Weaponizing Language

Our Israeli correspondent MC takes a look at the battle being waged to control the dictionary, especially where political and social matters are concerned.

Weaponizing Language
by MC

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

From Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

The pen, so we are told, is mightier than the sword, and thus we became victims. Victims of a war waged not in the land masses or the oceans, but in the dictionary.

‘Gay’, ‘pansy’ and ‘fairy’, for example have been hijacked at some time or other to redefine homosexuality, in doing so, the “love that dare not speak its name” has spoken several of its names, and thereby trivialised itself by using language out of the nursery. There is nothing ‘gay’ about same sex-relationships that I am aware of — they seem to have more than their fair share of relationship stresses and strains without the benefits of real parenthood.

But these neologisms seem innocuous when we look at how the word ‘freedom’ has been vandalised. Freedom used to be about taking responsibility for one’s own actions; but not now, we have, for example, freedom of religion — except where Islam is concerned; it is more important not to ‘offend’ Muslims by having a Christmas tree than it is to preserve freedom. We have freedom of speech — except when it is homophobic. We have freedom of information — except where the President’s social security number is concerned.

The word ‘fascist’ has always been difficult to define because it describes the particular aspirations of an Italian neo-communist party to identify with its ancient Roman roots. The fasci, the bundle of sticks wrapped around an axe, were a common link with the past. It is a symbol of absolute power and appears throughout the modern western world. What, however, does ‘fascist’ mean, in modern parlance? It is an epithet used against anybody who does not agree with left liberal/communist doctrines.

‘Religion’ is an interesting for being a word that is in stasis. It should describe any unprovable concept around which humans assemble and promote as truth. Somehow the ‘religions’ based upon ‘science’ have escaped from the bondage of the religious stereotype. The word ‘science’ has also been redefined in recent times. It no longer means ‘knowledge’; its definition has been narrowed to ‘knowledge of the physical world’. Thus socialism, a totally abstract concept, but with its basis on ‘social science’, wriggles free from being described as a religion whilst all the time hiding behind the façade of unproven pseudo-scientific social theory. In economics, Mr. Micawber gave us a very sane definition of the ‘science’ of economics. The rest of it is just religious belief and faith in miracles.

‘Fundamentalism’ has come to be associated with extremes of violence, yet fundamentalist Christian sects, for example, are not, on the whole, physically violent. Fundamentalist Islam is very violent, so much so that it has given new meaning to the word.

Fundamentalist Christians are those who go back to the Bible. Fundamentalist Muslims go back to the Koran. The Bible is essentially benign; the Koran is essentially violent. Get the picture?

The political redefinition of the word has been designed to ‘mix’ the two, the violent and the non-violent, in order to demonise Christianity and tar it with the violence-tainted Koranic brush. At the same time, it is intended to justify a preference for ‘moderate’ Islam, whatever that is — ‘moderate’, is that something that has been ‘moderated’? By whom, may we ask in the case of Islam?

The word ‘offended’ has not so much changed its meaning as had its meaning amplified. To be ‘offended’ is now comparable with being physically wounded. It is here that we begin to see how words have been weaponized. Whilst sticks and stones may break my bones, calling me names now ‘hurts’ me even more.

Yet there are caveats here: the victim must be a member of a defined ‘victim groups’. So calling Jews ‘apes and pigs’ is acceptable because it is in the Koran, whereas calling Islam a religion of violence is not acceptable, because — although provably true — Islam is a major victim group, so truth must be subordinate to political convenience.

‘Truth’ therefore suffers. It is no longer tied to the eternal truths of creation as we know it. Truth becomes the ‘opinion’ of the great and the good. Telling the truth now becomes fraught with danger; one must tell only the ‘convenient’ truth. Likewise the ‘lie’ is now not a lie until the great and the good deem it to be a lie.

“You can still keep your old plan” (but subject to our new rules). Lie, what lie? So unemployment is going down because we now only count those looking for work as ‘unemployed’ and by changing the meaning of the word we can ‘verify’ the lie.

“Soros praised the “Republican establishment” for “fighting back” against the Tea Party, who he referred to as a ‘coalition of religious and market fundamentalists.’”

Note the interesting use of weaponized words here; religious, fundamentalists, market and fighting back. What has the “Tea Party” done to the GOP that could warrant “fighting back”, I wonder? Why should the GOP be directed by an avowed socialist to ‘fight back’ against non-violent and reasonably like-minded conservatives?

Could it be that Republicans are no longer conservative?

