Terry Jones First Bomb the Language, Then the Iraqis

[Celso Alvarez Cáccamo]

Ken,

Thank you for the pointer.

The article's last paragraph summarizes it all:

>When men in power propose doing something that is shameful, wrong and 
>destructive, the first casualty is the English language. It would matter 
>less if it were the only casualty. But if they carry on perverting our 
>vocabulary and twisting our grammar, the result will spell death for many 
>who are now alive.

Excessive, isn't it?  The first casualty is ethics, and ethics is not 
English. It's the old story of the role of language/discourse in powerful 
groups' decisions to kill people for profit. We've had many of such cases 
in history, and it surprises me that we keep on thinking that language is 
in each case being perverted prior to the perversion of the human mind. In 
fact, agreeing to negotiate meanings ("weapons of mass destruction", 
"terrorism", "international community") represents a sort of political 
compliance, as the decisions leading to these semantic shifts cannot be 
contested without a serious challenge of the logicl of class exploitation. 
The discursive game is so transparent that governments no longer need 
massive indoctrination in order to carry out their actions: the Spanish 
government is one of the three signers of today's proposal for a "second" 
UN resolution on "Irak", even though 90% of people in Spain are opposed to 
such "war". Popular and media discussions on these words and notions only 
unveal the government's hypocrisy and manipulation (which may have an 
electoral cost for it), but they don't excavate the reasons why those same 
people who criticize new discourses have voted for those same governments 
and will vote for similar ones in the future. It's also contradictory to 
deconstruct dominant discourses on "war" (by "the US", "the UK" or "Spain") 
while not deconstructing "France"'s or "Germany"'s (discursive) position to 
"let the inspections work". Both "the US"' and "Old Europe"'s positions 
respond to the same logic: differences are a matter of tactics and interests.

And where is Osama bin Laden?: In Saudi Arabia, awaiting new orders (in a 
couple of years to come) for a new massive attack that will "force" "the 
US" (and/or "Europe", it'll depend) to intervene in "Iran" (with "China"'s 
dangerous opposition). Pure speculation of course, politics is not my forte.

(Interesting, I haven't used the word 'oil' even once: the game is so 
transparent).

Peace,
-celso

Celso Alvarez Cáccamo
lxalvarz at udc.es
http://www.udc.es/dep/lx/cac/

At 16:34 24/02/03 -0500, Ken Ehrensal wrote:
>I thought that this might interest some on this list as it is a commentary 
>on the "use of language" by politicians that has entered the "popular" 
>press, written by a non-linguist/discourse person:
>
>
>
> 
><http://www.counterpunch.org/jones02242003.html>http://www.counterpunch.org/jones02242003.<http://www.counterpunch.org/jones02242003.html>html
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