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Ken,<br><br>
Thank you for the pointer.<br><br>
The article's last paragraph summarizes it all:<br><br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite><font face="Verdana">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.</font></blockquote><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
(Interesting, I haven't used the word 'oil' even once: the game is so
transparent).<br><br>
Peace,<br>
-celso<br><br>
Celso Alvarez Cáccamo<br>
lxalvarz@udc.es<br>
<a href="http://www.udc.es/dep/lx/cac/" eudora="autourl">http://www.udc.es/dep/lx/cac/</a><br><br>
At 16:34 24/02/03 -0500, Ken Ehrensal wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite><font face="arial" size=2>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:</font><br>
<br>
<br><br>
<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/jones02242003.html">http://www.counterpunch.org/jones02242003.</a><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/jones02242003.html">html</a></blockquote></html>