The objective of weaponizing words is to nuke real dialogue. In an ideal world, the Tea Party would state its causes and complaints. Their concerns would be discussed in the media and generally aired to see if they have relevance and add value. The “fight back” is not about coming up with counter-arguments, it is about suppression of the Tea Party, which thus avoids the need for a counter-argument.

The word ‘racist’ became was the Little Boy of weaponized words. The term ‘racist’ actually holds very little realistic meaning, but it was the first word in the language to be equipped with a ‘colour’ bludgeon in order to stun and beat down any discussion of problems with non-white minorities, or to clobber valid criticisms of white-African presidents and their un-American administrations.

A weaponized word is designed to kill a simple honest conversation, and in doing so, to stop the flow of information and understanding. People with evil intentions do not like free dialogue, and they will think long and hard how to stop the free flow of opinion and information which is so dangerous to them. They amass an arsenal of verbal hand grenades with which they can fragment the unwary and so win the moral high ground.

This is especially true when a biased mass media — which is a relatively new phenomenon — is very much the most effective delivery system of the weaponized word. It provides a constant barrage of these weasel words, each one sinking deep into the fabric of our psyche — unless, that is, we are forewarned, and thus clad in the Kevlar of foreknowledge.

26 thoughts on “Weaponizing Language

  1. What a brilliant article!
    Could have added the word “islamophobe” to it as a neologism designed solely to vilify a person’s point of view.

    I would also add in something about how descriptors are used to manipulate perceptions of reality. For example, here in Northern Ireland, we are no longer allowed to have republican terrorists since the GFA and “peace process”. Instead we have “dissidents”. We’re all dissidents in one respect or another – we don’t all agree with everyone else’s point of view, but this term is specifically used to sanitise republican violence. Interestingly, no equivalent term seems to exist for Loyalist terrorists.

    Similarly, in terms of being “offended”. Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK (and, as far as I know, Europe) which has a quasi-governmental authority, backed by the full might of the police and courts, whose only function is the selective removal of the freedom of assembly (and in the case of the Orange Order, it could be argued, of their freedom of religious expression) solely on the basis of the “offense” it might cause to another section of the community.

    • Curiously enough I was going to build the article around the ‘islamophobia’ concept, but I became fascinated by the different ways in which words had been loaded to carry their propaganda payloads.

      Islamophobia having been dissected several times in the CJ blogospere in the last few years, I eventually left it out, but you are right, it is a significant neologism of our times, and perhaps I should not have so hasty…

  2. The weaponized words are in fact hollow absurdities what makes them potent is the power of reinforcement by authority in the populist echo chamber by the squawking of academia, law and media . In the absence of that power of reinforcement the words are banal and powerless.

    • Certain selected words serve as shortcut keys to activate complex power-related functions. When directed at a person or group, these brief words or phrases are understood to designate the target as one or more of the following:

      1. Untrustworthy
      2. Corrupt
      3. Dishonest
      4. Dangerously violent or violent-intentioned
      5. Outside the pale of civilized behavior
      6. Evil

      Invoking these keywords under the right circumstances can immediately achieve political ends that would otherwise take much longer. The target is promptly shunned, discredited, marginalized, anathematized, and forced into a defensive stance.

      In order to regain his previous position or recover his reputation (which is often not even possible), he must perform an elaborate redemptive ritual, exhibiting obeisance towards the authoritative powers that stigmatized him. His utterance of appropriate shibboleths (which are also keywords, but positively viewed, denoting inherently good, approved-of positions) ensures that the dominate narrative is maintained and reinforced.

      When the above process becomes fully entrenched in a society, meaningful organized dissent becomes all but impossible. The only way the hegemony of the reigning memeset can be broken is through a violent catastrophic event of some sort, or intervention from the outside — or both combined.

      • “When the above process becomes fully entrenched in a society, meaningful organized dissent becomes all but impossible. The only way the hegemony of the reigning memeset can be broken is through a violent catastrophic event of some sort, or intervention from the outside — or both combined.”

        There are other ways that hegemony of the reigning memeset can be broken:

        1. The reigning memeset of Europe used to 100% ban Islam. Then, Islam got oil. Once the wealthy of the world artificially valued the possession of crude oil ABOVE all else (like water or crops that Muslims require to feed their people), the reigning memeset changed 100% to embrace Islam and, indeed, value Muslims over other people.

        2. The reigning memeset of America used to 100% favor white Protestant males. Then, the Civil War (which may well have been caused by outside intervention from Europeans attempting to split the United States ) eventually led to civil rights legislation used to 100% favor non-white non-Christian males and females.

