Orwell says
Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
– George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” 1946
This is an extremely apt description. What does “solidity” in this context mean? It means the quality or state of being substantial or reliable in character.
e.g. “he exuded an aura of reassuring solidity“
Many people suffer from the result of “public opinion” or “presentation”. What is this result? It is propaganda in action. The result is the belief of what I like to identify as “officialness” i.e. the quality or state of being “official” as if the very nature of what is being presented has the aura of substantiation and reliability, hence bringing us back to the appearance of solidity. The most susceptible, unwitting, and downright incredulous of specific groups who suffer from the inability to identify false solidity are the Muslims en masse, which may be an aspect (but not the epitome) of why Muslims were so easily conquered by its enemies. Even non-Muslims typically do not exemplify this level of incredulity towards power and its institutions and manifest outlets among the corporate, financial, medical, and scientific sectors of society. An entire book could most likely be authored in regards to modern Muslim incredulity. But if we were to, for the sake of brevity, explicate this in summary, it is the paradigmatic world view in which one takes the world for what is presented to them, as is, within the parameters of “official” or “mainstream” media. As a result of this incredulous world view, all alternative analysis, even if sourced and proven, are categorically identified as “unofficial”, “pseudo” and “conspiracy theory”. The result of this world view is that, if the mainstream “official” media does not inform them of any particular matter, then it must not be “valid”, “accurate”, or “true”. It stems from a belief that the media is there to “rightfully inform” them of what they need to know, which is the fundamental mistake in thought!. More importantly, the media in which they have this behavior towards and by which they have unwittingly made taqlid of, in defiance of Allah’s command
يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا إِن جَاءَكُمْ فَاسِقٌ بِنَبَإٍ فَتَبَيَّنُوا أَن تُصِيبُوا قَوْمًا بِجَهَالَةٍ فَتُصْبِحُوا عَلَىٰ مَا فَعَلْتُمْ نَادِمِينَ
“All of you who have attained faith! If any shady person (entity) comes to you with a report, use your discernment (verify it), lest you hurt people unwittingly and afterwards be filled with remorse for what you’ve done“
Has proven time and time again that they do not fulfill the requisites of true solidity, and are a direct opposite of integrity and being upright and honest. This is further substantiated by the abundant historical and documentable data that reveal that the purpose of modern media does not exist to present “truth”, nor even to “spin” it, but to form your own viewpoints and create a dialectic of manufactured diverging points of views from the acceptable views of the establishment so that the target i.e. the audience, lives and operates within the pool of acceptable ideas of khilaf (differing views) that the existing power structures deem acceptable! This is actually what is called “manufacturing consent”. Hence, what happens is, the mainstream and “official” media does their reasoning for them, giving them their viewpoints that were literally contrived by corporate, banking, or political interests, in order that the target populations live their reality and conceive of the world in what was politically expedient for them! And what confounds this problem is that the target population, does not know that this is what takes place, and they think that the presentation of this fake solidity, is itself “truth” and the bastion of reason! Thus, a degree of jahl murakab (compound ignorance) is exerted here whereby they are operating on ignorance and thinking that they are operating on informed and true data at their disposal, data, that was provided to them by the establishment, which presents itself as the bastion of solidity!
So what I have below is the fundamental tools needed to think our way out of the contrived paradigm manufactured for us to adopt. These steps were postulated by a great geopolitical and economic commentator, Andrew Gavin Marshall. I utilize it here and then expand on it along with additional examples of citations from AGM.
Political language functions through euphemism, by employing soft-sounding or simply meaningless words to describe otherwise monstrous and vicious policies and objectives. In the European debt crisis, political language employed by politicians, economists, technocrats and bankers is designed to make policies which create poverty and exploitation appear to be logical and reasonable. The language employed includes euphemistic words and phrases such as “fiscal austerity/consolidation”, “structural adjustment/reform“, “labour flexibility“, “competitiveness”, and “growth“. To understand political language, one must translate it. This requires four steps:
- first, you look at the rhetoric itself as inherently meaningless!
- second, you examine the policies that are taken!
- third, you look at the effects of the policies.
- Finally, if the effects do not match the rhetoric, yet the same policies are pursued time and time again, one must translate the effects as the true meaning of the rhetoric. Thus, the rhetoric has meaning, but not at face value.
This four step process can be applied on any particular subject matter. Lets take, for example, European austerity measures. Europe’s people are being forced to undergo “austerity measures,” a political-economic euphemism for cutting social spending, welfare, social services, public sector jobs, and increased taxes. The aim, they are told, is to get their “fiscal house in order.” The people protest, and go out into the streets. The state responds by meeting the people with riot police, batons, tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets. This is called “restoring order.”
