The Abuse of Language By Media and Government

I stumbled across this, completely typical word usage today:

The Somali government officially announced that it was starting a blockade. Same as the US blockade. Same as the Iranian blockade.

So either it’s all piracy, or it’s all “boarding.”

We have seen a constant refusal to call Palestinian children, children. The words “Israel killed” are never used in the Western press. And then there’s the constant use of the words terrorist and terrorism, the two most meaningless words in the English language.

Britannica says:

terrorism, the calculated use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective

Cambridge:

violent action or threats designed to cause fear among ordinary people, in order to achieve political aims.

By either of these definitions, the world’s greatest users of terrorism are America and Israel. No one else comes close, not even the Russians.

The word terrorist always describes non-state actors with limited reach, or state actors like Iran. Yet Iran’s strikes were not intended to cause fear among the civilian population: they were intended to hurt the economies and militaries of the West and the Gulf Arab states which allow attacks on Iran. Schools and hospitals were not targeted.

Iran has gone out of its way to not kill civilians. In the Ukraine war the death rate for children is under 1%. In Palestine it’s somewhere around 32%. In Iran it was about 16%.

The US and Israel have repeatedly said that one goal is to cause the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow the Iranian state. The method of doing this is attacking civilian targets. Indeed the latest war on Iran began with an attack on a children’s school. Hospitals are systematically targeted, as are paramedics and firefighters.

Hezbollah, likewise, tends to stick to military targets. Even Hamas mostly hits military targets.

Yet somehow the nations who are primarily committing terrorism: the US and Israel, are never described as terrorists. Russia, Iran, Hezbolla and Hamas: they’re always terrorists, even when they attack military targets.

In Britain terrorist designations have been used against protesters who have never harmed civilians. The same is true in Germany.

The word means nothing, and Western media outlets are nothing but propagandists. Most aren’t even allowed to say the word “genocide”. It’s publisher policy. (Publishers always make these decisions. Editors are downstream and are routinely over-ridden by publishers, though most American journalists seem to be OK with being propagandists. Those who aren’t tend to be fired, or eventually leave in disgust.)

Terrorism means “violence by people who are our enemies” and nothing else. Genocide is never done by us, only by our enemies. If half a million children die due to sanctions, it’s “worth it”, in the immortal word of Secretary of State Madeline Albright.

None of this will come as a shock to my readers, I know. But I think it’s worth emphasizing just how worthless our media has become. They lie, they propagandize, they refuse to state the obvious: indeed their job is to lie, to pretend the sun is purple with silver polka-dots and that the sky isn’t blue. There’s no genocide in Palestine. No sir. But there is one China, oh yes. And our enemies are terrorists, but we, who actively target schools and hospitals and bomb weddings and funerals, we’re the good guys.

It was always bad, to be sure. But I’ve lived a long time now and it keeps getting worse. In the old days some columnist would be allowed to tell the truth. Articles would have misleading headlines but the actual facts were in the article, albeit sometimes near the end.

You can still, with very careful reading, get some truth from the legacy media. Some. But if you want unfettered news and not to have to work like a dog, you have to go to alternative media and read foreign sources directly.

This isn’t trivial, because most people don’t do the extra work, which means that even if suspicious of official narratives, they live in a soup of lies and their understanding of the world is wrong. I still regularly run across people who think the US can open the Strait of Hormuz with direct military naval action, which is deranged. It’s not possible.

But there is something good about completely out-to-lunch propaganda. Over time people see thru it. They stop trusting. They stop believing anything they’re told.

But that’s also a bad thing: there is no consensus world view left, just a series of tribes with their own echo chambers. Without a shared understanding of the world that is not completely unhinged from reality, there’s no basis for social action which works. China has the buy-in of most of their population because they believe in what China does, and trust the government. (Research on this is very clear. Chinese citizens do trust the CPC.) In the US there can be no concerted action because their is no trust left. Hell, Trump contradicts himself regularly. He’ll say the sky is green in the morning and announce it’s magenta at supper.

No society riven like this and basing its decisions on delusion rather than truth can act effectively. America can’t fix anything, can’t win wars, can’t reindustrialize and much of this is because Americans live in a world of fantasy.

The first step in fixing anything; in running any sort of society worth living in, is facing at least some of the facts: of living in the real world. It’s been a long time since the West acknowledged reality, and our delusions are just getting worse.

Everyone reads these article for free, but the site and Ian take money to run. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.