hidden persuaders
THE POWER OF THE PHRASE
by
DAVID SOLWAY
______________________________
David
Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist (Random Walks)
and author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and
Identity and Hear, O Israel! (Mantua Books). His
editorials appear regularly in PJ
Media. His monograph, Global Warning: The Trials of
an Unsettled Science (Freedom Press Canada) was launched
at the National Archives in Ottawa in September, 2012. His debut
album, Blood
Guitar, is now available, as is his latest
book, Reflections
on Music, Poetry and Politics.
As a poet and essayist,
I have always been interested in the power of the phrase: the
epithet, the slogan, the aphorism, the idiom, the cliché,
the qualifier, the tag, the label, the title and the name. Of
course, such locutions often carry neutral implications as mere
designators, or may generate what Vance Packard called “hidden
persuaders,” some of which can be quite clever and even
impressive. For example, the FedEx logo. The company acronym
contains a hidden symbol which one can glimpse with a little
attention, namely, the white-space arrow implying forward motion
between the concluding "E" and the lower case "x."
The
problem is, as we should all be aware, that phrases may also
be used for nefarious purposes, insinuating themselves into
the mind as signifiers for non-existent “realities”
or as de facto claims that are wholly fraudulent. The
names of many totalitarian dictatorships bear misnomers like
“Democratic” or “Republic” or “Free,”
which fool only the credulous and the partisan. Does an area
of the Pacific Ocean belong to China because it is called the
South China Sea?
But
it is astonishing how many people fall for the appellative shell
game, accepting without skepticism or critical thought the radiant
energy of such -- let’s call them -- deceptors. They must
mean what they say, especially by dint of incessant repetition.
This, according to Goebbels, is how the “Big Lie”
operates. I have conversed, much to my chagrin, with many otherwise
sensible people who have swallowed the phrasal and lexical subterfuge
hook, line and sinker.
In
an article for PJ Media, “The Semantic Whoredom
of the Left,” Sarah Hoyt unpacks such words for us --
words, she explains, “that are in common use voided of
their signification and filled with meanings they were never
meant to have, meanings that can only be understood if you share
the basic assumptions of leftist liberals.” We may regard
them as semiotic false flags where connotations substitute for
denotations, or as Hoyt writes, the Left is “holding perfectly
good words captive and making them commit acts against their
nature.” Regrettably, the gullible are routinely taken
in.
A few
well-known examples from current political discourse include
buzzwords, whether pejorative or unctuous, like “alt-right,”
“fascist,” “social justice,” “Zionism,”
“patriarchy,” “racist,” “woke,”
“hater,” “diversity and inclusion,”
“hope and change” and innumerable others. These
are neither conceptual classifiers nor reality signifiers, they
are “just a handful of words,” as Jack Kerwick says
in an article perforating academic groupthink, whose purpose
is to beguile and delude. Such words and phrases have come either
to signify the opposite of their original meaning or to compromise
the ability to make distinctions between truth and falsehood.
They are intended to function as instruments of censorship,
coercion and befuddlement against those who believe in freedom
of speech, thought and assembly.
Left-wing
sites and faux-liberal communal enterprises are adept at recruiting
noble and positive-oriented phrases and tags as forms of covert
deception, especially regarding titles for their various political
organizations. A smattering of examples:
Southern Poverty
Law Center (SPLC)
Located in Alabama, it is described as a non-profit legal
advocacy organization specializing in civil rights and public
interest litigation, but this is far from the truth. In the
words of Robert Spencer, it is nothing but a “defamation
factory,” subsidized by George Soros and tasked with
defending leftist and subversive groups and smearing conservative
sites and individuals. It is not poor, is not a genuine advocate
for the poor, and it has no respect for the law except in
devising ways to use it as a weapon, as in launching frivolous
suits. Its notion of justice is a vicious burlesque. A proper
designation for SPLC would be Southern Political Libel Center.
American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU)
This tax-exempt outfit has nothing to do with civil liberties,
as it grotesquely describes itself. Quite the contrary. It
has worked over the years to promote a campaign of “liberal”
obstructionism. It has worked to prevent the nomination of
Judge Robert Bork, to defeat pro-life initiatives, to protest
President Trump’s travel ban on arrivals from terror-sponsoring
Muslim nations, to attack a loyal patriot like Sheriff Irwin
Carmichael of Mecklenburg County in North Carolina who abided
by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to turn over illegal
immigrants to federal agents. It is taking a role in influencing
election results. It is now, according to an internal memo,
tempering its commitment to the First Amendment, wary of “the
extent to which [free] speech may assist in advancing the
goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary
to our values”; after all, “Our defense of speech
may have a greater or lesser harmful impact on the equality
and justice work to which we are also committed." The
list goes on. A more appropriate moniker might be American
Cozenage League Unlimited.
Students for
Justice in Palestine (SJP)
To begin with, there is no “Palestine,” a fake
country invented in 1974 at the Rabat Conference minus all
the elements that characterize the historic existence of a
nation. A vast proportion of its “citizens” hail
from South Syria and Egypt (including some of its most famous
representatives, such as Edward Said and Yasser Arafat, both
Egyptians). These are students who are manifestly not for
justice in Palestine, or justice plain and simple. They are
students massively ignorant of history, including their own
history, who are given to anti-civil disruptive behavior on
college campuses, and who promote a campaign of terror against
Israel. A more accurate designation of SJP would be Students
for Jihad in Palestine.
Planned Parenthood
Federation of America
What is planned is not parenthood but the absence of it. Its
purpose is to provide abortion services, that is, the indiscriminate
slaughter of the unborn and selling of fetal tissue for profit.
As James O’Keefe reports in American Pravda, citing
a video released by the correctly named Center for Medical
Progress, a “clinician picks through a tray of body
parts . . . and discusses the market value of each.”
Project Veritas has abundantly shown Planned Parenthood to
be nothing more than a for-profit butcher shop. Nor is Planned
Parenthood averse to recommending illegal abortions and refusing
to report cases of statutory rape, as it is lawfully mandated
to do. PPFA should be better known as Professional Project
for Annihilation.
Antifa
Billing itself as anti-fascist, an insurgent army of brownshirts,
political vandals and masked guerrillas, reminiscent of Germany’s
Baader Meinhoff and Italy’s Red Brigades, Antifa protesters
are in the business of causing social mayhem and damage to
public and private property in the name of “liberation.”
It can be defined as a crypto-fascist organization counting,
by some estimates, up to 200,000 members. As The Hill reports,
violence against innocent citizens, “and more importantly,
law enforcement, which the Antifa routinely violently opposes,
is not the result of a few bad apples. It’s the fundamental
philosophy of the loose confederation of Antifa cells …
All of it tactical toward achieving the goals of destroying
the American culture, society and economy. Never mind that
the tactics are themselves the tactics of the fascist.”
Its proper name would be Profa.