The effects of austerity happen to increase poverty, unemployment, and misery. People are fired from the public sector, welfare and social benefits are reduced or lost, retirement ages are increased to keep people in the work force and off the pension system, which is also cut. Cuts to health care and education take a social and physical toll; as poverty increases the need for better health care, that very system is dismantled when it is needed most. Taxes are increased, and wages are decreased. People are deeper in debt, and destined for destitution. The objective, we are told, is to “reduce public spending” so that the government can reduce its deficit (the yearly debt).
So, with appeal to the context of the United States, when “public spending” is reduced, the areas and sectors of what is cut are not things that need to be cut, like sectors that kill people, create chaos and destruction for the rest of the world like “defense”. So for example, when the state draws back on state spending, the military or intelligence budgets are not targeted. The target of such cuts are on social spending, sectors that help people. So the educational system is cut, welfare is cut, labor benefits cut.
As we can loosely translate “austerity” into poverty, we may translate “structural adjustment” into exploitation. After all, nothing goes better with poverty than exploitation! How does “structural adjustment” become exploitation? Well through competitiveness and growth, of course! Structural adjustment means that the state liberalizes the economy, so everything is deregulated, all state-owned assets are privatized, like roads, hospitals, airports, rivers, water systems, minerals, resources, state-owned companies, services, etc. This, as the story goes, will encourage “investment” in the country when it “needs it most.” This idea suggests that foreign banks and corporations will enter the “market” and purchase all these wonderful things, explaining that they work better when they are “competitive” in the “free market,” and then with their new investments, they will create new industries, employ local people, revive the economy, and with the “trickle down” from the most productive and profitable, all of society will rise in living standards and opportunity.
Labour flexibility will then help “specialize” your country in producing one or a few select goods, which you can produce better, cheaper, and more of than anywhere else. Then your economy will have success and the lives of all will prosper and grow… just not their wages. That is left to the “trickle down” from those whose wages are increased, the corporate, banking, and government executives and managers. That is because they take all the risk (remember, you are not risking anything when you passively accept your wages and standards of living to be rapidly decreased), and thus, they should get all of the reward. And because their rewards are so huge, large scraps will fall off of their table and onto the floor, which the wage-slaves below can fight over. By the laws of what I can only assume is “magic,” this will eventually lift the downtrodden from a life of poverty and labour and all will enjoy the fruits of being in a modern, technological, democratic-Capitalist paradise! Or so the fable goes.
The actual, predictable, and proven results of “structural adjustment” aimed at achieving “growth” through “competitiveness” is exploitation. The privatization of the economy allows foreign banks and corporations to come in and buy the entire economy, resources, commodities, infrastructure and wealth. Because the country is always in crisis when it does this, everything is sold very cheaply, pennies on the dollar kind of cheap. That is because the corporations and banks are doing the government and people a favour by investing in a country which is a large risk. The money the state gets from these sales is recorded as “revenue,” and helps reduce the yearly debt (deficit). The result for the people, however, is that mass layoffs take place, commodity prices increase, service costs increase, and thus, poverty increases. But privatization has benefits, remember; it encourages “competitiveness.” If everything was privatized, everyone would compete with each other to produce the best goods for the lowest costs, and everyone can subsequently prosper together in a society of abundance.
What actually takes place is that multinational corporations and banks, which already own most of the world’s resources, now own yours, too. This is not competitive, because they are ultimately all cartels, and collude together in exploiting vast resources and goods from around the world. They do compete in the sense of seeing which one can exploit, produce, and control more than the other. But at the bottom of this system, everyone else gets poorer. This is called “competitiveness,” but what it actually means is control. So if the economy needs to become more competitive, what is really being said is that it needs to come under more control, and of course, in private corporate and financial hands.
State owned industries are simply closed down, employees fired, and the product or resource which that industry was responsible for producing is then imported from another country/corporation. A corporation takes over that domestic good/resource and then extracts/produces it for itself. But this requires labour. It’s a good thing that the labour force has had its back broken through austerity and adjustment, because now there are no protected jobs, wages, hours, unions, or workers’ rights in general. Thus, the population is free to be exploited for long hours and minimal wages. This makes what they are producing to be cheaper, and thus, more “competitive.” This can become extremely profitable for corporations and banks which took all the risk in this entire process (remember: you don’t count; you had very little to begin with, so you lost very little. They have a lot, and thus, a lot more to lose. That’s what risk means). If workers attempt to form unions or organize and demand higher wages, the corporation can simply threaten to close down the plant, and move the jobs to somewhere else with a more “flexible” labour force. Or, the corporation could simply hire local immigrant populations (or ship in others) and pay them less for more hours, and leave you without any jobs. This is called “labour flexibility.” Labour flexibility translates as cheap labour: to bring everyone down to an equally low level of worker standards, and thus, to encourage “utilization,” which means exploitation.
