{"id":7623,"date":"2014-07-02T07:52:49","date_gmt":"2014-07-02T14:52:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=7623"},"modified":"2014-07-02T07:54:41","modified_gmt":"2014-07-02T14:54:41","slug":"the-language-of-despotism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-language-of-despotism\/","title":{"rendered":"The Language of Despotism"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Photo
Photo via FrontPage Magazine<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Long before\u00a01984<\/em>\u00a0gave us the adjective \u201cOrwellian\u201d to describe the political corruption of language and thought, Thucydides observed how factional struggles for power make words their first victims. Describing the horrors of civil war on the island of Corcyra during the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides wrote, \u201cWords had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them.\u201d Orwell explains the reason for such degradation of language in his essay \u201cPolitics and the English Language\u201d: \u201cPolitical speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tyrannical power and its abuses comprise the \u201cindefensible\u201d that must be verbally disguised. The gulags, engineered famines, show trials, and mass murder of the Soviet Union required that it be a \u201cregime of lies,\u201d as the disillusioned admirer of Soviet communism Pierre Pascal put it in 1927.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Our own political and social discourse must torture language in order to disguise the failures and abuses of policies designed to advance the power and interests of the \u201csoft despotism,\u201d as Tocqueville called it, of the modern Leviathan state and its political caretakers. Meanwhile, in foreign policy the transformation of meaning serves misguided policies that endanger our security and interests.<\/p>\n

One example from domestic policy recently cropped up in Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor\u2019s dissent in the\u00a0Schuette\u00a0<\/em>decision, which upheld the Michigan referendum banning racial preferences. In her dissent, Sotomayor called for replacing the term\u00a0 \u201caffirmative action\u201d with \u201crace-sensitive admissions.\u201d But \u201caffirmative action\u201d was itself a euphemism for the racial quotas in use in college admissions until they were struck down in the 1978\u00a0Bakke<\/em>\u00a0decision. To salvage racial discrimination, which any process that gives race an advantage necessarily requires,\u00a0Bakke<\/em>\u00a0legitimized yet another euphemism, \u201cdiversity,\u201d as a compelling state interest that justified taking race into account in university admissions.<\/p>\n

Thus the most important form of \u201cdiversity\u201d for the university became the easily quantifiable one of race. Not even socio-economic status can trump it, as the counsel for the University of Texas admitted during oral arguments in\u00a0Fisher vs. University of Texas<\/em>\u00a0last year, when he implied that a minority applicant from a privileged background would add more diversity to the university than a less privileged white applicant. All these verbal evasions are necessary for camouflaging the fact that any process that discriminates on the basis of race violates the Civil Rights Act ban on such discrimination. Promoting an identity politics predicated on historical victimization and the equality of result is more important than the principle of equality before the law, and this illiberal ideology must be hidden behind distortions of language and vague phrases like \u201crace-sensitive\u201d and \u201cdiversity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another example can be found in the recently released report from the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault. The report is the basis for the government\u2019s numerous policy and procedural suggestions to universities and colleges in order to help them \u201clive up to their obligation to protect students from sexual violence.\u201d Genuine sexual violence, of course, needs to be investigated, adjudicated, and punished to the full extent of the law by the police and the judicial system. But the \u201csexual assault\u201d and \u201csexual violence\u201d the Obama administration is talking about is something different.<\/p>\n

At the heart of the White House report is the oft-repeated 2007 statistic that 20 percent of female college students have been victims of \u201csexual assault,\u201d which most people will understand to mean rape or sexual battery. Yet as many critics of the study have pointed out, that preposterous number\u2013\u2013crime-ridden Detroit\u2019s rape rate is 0.05 percent\u2013\u2013was achieved by redefining \u201csexual assault\u201d to include even consensual sexual contact when the woman was drunk, and behaviors like \u201cforced kissing\u201d and \u201crubbing up against [the woman] in a sexual way, even if it is over [her] clothes.\u201d<\/p>\n

The vagueness and subjectivity of such a definition is an invitation to women to abandon personal responsibility and agency by redefining clumsy or boorish behavior as \u201csexual assault,\u201d a phrase suggesting physical violence against the unwilling. As one analyst of the flawed study has reported, \u201cthree-quarters of the female students who were classified as victims of sexual assault by incapacitation did not believe they had been raped; even when only incidents involving penetration were counted, nearly two-thirds did not call it rape.\u201d As many have pointed out, if genuine sexual assault were happening, colleges would be calling in the police, not trying the accused in campus tribunals made up of legal amateurs and lacking constitutional protections such as the right to confront and cross-examine one\u2019s accuser.<\/p>\n

