Words And Freedom
By Bruce Walker (07/30/03)
Few areas of left wing perversion have been more successful than the conscious manipulation of language for ideological purposes. Many egregious examples are familiar. Equal employment opportunity means mandatory inequality. Government investment means coercive waste of capital. Public education means the deconstruction of learning. And so on.
This conscious inversion of the meaning of words mean was predicted by George Orwell in his dystopian classic 1984. The Ministry of Truth existed to dissemble. The Ministry of Love tortured the innocent. The Ministry of Peace insured war. The Ministry of Plenty manufactured poverty. All these logical contortions are glorified in the infamous proclamation: “War is Peace”, “Ignorance is Strength” and “Freedom is Slavery.”
Most people understand blatant manipulation of words for the deliberate purpose of destroying meaning, but the legacy of Marxist lexicon remains with us and this legacy - as Orwell feared - has caused us to forget how to think clearly.
What does “capitalism” mean? The sheep of today are taught that capitalism is the antithesis of Marxism. Those of us on the political right have tried to correct the pejorative nature of this Marxist word by replacing it with terms like “free enterprise” or “market oriented economics.” This fails to correct the primary flaw in the word “capitalism.” Capitalism, market economies, and the similar terms presume that money drives human activity. This is blarney.
Consider some famous “capitalists.” Albert Schweitzer, Madame Curie, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Henry David Thoreau, Mother Teresa, Albert Einstein, Leonardo di Vinci, and Jonas Salk all received money because of their work, but this money was irrelevant to them.
The whole silliness of trying to relate all human interest around money, sex, popularity, physical fitness or religious devotion tries to make humans into large rodents, driven by a few primal concerns and oblivious to the depth and breadth or reality. Words like “capitalism” are as empty in describing the panorama of human expression and sentiment as would be words like “musicalism” or “horticulturalism.”
Drawing arbitrary lines with words creates greater absurdity when applied to the notional ideological “spectrum” that stretches from left to right. Consider the common understanding of several terms used casually in political discussions to describe this spectrum from the extreme left to the extreme right: revolutionary, radical, progressive, liberal, moderate, conservative and reactionary. These seven words do not form any sort of rational scale like “hot,” “warm,” “mild,” “cool,” and “cold” form in the calibrated measurement of thermodynamic activity.
The word “conservative” may conflict or complement “liberal.” Liberty conserved, as our Founding Fathers intended, is liberal conservatism or conservative liberalism.
What does “revolutionary” mean? That word implies overthrowing the current power structure, but in the death throes of the Roman Republic generals like Marius, Sulla, Pompey and Caesar were all “revolutionaries” who desired the opposing faction ousted and its factional leaders placed on proscription lists. Contras and Sandinistas were both “revolutionary” depending upon which group held power in Nicaragua.
Does “revolutionary” mean the opposite of “reactionary”? No. “Reactionary” simply reflects an opinion that things have gone too far, which is precisely what the enemies of Sulla or Marius would have felt (when they were not in power and butchering their own opponents.) The Sandinistas were “reactionaries” against the “revolutionary” Contras in the 1980s.
Words like “moderate” and “radical” likewise say nothing that would relate to a philosophy of government, laws and policies. Those two terms imply a level of commitment, but say nothing about the purpose of that commitment. The use of these words to describe a “moderate” Nazi or a “radical” Polish underground fighter during the Second World War convey nothing about beliefs or values.
Only that new disguise for old liberals - “progressive” - shows a bit of what the left really means by its Alice in Wonderland political vocabulary. “Progressive” implies an inevitable movement of human history toward a particular beneficial direction.
How do these bogus descriptions of political belief affect our thinking? Ponder this: Thomas Jefferson was all at once a revolutionary, reactionary, progressive, radical, liberal and conservative. Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, and was a leader in the war to end the immediate regime of King George III (clearly revolutionary.) But Jefferson was also a reactionary, because his intention was to stop the flow of events were increasingly removing the relative autonomy of the colonies. Jefferson was a progressive who believed that time was on the side of freedom. He was a radical within the revolutionary councils, because he came to believe that half-measures would not longer work. Jefferson’s goal was to maximize freedom, which made him liberal. And because the thirteen colonies were the freest polity in human history, Thomas Jefferson was strongly conservative in his intention to keep those values which the people of the colonies had come to accept as their birthright.
Why do those on the political left feel the need to create these nonsensical gradations in ideology? Because the truth would expose the left for what, it is: lust for limitless power over others. Calling someone a “reactionary” is utterly meaningless: Jews, Gipsies and Poles “reacted” against revolutionary Nazism - did that make them “reactionary” in the sense of the way the left intends?
The ugly truth is that there is no difference at all between those monsters who are supported to be at one “extreme” on this fictional “spectrum” and those at the other extreme of that spectrum. Why? There is no ideological spectrum, and there never has been any ideological spectrum.
Those deemed at the “extreme right wing” (whatever that silly phrase is intended to mean) are supposedly Fascists. The muddling of Fascism, National Socialism and Falangism is bad enough. Fascism for much of its reign over Italy was anti-Anti-Semitic (i.e. condemned Anti-Semitism) and Fascist Italy was the primary geopolitical opponent of Nazi Germany during these years. But pretending that the National Socialist German Workers Party was “right wing” and that if America (or Amerika?) moves too far to the “right” then it will end up with concentration camps and Gestapo, while if it moves too far to the “left” then it will end up with gulags and KGB, is absurd. Moving in the direction of Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, George Washington and George Mason is always moving away from totalitarian nightmares.
All of the thug regimes that haunted the Twentieth Century - Marxism, National Socialism, Kou Ming Tang, Maoism, and Fascism - denounced “capitalism” and embraced “socialism.” Why? Because the nonexistent “capitalist system” described the decentralization of economic power, rather than the greedy concentration of this power in the hands of party functionaries.
This decentralized power refutes the idea of a preordained outcome of discrete events. This hypothetical “chaos” of markets reflects the finite but real knowledge of many individuals. No one knows precisely what will happen tomorrow or next year, but anyone who is serious about truth knows that the liberation of human ability and aspirations will lead to an overall rise in material, social, and cultural well being of those within the group of those liberated.
The left - what else are we to call them? - and the bogeyman on the ultra-extreme-reactionary-far right are identical. Those of us who call ourselves “conservatives” simply wish to conserve that Eighteenth Century liberalism (i.e. individual liberty) which was once so much at the center of our nationhood. We are the antitheses of monolithic thinking and feeling, because our desire for freedom is to pursue our own personal and individual visions.
We are “progressives” because we want progress toward human liberty. We are “reactionaries” because we react to Nazis, Communists or Fascists and other leftists who try to seize liberty. We are “conservatives” because we wish to conserve the freedom won for us by men like Jefferson and Washington. We are “revolutionaries” because we understand that America is a good revolution in the way people and government related to each other. We are “radicals” because our insistent support for common freedoms is not moderate. We are “moderates” because we expect that expect freedom alone will only give us the chance for success: each person does his own heavy lifting.
The ideological right - the loose communion of independent minds and hearts - is beginning to win many battles on many fronts, but until we begin to challenge the thugocracy of Marxists, Nazis, Socialists, Fascists, and other leftists at that level of language - where ideas are born, facts are preserved, and arguments are made - we will not have won the war.
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