        3. The reigning memeset of Europe used to recognize Judaism as a threat to Christianity. Ironically, the current reigning memeset is that Christianity is a threat to atheism….

        Reigning memesets CAN and DO change – which is cold comfort to those who suffer under a reigning memeset at any given time.

        • I’ll grant your point. But those changes were gradual, in historical terms. Even the changes that resulted from the Civil War took decades to unfold.

          My point is that a reigning “narrative” will only undergo sudden change under catastrophic circumstances. This is especially relevant to those dissidents whose opinions are demonized by the hegemony, as ours are.

          We will be unlikely to experience a major shift that favors our worldview until the Collapse intervenes.

  3. I hesitate (briefly) to enter the strange (to a Brit) world of US politics, and agree with MC over the hijacking and distortion of language.

    However, it seems likely that the GOP would like to get back into the White House sometime soon, and in order to do so, they need to win, not core republican votes, but the undecideds in the middle: “floating voters”, as we call them in the UK. Association with the Mad Hatters- sorry, Tea Party- won’t help!

    • ‘ampshire born and ‘ampshire bred; strong in the arm an’ thick in the ‘ed….

      I would not describe the Tea Party as mad, although that is how the leftist propaganda machine tries to paint them. They stand for the Constitution and fiscal discipline which are very sane policies, whilst the latest budget approval, supported by the GOP, truly endangers the value of the dollar, which is being increasingly viewed with alarm here in the middle east. Sometime the spending must stop….

    • You’ve bought into the MSM demonization of the Tea Party. Neither I nor the Baron is a Mad Hatter, but we are indeed fiscal conservatives; our seeking remedies to the current mess won’t be deterred by your name-calling. It says more about you than it does about the Tea Party.

      What’s the reasoning behind your sneer? It’s the same one the RNC made during the last election, cutting the Tea Party out of the grass roots campaign. And THAT is the reason Romney lost. He proved that he and the GOP are merely the second head on the Democrat machine. The less effective head at that.

      Those of us who are fiscal conservatives have no real practical home/strategy application aside from the Tea Party. But the Political Class is terrified of populism. Jacksonian Democracy was founded on it, and Washington DC never forgave him and his rabble rousers for winning.

      47% of American voters label themselves Independents, of which we are two. Of that percentage, probably a third are affiliated with/sympathetic to the goals of the Tea Party. Of the others, an endorsement from the many many Tea Party groups would not be a turn-off.

      Look at Wisconsin’s GOP to see what can be done even when particular candidates try to distance themselves from the very people who are pulling them over the finish line. And watch the IRS investigate those grass roots’ folks. Who needs the KGB when you have the IRS to harass you?

      “The IRS: Raining Down Ruin on Conservatives Since 1933”

      What the Tea Party wants is economic sanity instead of the bloated bureaucratic nightmare now extant.

      • Yes, and Tea Party on this side of the pond is called UKIP. The Establishment are suspicious, they don’t like surprises, they prefer the status quo, let the cattle continue eating grass.

    • @Mark H,

      “Mad Hatters” is that your attempt at a shortcut key?

      The floating voters of England probably have more in common with the Tea Party than with the LibLabCon.

      • Sorry, “Tea Party”=”Mad Hatters” was such an obvious joke when the Baron and I had both referenced Lewis Carroll here recently!

        I’m not convinced by the comparison between UKIP, for whom I’ll likely vote in the upcoming European elections, and the Tea Party: UKIP leader Nigel Farage is erudite and well-informed, whereas…

        And doesn’t Alaska receive disproportionate Federal subsidies?

        • That “joke” flew so high and fast it missed most of us. And just to show you weren’t *really* joking, there’s a cryptic sneer in the next remark, comparing the erudite, well-informed Farage with…whom, precisely? Just because some of our well-informed pols don’t use Brit accents (even it they aspired to such a goal, they’d estrange their constituency) that makes them somehow lesser beings? Not hardly.

          As for your comment about Alaska, it’s the amount of money spent on defense (or defence) that makes the disproportionate difference, money that Mr Obama plans to cut down to something more in keeping with y’all…except for China, we’ll all be Europe then.

