October 29, 2001
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Right wing radicals prejudiced against free hate speech and liberalization
the New Word Order by Daniel Hannan is a terrific read and I recommend you go read it top to bottom. Many of you probably noticed the histrionics of Bob Herbert in the Times today ("shame, shame", he says, on tax cuts) and the Times' own moralizing about federalizing airport security despite evidence from El Al and Heathrow that resisting knee-jerk federalization might actually not be akin to handing the keys and some C4 to Osama bin Laden. So the language distortions perpetrated by the terminally politically correct are on my mind today.
This process of language bastardization involves linking formerly descriptive terms (such as conservative) to atrocious people with atrocious intentions. Then, having made the link, one questions the general intentions of those under these newly defined labels (like those horrible people who actually want dangerous airports). Hannan describes and illuminates this trend to link "right wing" with stepping on vagrants, putting babies on spikes and the like. He begins:
Last week I heard a BBC correspondent refer en passant to ‘right-wing elements’ in Iran who were sympathetic to the Taleban. And why not? ‘Right-wing elements’, after all, has simply become a handy term meaning ‘baddies’. Never mind that the Iranians in question want to confiscate private property and nationalise the means of production. The fact that they have lined up with Mullah Omar means that they can be neatly bracketed with Israeli hard-liners, Stalinist nostalgics, Timothy McVeigh, Eugene Terre Blanche, the BNP, the Tory party and any other ‘right-wing elements’ that threaten the BBC’s world-view.......In an appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell discussed how an idea could be made literally unthinkable if there were no proper words to express it. The illustration he gave was the word ‘free’. In Newspeak, free could be used only in the sense of ‘this field is free from weeds’, ‘this dog is free from lice’. Thus, the concept of political freedom disappeared, because no one could put it into words.
Looking back, it was an uncannily prescient example to have chosen. For in recent years this is more or less what has happened to the word ‘free’. To Orwell, writing in 1948, ‘freedom’ still had its traditional meaning of a guarantee against coercion: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly or whatever. Since then, however, ‘freedom’ has come to mean ‘entitlement’: ‘freedom to work’, ‘freedom to use the NHS’, ‘freedom from discrimination’, and so on. Thus, the notion that the state ought not to boss us around becomes harder to convey, and the politician who supports that notion is disadvantaged.
This is an important observation, because Western civilization has shown that "Freedom from" is important as a necessary precondition to any "freedom to" entitlements. This has been a landmark pollution of the term "freedom". More from Hannan:
A similar recalibration of meaning has been at work throughout our political debate. ‘Greed’ now means low taxes, while ‘compassion’ means high taxes. ‘Fairness’ means state-enforced equality, while ‘unfairness’ means an individual’s right to better himself. Any discussion of the relationship between government and citizen is perforce conducted in loaded terms. You can still make the case for greater liberty, but not without sounding rather nasty. A brief glossary will give some indication of what I mean........Community: the state — or, more precisely, the state’s bureaucracy. The one thing it emphatically doesn’t mean is a voluntary association of individuals. When people talk of ‘involving the community’, they invariably want more legislation....
...Profit: always a bad thing, but the severity of the term varies according to context. When talking about a supermarket, it simply means greed and exploitation (as in ‘excessive profits’). When discussing trains, however, it means homicidal tendencies, and is thus used as an antonym to safety —which, of course, means more regulation.
Dogmatic: believing in free markets, as in ‘the Tories have a dogmatic attachment to the private sector’. Curiously enough, this is almost precisely the opposite of the old sense. Being dogmatic used to mean believing in something against the evidence. In fact, free enterprise is utterly counter-intuitive: you’d think that a planned economy would be much more efficient than one where everyone was left to do their own thing higgledy-piggledy. But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the market works in practice. The truth, as Matt Ridley has put it, is that privatisation is not a dogma but a pragma.
Tax cuts: squalid public services. For some reason, talk of tax cuts makes us think not of our tax returns but of our local hospitals. It’s not so much that we believe that there is a direct link between spending and performance; it’s just that the phrase ‘tax cuts’ automatically conjures up a series of images in our minds: leaky school roofs, bodies lying on trolleys in corridors, and pin-striped Tory spivs selling off the playing fields to their friends in the City (see Profit).....
Conservative: Neanderthal. An even more useful term than ‘right-wing elements’ (qv) since it can be applied to both sides in the same conflict. IRA ‘conservatives’ don’t want to disarm, while ‘conservative elements within Unionism’ don’t want to share power with Catholics.
Of course, Hannan is British, so the American lexicon would equate as follows:
tax cuts that lower the overall tax burden, but increase the relative burden on wealthier = "giveaways to the rich"
decreases in the rate of spending growth = "cuts"
resistance to nationalizing 25,000 new employees = "right wing radical extremism"
massive intergenerational wealth redistribution through social security = "savings plan"
Of course, the anti-abortion lobby has done this with "pro-life", but the largely left-leaning politically correct have certainly abused the language the most.
The most significant change in meaning this century? Liberal actually used to mean people like me, who were in favor of reducing government's constraints on enterprise and people. Now, to some, I am a right-wingradicalextremistfundamentalistantiprogressivezealot. Go figure.
Posted by Mindles H. Dreck at October 29, 2001 01:06 PM | Technorati inbound links