In the ‘Third World,’ this has been best achieved through what are called “Export Processing Zones (EPZs),” a term used to describe a designated area outside of state control in which corporations may establish factories to freely exploit labour as they choose. Commodities are shipped in, goods are produced in the EPZs, from where they are then exported abroad, free of pesky national taxation and regulation. Ultimately, EPZs are mini corporate colonies.
Economists and politicians often talk about the need to “utilize labour flexibility to increase competitiveness and achieve growth.” What they are really saying is that they need to exploit cheap labour to increase control and achieve profits and power. Lucas Papademos was installed (unelected) as the “Technocratic” prime minister of Greece in November of 2011, in order to “help” Greece undertake the mandatory “reforms.”
The combination of “fiscal austerity” and “structural adjustment” are generally referred to as a “comprehensive structural adjustment program” or a “restructuring of the economy.” This language is important to understand because “restructuring” as a word is used to describe two processes: one, is that it is what is needed to prevent a country from defaulting on its debt and to return the country to a period of growth; and, on the other hand, “restructuring” is used to describe what takes place after a country defaults. The words in both situations are the same, and so are the policies, though in a default they are inflicted more severely. The very process we are told we must undergo to prevent a default, is the very same process that we undergo after a default. Thus, the combination of fiscal austerity and structural adjustment is, in actuality, a slow and painful default.
This combination of austerity and adjustment amounts to a program and effect of social devastation. Thus, the words “structural adjustment program,” “restructuring,” and “default” in actuality translate into social genocide. These three terms provide further insight into their use: the class system is what is being restructured, as middle classes are wiped out and pushed into poverty, the poor are made destitute, and the elite become concentrated and in total control; the political and economic system is being adjusted to fit this restructuring; and the promise that people everywhere were told, that their leaders and society exists to serve their interests, is what is being defaulted on. The state does not default; it is the ‘social contract’ that is defaulted. Just as Mario Draghi told the Wall Street Journal, “the European social model has already gone… Fiscal consolidation is unavoidable in the present set up, and it buys time needed for the structural reforms.” Thus, social genocide.
Ultimately, one can get away with saying, “we need a comprehensive austerity package augmented by structural reforms, such as labour flexibility, designed to increase competitiveness and facilitate growth,” as opposed to: “We need to rapidly impoverish our populations, whom we will then exploit to the fullest, such as by creating a cheap labour force, which would increase elite control and generate private profits.” Such honesty and bluntness would lead to revolt, so, political language is used instead. In Europe, political language is part of a ‘power dialectic’ which supports policies and agendas that aim to take more for those who already have the most, and to take from all the rest.
As one can see with this demonstration on just one issue, the European economic crisis, one follows the four step rule highlighted above to actualize that terms or phrases in “political” speak, sometimes known as “newspeak” coincidentally coined by Orwell himself in his 1984, where things are described in a deceptive opposite reality where ignorance is bliss, or peace through war, etc, can be deciphered for people to understand that these deceptive sloganeering campaigns have a
- theoretical definition, used to maintain a facade for public consumption, and
- A functional definition that looks at the effects of policies which then in turn explain the true meaning such political speak entails.
As a result of this, this language is “clear” to those who understand functional newspeak, those in the know! That is, those who consist of people who are involved in the con of marketing the con to the public via the theoretics of the planned ambitions of the planners employing this language, and of course, the minority of us who have the mental faculties to be able to see through this and connect the dots from the portrait that media effectively erase for public consumption so that people are incapable of connecting those dots.
To conclude, i wish to insert a statement. The reason for inserting this statement Is actually multifaceted. One is to eliminate the conventional “wisdom” people who suffer from this incredulity, mainly among Muslims, who think that this is all haphazard and we are merely rolling down through history and those in authority happen to spontaneously deal with these matters as they allegedly rise. Another facet to this is to connect how “philosophy” as it truly was, and in its modern form of “science” and “academia”, are in cahoots with this con. In his book on “The Impact of Science on Society, the famed Philosopher, and member of imperial elites, Lord Bertrand Russel of England said
“Scientific societies are as yet in their infancy. . . . It is to be expected that advances in physiology and psychology will give governments much more control over individual mentality than they now have even in totalitarian countries. Fitche laid it down that education should aim at destroying free will, so that, after pupils have left school, they shall be incapable, throughout the rest of their lives, of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished.”
He then says elsewhere that
“Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible.”
— Bertrand Russell, “The Impact of Science on Society”, 1953, pg 49-50
If one cannot compute what this entails, then such a one is himself thee problem. If one conceives that this is a mere “wish list” that elites “feel” should be done and this does not actually actualize in action plans by authorities, then such folk are the problem. If one cannot surpass and navigate out of accepting the world in the way it has been fostered and neatly packaged for you by your mainstream, your educational upbringing, then such people are no more than meat on the table to be cut and eaten, cattle to be sacrificed by choice and consent!
The Boriqee Notes 