          States like Virginia, Alaska, Maryland and New Mexico received the most money per capita in federal procurement spending, which includes things like Medicaid and NASA, but the majority of which goes to the Department of Defense. To give an idea of the amount of money the federal government poured into military bases and research centers in these states, the government spent approximately $7,300 per person on all programs in Nevada. It also spent approximately $5,000 per person on defense spending alone in Virginia.

          http://is.gd/lqSECT

          We don’t see any of that money this far south and west in Virginia. It’s all in the northern and coastal areas. Thus real estate remains at a premium in the areas of Virginia within the reach of the ever-bloating Federal behemoth while here in The Edge of Beyond, real estate prices fell 10%. That’s good news for us since we don’t ever plan to move and will save on our real estate taxes, but I feel for those who bought land here as “an investment”.

          To an outsider, the political parties in the UK seem almost as stifled as the US. You have more names, but not a dime’s worth of difference among varying degrees of socialism. France seems politically livelier from this distance.

          • Apologies for my ignorance of the reason behind the high level of federal spending in Alaska. A little knowledge is indeed a dangerous thing.

            My “sneer” has nothing to do with any sense of superiority over accents, but with Sarah Palin’s patent ignorance of international affairs, a truly terrifying lack in someone who aspired to leadership of what is still the world’s most powerful nation.

          • A little knowledge about the level of politicians’ ignorance outside their particular interest would help a lot. You’re *still* buying into the MSM ‘narrative’ about the Right, this time, Palin. The “patent ignorance of international affairs” of ALL our political aspirants is indeed terrifying. I daresay Palin wouldn’t have us in the mess we face right now.

            The current office holder couldn’t pass a security clearance if he were trying to get a job. And he constantly volunteers his ignorance -as does his Vice President – on foreign affairs. Of course only the rightwingextremists report his gaffes.

            Just one recent glaring stupidity: in his knee-jerk hatred of the UK he referred to the Falkland Islands as the Melvinas, ummm…the Maldives…Help somebody…get me a corpseman…”**

            http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2131359/Barack-Obama-makes-Falklands-gaffe-calling-Malvinas-Maldives.html

            He has learned to walk on one foot since the other one is always in his mouth and he doesn’t care.

            The MSM set traps on foreign affairs for Palin that all the other candidates would’ve failed too. It’s simply what they do to all Republican candidates, though McCain got off easy bec he’s a Rage Boy and they’re a bit afraid of him. Democrats get a free pass.

            Please stop while you’re behind. You’re starting to sound mighty like a gullible Leftist American. These are the same things they repeat, mindlessly, ad nauseam ad aeternitatem.

            And by the way, several of your own pols have called attention to our president’s abysmal incompetence.

            **(that’s an inside joke – BHO didn’t know how to pronounce corpsman, which is an Army term for enlisted medical assistants.)

        • That “joke” flew so high and fast it missed most of us. And just to show you weren’t *really* joking, there’s a cryptic sneer in the next remark, comparing the erudite, well-informed Farage with…whom, precisely? Just because some of our well-informed pols don’t use Brit accents (even it they aspired to such a goal, they’d estrange their constituency) that makes them somehow lesser beings? Not hardly.

          As for your comment about Alaska, it’s the amount of money spent on defense (or defence) that makes the disproportionate difference, money that Mr Obama plans to cut down to something more in keeping with y’all…except for China, we’ll all be Europe then.

          States like Virginia, Alaska, Maryland and New Mexico received the most money per capita in federal procurement spending, which includes things like Medicaid and NASA, but the majority of which goes to the Department of Defense. To give an idea of the amount of money the federal government poured into military bases and research centers in these states, the government spent approximately $7,300 per person on all programs in Nevada. It also spent approximately $5,000 per person on defense spending alone in Virginia.

          http://is.gd/lqSECT

          We don’t see any of that money this far south and west in Virginia. It’s all in the northern and coastal areas. Thus real estate remains at a premium in the areas of Virginia within the reach of the ever-bloating Federal behemoth while here in The Edge of Beyond, real estate prices fell 10%. That’s good news for us since we don’t ever plan to move and will save on our real estate taxes, but I feel for those who bought land here as “an investment”.

          To an outsider, the political parties in the UK seem almost as stifled as the US. You have more names, but not a dime’s worth of difference among varying degrees of socialism. France seems politically livelier from this distance.