What matters more than protecting college women against a phantom epidemic of rape, then, is the need to expand government power into the social lives of college students, empowering the federal bureaucrats, university administrators, and ideological programs like women\u2019s studies that all stand to benefit by this sort of coercive intrusion. This enshrining of racial and sexual ideology into law through the abuse of language has had damaging consequences, whether for the minority college students mismatched with the universities to which they are admitted, thus often ensuring their failure and disillusion; or for the young women encouraged to abandon their autonomy and surrender it to government and education bureaucrats who know better than they how to make sense of their experiences and decisions.<\/p>\n

In foreign policy, however, the abuse of language is positively dangerous. Since 9\/11, our failure to identity the true nature of the Islamist threat and its grounding in traditional Islamic theology has led to misguided aims and tactics. Under both the Bush and Obama administrations, for example, the traditional Islamic doctrine of jihad\u2013\u2013which means to fight against the enemies of Islam, which predominantly means infidels\u2013\u2013has been redefined to serve the dubious tactic of flattering Islam in order to prevent Muslim terrorism.<\/p>\n

Thus in 2008 the National Terrorism Center instructed its employees, \u201cNever use the term\u00a0jihadist\u00a0<\/em>ormujahideen\u00a0<\/em>in conversation to describe terrorists,\u201d since \u201cIn Arabic, jihad means \u2018striving in the path of God\u2019 and is used in many contexts beyond warfare.\u201d Similarly, CIA chief John Brennan has asserted that jihad \u201cis a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one\u2019s community,\u201d despite the fourteen centuries of evidence from the Koran, hadiths, and bloody history that jihad is in fact predominantly an obligatory armed struggle against the enemies of Islam. The reluctance to put Muslim violence in its religious context reflects not historical truth, but a public relations tactic serving the delusional strategy of appeasing Muslims into liking us.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why, to this day, the 2009 murders of 13 military personnel at Fort Hood by Muslim Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan are still classified as \u201cworkplace violence\u201d rather than an act of terror. This despite the fact that Hasan\u2013\u2013whose business cards had the initials \u201cSoA,\u201d \u201cSoldier of Allah,\u201d on them\u2013\u2013shouted the traditional Islamic battle cry \u201cAllahu Akbar\u201d during his rampage. Or that in a presentation at Walter Reed Hospital, Hasan had put up a slide with the great commission to practice jihad that Mohammed delivered in his farewell address: \u201cI was ordered to fight all men until they say \u2018There is no god but Allah.\u2019\u201d This command to wage jihad was echoed in 1979 by the Ayatollah Khomeini, revered as a \u201cGrand Sign of God\u201d for his theological acumen, and by Osama bin Laden in 2001. Those ignoring this venerable jihadist tradition must use verbal evasions like \u201cworkplace violence\u201d and \u201cstriving in the path of God\u201d to hide the indefensible\u2013\u2013and failed\u2013\u2013tactic of appeasement that prevents us from accurately understanding the religious motives of Muslim terrorists, and the extent of the Muslim world\u2019s support for them.<\/p>\n

No foreign policy crisis, however, is more illustrative of the \u201cregime of lies\u201d and abuse of language to serve \u201cindefensible\u201d aims than the conflict between Israel and the Arabs. The Arabs\u2019 aim, of course, is to destroy Israel as a nation, a policy they have consistently pursued since 1948. Since military attacks have failed ignominiously, an international public relations campaign coupled to terrorist violence has been employed to weaken Israel\u2019s morale and separate Israel from her Western allies. An Orwellian assault on language has been key to this tactic.<\/p>\n

Examples are legion, but one is particularly insidious, here seen in a\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0headline from 2011: \u201cObama Sees \u201967 Borders as Starting Point for Peace Deal.\u201d The common reference to \u201cborders\u201d in regard to what is in fact the armistice line from the 1948 Arab war against Israel is ubiquitous. Yet there has never been recognized in international law a formal \u201cborder\u201d between Israel and what the world, in another Orwellian phrase, calls the \u201cWest Bank,\u201d because that territory has never been part of a modern nation. Its only international legal status was as part of the British Mandate for Palestine, which was confirmed by the League of Nations in 1922, and which was intended as the national homeland for the Jewish people. The Arabs\u2019 rejection of the U.N. partition plan and their invasion of Israel in 1948 put the territory\u2019s status in limbo once Jordan annexed Judea and Samaria, which the international community with a few exceptions refused to recognize. In 1967 Israel took it back in another defensive war against Arab aggression. Since then, its final disposition has awaited a peace treaty that will determine the international border.<\/p>\n

