. Sisi has brought stability to Egypt," says the Economist [10]
of murderous dictator.
Political purpose: To try and pass off unsavory governments, leaders and
economic systems as, at the very least, predictable. To business-minded
types, this is the ultimate virtue since investments require some ability to
model out five, 10 years down the road. Therefore, the simple act of keeping
unrest at bay is seen as a positive quality, even if, as in the case of
Sisi, it requires extrajudicial killings, jailing journalists and snuffing
out democracy. As Morgan State professor Dr. Jared Ball once said [11] in
the context of policies directed at inner-city communities, "What they want
is 'stability', not freedom. Blacks walking around with their fist up, not
stable. Blacks killing each other, stable."
7. "No-fly zone."
Actual meaning: The right to fly over another country's territory unimpeded
for surveillance, bombing and transport, and control of other party's
efforts.
Example: No-fly zones in Libya and Syria.
Political purpose: "No-fly zone" is texbook Orwell because the phrase itself
implies it's a suspension of war rather than an escalation. A no-fly zone is
not actually a no-fly zone. It's an "only one country flies here" zone and
that country, more often than not, is the United States. No-fly zones
involve the destruction of another country's air capacity, typically
targeting military installations and aircraft. The no-fly zone in Libya
involved weeks of sustained bombing that killed hundreds. According to a
2013 Pentagon estimate [12], a no-fly zone in Syria would involve a greater
sustained air assault and as much as "70,000 servicemen." But none of these
messy facts are mentioned when politicians like Marco Rubio and Hillary
Clinton bandy around the term because they assume, rightly, that most people
don't actually know what a no-fly zone entails.
8. "Boots on the ground."
Actual meaning: A boot is announced to be on the ground when a U.S.
president sees that there's no political damage in public opinion to
announcing putting military boots on the ground. Otherwise military actions
take the announced form of terms that include trainers, experts, civilian
aid, rescue missions, and drone surveillance missions.
Example: Obama promises [13] no "boots on the ground" in Iraq.
Political purpose: No term better captures the combination of imperial
arrogance and pseudo-leftism that defines the current center-left discussion
of foreign policy than "boots on the ground." Somehow opposing boots on the
ground, or the deployment of American soldiers, became enough to render one
a "dove" despite being totally okay with using drones, F-22s and cruise
missiles to kill people from afar. There were no boots on the ground during
Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, or 9/11, but certainly no one considers these
events dovish in nature.
Adam Johnson is an associate editor at AlterNet. Follow him on Twitter at
@adamjohnsonnyc [14].
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [15]
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[16]
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/media/translating-8-most-common-code-words-reveal-us
-medias-imperial-mindset
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/adam-johnson-0
[2] http://alternet.org
[3]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-iran-foreign-policy_us_5
5f05c2ae4b002d5c07786b2
[4]
http://fair.org/home/media-turn-civilian-isis-victims-in-beirut-into-hezboll
ah-human-shields/
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuelan_presidential_election,_2006
[6]
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-19/emerging-stocks-pare-weekl
y-gain-on-oil-retreat-ringgit-slumps
[7]
http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2014/apr/07/is
-india-still-a-developing-country
[8]
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/feb/19/closing-capital-drain-emergi
ng-markets-joseph-stiglitz
[9]
http://www.glerl.noaa.gov/seagrant/ClimateChangeWhiteboard/Resources/Uncerta
inty/Mac1/susteinPR.pdf
[10] https://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/652870231006822400
[11] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyDhxV3NMmw
[12]
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/23/world/middleeast/obamas-uncertain-path-ami
d-syria-bloodshed.html?referrer=&_r=3
[13]
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-says-it-again-no-ground-troops-in-iraq/
[14] https://twitter.com/adamjohnsonnyc
[15] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Translating 8 of the
Media's Code Words to Reveal Their Imperial Mindset
[16] http://www.alternet.org/
[17] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
