More Alice In Wonderland
Government-speak, i.e. the use of language to hide or distort meaning, is certainly nothing new, but this administration has been particularly skillful with this tool. I've commented on the euphemisms ("intensive interrogation techniques") and on the misleading titles ("Clean Air Act"), but I hadn't really considered the less obvious yet just as misleading labeling which allows for the promulgation of policies which would have been unthinkable just ten years ago. An editorial in the English-language Arab News (Saudi Arabia) gives a terrific analysis of the process.
...let’s move on to what the US State Department does define as terrorism.
The first thing that strikes you, reading the “Country Reports on Terrorism,” is that 6,212 of “the terrorist attacks,” over two-fifths of all the 14,499 that it records for last year, were in Iraq.
Might that be connected in some way with the fact that Iraq was invaded by the United States five years ago and for all practical purposes remains under US military occupation?
Algerian rebels used similar tactics against French imperial rule, including numerous brutal attacks on innocent civilians. So did the Mau Mau guerrillas against their British colonial masters in Kenya, and the Viet Cong against the American presence in South Vietnam, and other people fighting against foreign occupation or domestic oppression in dozens of other countries.
Their tactics were regularly condemned by their targets, but nobody tried to pretend that the world was facing a wave of irrational and inexplicable violence called “terrorism.”
Yet that is precisely the assumption that underlies the State Department’s annual reports on “terrorism,” and indeed the Bush administration’s entire “war on terror.” Or rather, it is the perspective through which the report’s authors want the rest of the world to see the troubles in Iraq, Afghanistan and so on, for they cannot be so naive that they truly believe the link between the presence of US occupation troops and a high level of terrorist attacks is purely coincidental. [Emphasis added]
In order to achieve this perspective, to "catapult the propaganda," the administration took some very conscious steps:
Others play this game too — notably the Russians in Chechnya — but it is really an American innovation. Leading neoconservative Richard Perle, former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, famously declared in 2002 that “terrorism must be decontextualised,” but the process was already well underway in practice.
And so, deprived of context, terrorism sits there as a uniquely wicked and inexplicable phenomenon, while legitimate states and armies can get on with the business of killing people in legitimate wars. [Emphasis added]
Stunning, isn't it?
And, for at least six years, it has worked.
Clean cups! Clean cups!
...let’s move on to what the US State Department does define as terrorism.
The first thing that strikes you, reading the “Country Reports on Terrorism,” is that 6,212 of “the terrorist attacks,” over two-fifths of all the 14,499 that it records for last year, were in Iraq.
Might that be connected in some way with the fact that Iraq was invaded by the United States five years ago and for all practical purposes remains under US military occupation?
Algerian rebels used similar tactics against French imperial rule, including numerous brutal attacks on innocent civilians. So did the Mau Mau guerrillas against their British colonial masters in Kenya, and the Viet Cong against the American presence in South Vietnam, and other people fighting against foreign occupation or domestic oppression in dozens of other countries.
Their tactics were regularly condemned by their targets, but nobody tried to pretend that the world was facing a wave of irrational and inexplicable violence called “terrorism.”
Yet that is precisely the assumption that underlies the State Department’s annual reports on “terrorism,” and indeed the Bush administration’s entire “war on terror.” Or rather, it is the perspective through which the report’s authors want the rest of the world to see the troubles in Iraq, Afghanistan and so on, for they cannot be so naive that they truly believe the link between the presence of US occupation troops and a high level of terrorist attacks is purely coincidental. [Emphasis added]
In order to achieve this perspective, to "catapult the propaganda," the administration took some very conscious steps:
Others play this game too — notably the Russians in Chechnya — but it is really an American innovation. Leading neoconservative Richard Perle, former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, famously declared in 2002 that “terrorism must be decontextualised,” but the process was already well underway in practice.
And so, deprived of context, terrorism sits there as a uniquely wicked and inexplicable phenomenon, while legitimate states and armies can get on with the business of killing people in legitimate wars. [Emphasis added]
Stunning, isn't it?
And, for at least six years, it has worked.
Clean cups! Clean cups!
Labels: Terra Terra Terra
posted by Diane at 4:13 AM
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