This may sound like quibbling over careless language, but the dishonest use of \u201cborder\u201d reinforces and encodes in peoples\u2019 minds the big lie of the conflict\u2013\u2013that a Palestinian \u201cnation\u201d is being deprived of its \u201chomeland\u201d by Israel, a canard that didn\u2019t become current among Arabs and the rest of the world until after the 1967 Six Day War. And this lie in turns validates the common use of \u201coccupation\u201d\u2013\u2013which implies an illegal invasion into and control of another nation, as the Germans did to France in 1940\u2013\u2013to describe Israel\u2019s defensive possession of territories that have long served as launch pads for aggression against Israel. Until a peace treaty, the territory known as the \u201cWest Bank\u201d\u2013\u2013more accurately Judea and Samaria, the heartland of historical Israel for centuries\u2013\u2013is\u00a0disputed<\/em>, not \u201coccupied.\u201d<\/p>\n

To paraphrase Thucydides, words like \u201cborders\u201d and \u201coccupation\u201d have had their ordinary meanings changed, and been forced to take meanings that serve tyranny and aggression. And we who accept those new meanings are complicit in the resulting injustice that follows.<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2009 FrontPage Magazine. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine Long before\u00a01984\u00a0gave us the adjective \u201cOrwellian\u201d to describe the political corruption of language and thought, Thucydides observed how factional struggles for power make words their first victims. Describing the horrors of civil war on the island of Corcyra during the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides wrote, \u201cWords had to change […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[848,844,842,22],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1YX","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":8351,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-foreign-policy-primer-for-obama-and-rand-paul\/","url_meta":{"origin":7623,"position":0},"title":"A Foreign Policy Primer for Obama\u2013\u2013and Rand Paul","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 20, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine The president who thinks there\u2019s such a thing as an \u201cAustrian\u201d language is advising Rand Paul to \u201cbone up on foreign policy.\u201d It\u2019s now official: the Obama administration has become a recurring skit on Saturday Night Live. This is the same Barack Obama\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Our Contributors"","block_context":{"text":"Our Contributors","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Photo via FrontPage Magazine","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/rand-paul1-500x271.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7538,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-progressive-gitmo-myth\/","url_meta":{"origin":7623,"position":1},"title":"The Progressive Gitmo Myth","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 9, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce Thornton\/\/ FrontPage Magazine The swap of probable deserter Bowe Bergdahl for 5 \u201chigh-risk\u201d Guant\u00e1namo detainees is about more than political public relations. 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Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8475,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/progressive-academics-shocked-that-their-creatures-turn-on-them\/","url_meta":{"origin":7623,"position":3},"title":"Progressive Academics Shocked That Their Creatures Turn on Them","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 12, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"When the cult of sensitivity begins to eat its children. by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine Recently several progressive professors have publicly complained that their students are hounding them for failing to consider their tender sensibilities by straying beyond the p.c. orthodoxy on sexual assault, sex identity, linguistic correctness,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Our Contributors"","block_context":{"text":"Our Contributors","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8093,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/sloppy-thinking-about-torture\/","url_meta":{"origin":7623,"position":4},"title":"Sloppy Thinking About \u2018Torture\u2019","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 17, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine\u00a0 Torture is one of those topics that often overwhelm sober reason with lurid emotion. Even people who usually are clear-eyed and rational sink into sloppy thinking and incoherent argument when it comes to torture. Peggy Noonan\u2019s recentWall Street Journal column about the Senate\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Terrorism"","block_context":{"text":"Terrorism","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/war-on-terror\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"photo via FrontPage Magazine","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/mccainfein-450x282.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":8077,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/hillarys-bad-politics-and-worse-ideas\/","url_meta":{"origin":7623,"position":5},"title":"Hillary\u2019s Bad Politics and Worse Ideas","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 10, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine Once again Hillary Clinton has given the Republicans some suicidal soundbites they should stash away for 2016 in the likely event she is the Democratic candidate for president. 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