  4. Excellent article MC! Well done. I noticed that you mentioned Obama’s phony SSN. In August 2011 I determined that i was one of Obama’s employers and that I had an obligation to see if he was eligible to work in the United States. Why? Because there was credible evidence that his birth certificate was forged and his SSN was phony. I registered with a governement run program called E-Verify and ran Obama’s SSN. It came back flagged for fraud. The number was never assigned to him. I am including a press release for my new website called obabasfakid.com Hope your readers will take some time to give it a view. Thanks again for having the courage to state the obvious. Sincerely, Linda Jordan

    Does Evidence Matter? Press Release January 13, 2014

    Democrats have argued in the past that the seriousness of a charge is all you need to warrant an investigation.

    “The nature of the evidence is irrelevant; it’s the seriousness of the charge that matters.” Tom Foley, Democrat, Former Speaker of the House

    But I think evidence matters. You don’t seriously investigate accusations that are baseless and you don’t charge someone with a crime unless you have some compelling evidence.

    And we do. So here’s the charge.

    Barack Obama used fake ID to gain access to the ballot and in turn the White House. And that’s more than just forgery and fraud, its treason.

    The Maricopa County Sheriff Department concluded, after a 12 month long investigation, that the birth certificate Obama posted on the White House website on April 27, 2011 is an abject forgery. So is his Selective Service Registration.

    Now, if normal was still normal, what would happen next? Formal charges would be filed, search warrants executed, witnesses and suspects questioned and then a Prosecutor would present the case and the evidence to a Judge and Jury.

    I created We The People T.V. at obamasfakeid.com to help ensure that happens. If you think evidence matters and you’ve been convinced by that evidence then say something.

    Post your video on We The People T.V. Tell Barack Obama that you know what he did. He used fake ID to fake his way into the White House and he’s not going to get away with it.

    Press Contact: Linda Jordan d.lizzy@comcast.net obamaforgeries@yahoo.com

  5. A definition for Fascism that I have been told is that it is the merger of state and corporate power. You could then argue that Obama care, the state forcing citizens to buy health care insurance from corporations, is a form of Fascism. In the UK, politicians like to talk about UK plc and it could be argued that viewing a country as a business is Fascist in its ideology.

    • The prime text on Fascism id Griffin’s ‘Fascism’ but curiously he never actually gives a definitive definition and spends several chapters describing it and maybe gives us more information on what it isn’t. It took Mussolini 3 days to ‘convert’ from communism to fascism, which gives us a good clue as to the parent of the fascist scion.

      It is too easy to say the fascism is just ‘corporate’ socialism, personally I think that fascism is a particular style of enforced humanism, where all problems are seen as agenda items for which ‘the great and the good’ will find and inflict a solution on the hoi-polloi and is part of a family of ‘nanny state knows best’ political religions

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  7. The blogger Robert Godwin, over at One Cosmos, said it best, “…they have broken the covenant between truth and language.”

    Daniel Dennett, one of the foremost proponents of the theory of memes, in his TED-Talk describes words as memes you can pronounce. So this post is really not about words but rather meme sets. For anyone unfamiliar with the concept of memes, then this short TED-Talk, by DD would be a good introduction, http://youtu.be/KzGjEkp772s . See also my end note (*).

    DD in his talk describes a virus as a string of nucleic acid with attitude. So to paraphrase, a weaponized word is just a meme set with attitude. Words are not single irreducibly things, but rather they are bundles of memetic associations to facts, memories, experiences, emotions and etc. that have been pre-stored within a person’s own mind. What you are seeing people do is hollow-out a word of some of its memetic associations, replacing those removed associations with artificial ones, while leaving the emotional associations still in place. And it’s these left-in-place emotional associations then, that form the “hooks” that allow a foreign and toxic meme set to control our subsequent thoughts and behaviors.

    It is observations like this, along with many others, that lead people to view memes as the equivalent of “thought-viruses.” Despite this apparent association, no one seems to take this equivalence to its logical conclusion. That is, for every process associated with viruses in the biological realm there will be an equivalent in the memetic realm. Specifically, there should be memetic equivalents of an immune system and immune response. In the biological realm, populations can develop immunity to a virus either naturally, via the winnowing process of Darwinian selection, or artificially via vaccination. So if you want to de-fuse these weaponized words in the memetic realm you need to, first, find their equivalent of a “vaccine” and then, second, find some way to deliver that memetic vaccine into people’s consciousness.

    (*). Despite my recommendation of this video, DD’s view of memes suffers from the same fatal flaw that his friend, Richard Dawkins’ does. That is, they both refuse to apply their own theory of memes to themselves. This inability/unwillingness to extend their own ideas to themselves leaves their particular view of memes in a state of immaturity; useful for nothing more than as a cudgel to beat up on people they disagree with. But this is a story for another day.

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