The Lies Of
Democracy and the Language Of Deceit
By Colin Todhunter
January 18, 2013 "Global Research" -- In an increasingly media-driven age, language is everything and is often used by officialdom to tyrannise meaning. With the deaths of millions on its hands since 1945, the US has become the world’s number one terror state. By the 1980s, former CIA man John Stockwell had put the figure at six million. As a recent article has indicated, from mass bombing in Southeast Asia to employing death squads in South America, the US military and the CIA have been directly and indirectly responsible for an updated figure of an estimated ten million deaths (1). But it’s not called mass murder these days. Ironically, the US has hijacked the word ‘terror’ to justify its brand of tyranny through a war on terror.
By Colin Todhunter
January 18, 2013 "Global Research" -- In an increasingly media-driven age, language is everything and is often used by officialdom to tyrannise meaning. With the deaths of millions on its hands since 1945, the US has become the world’s number one terror state. By the 1980s, former CIA man John Stockwell had put the figure at six million. As a recent article has indicated, from mass bombing in Southeast Asia to employing death squads in South America, the US military and the CIA have been directly and indirectly responsible for an updated figure of an estimated ten million deaths (1). But it’s not called mass murder these days. Ironically, the US has hijacked the word ‘terror’ to justify its brand of tyranny through a war on terror.
You
can also add to that ten million, countless others whose
lives have been sacrificed on the altar of corporate profit,
which did not rely on the military to bomb peoples and
countries into submission, but on a certain policy. It’s not
browbeating. It’s structural adjustment.
As a
result, hundreds of thousands of Indian farmers have taken
their own lives over the past decade and a half largely as a
result of US agribusiness manipulating global commodity
prices courtesy of policies enacted on its behalf by the US
government or due to the corporate monopoly, or
frontier technology, of terminator seeds that
also landed farmers in debt which was just too much for them
to bear (2).
The
plight of Indian farmers is not unique. How many lives have
been cut short across the world because of the inherent
structural violence or silent killing of the everyday
seemingly benign functioning of predatory capitalism? The
built-in inequalities of the system have effectively stolen
years from people’s lives, the health from their bodies, the
livelihoods from their hands, the water from their taps and
food from their plates. From the UK to Africa, the
subjugated classes – the now often discarded economic
fodder, the cannon fodder during times of war or the
returning heroes to be thrown overboard by the
system on coming home, the people who are to be manipulated
and exploited at will via bogus notions of nationalism or
the national interest – have had
their lives cut short or stripped bare of opportunities due
to the hardships imposed by the iron fist of capitalism (3).
The
appropriation of wealth through a system that funnels it
from bottom to top via a process of accumulation by
dispossession (4) is celebrated as growth,
prosperity, and
freedom of choice, despite evidence that, from
Greece to Spain, the reality for the majority has been
increasing poverty, the stripping away of choice and misery.
You
wouldn’t know much about this if you just used the
mainstream media for information, though. Sure, you may have
been told to tighten your belt
because we are all in it together
and must make some sacrifices in these difficult economic
times.
And
just for good measure, as much of the country (any country)
is thrown onto the scraphead because it is surplus to
requirements now that their jobs have been outsourced
abroad, we simply must attack Mali, Syria, Libya, Iran (the
list goes on) because not to do so would let the evil-doers
take over the world. And then where would we be without such
high-minded notions? It’s not resource plunder. It’s
humanitarianism.
Well,
we would be precisely where we are right now because the
evil-doers are already in control and waging war not only on
the people of those countries just mentioned, but on the
people within their own countries too via the tools of
surveillance, the penal system, the comotosing effects of
spymaster imported illegal drugs or the infotainment
industry and the barrage of legislation that is serving to
strip away civil liberties. The game is up, the dominant
Western economy (the US) is broken beyond repair (5).
Imperialism and militarism won’t save it, but dissent won’t
be allowed.
And as
private bankers entrap us all even further via their licence
to print and loan currencies to national governments then
also loan them the interest on it that spirals out of hand
so it can never be paid back (6), they are able to line
their pockets even further by buying up national assets on
the cheap from the countries they bankrupted in the first
place. It’s not racketeering. It’s austerity.
“And now they’re coming for your social security. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all sooner or later because they own this place.” Gorge Carlin, writer, critic and comedian.
And
where is the mainstream media in all of this? Where are
those journalists whose claim to respectability is their
rigid professionalism, their
accountability, their
objectivity? If you can call professionalism,
accountability and objectivity being in the pocket of and
not wishing to offend advertising interests, officialdom,
lobbyists or corporate think tanks then they are paragons of
absolute virtue!
Peddling their high salaried lies, they have failed and
continue to fail the public. By shining their dim
‘investigative’ light on ‘parliamentary procedures’,
personalities, the rubber stamping of policies and the inane
machinations of party politics, they merely serve to
maintain and perpetuate the status quo and keep the public
in the dark as to the unaccountable self-serving power
broking and unity of interests that enable Big Oil, Big
Banking, Big Pharma, Big Agra and the rest of them to keep
bleeding us all dry.
Looking back to the BBC’s reporting of the NATO bombing of
Libya provides quite revealing insight into the mainstream
media. The coverage was disgracefully one-sided. Is the
public to pay for a ‘public service’ broadcaster in order to
be misled and for it to secure our compliance for illegal
state-corporate policies? There was little analysis of
‘mission’ drift’ or of where the insurgents where getting
their arms from despite a UN-sanctioned arms embargo. Much
less of NATO’s moral right to bomb a path into Tripoli. No
talk there of what University of Johannesburg professor
Chris Landsberg said was NATO’s violation of international
law or of the 200 prominent African figures who accused
western nations of subverting international law.
On the
other hand, though, what we are served courtesy of the
mainstream media each time Britain decides to wage war is a
tasty dish of nationalistic sentiment and the old colonial
mentality of ‘our boys’ going out ‘there’ to help civilise
the barbarians.
But
that’s the role of the media: to help reinforce and
reproduce the material conditions of an exploitative and
divisive social system on a daily basis. It’s called having
a compliant, toothless media. It’s liberal
democracy. That’s the role not only of the
media, but the education system and the political system
too.
And
that’s why former British PM was some years ago told by his
financial masters to sell of what was laughingly regarded as
‘the nation’s gold’ at a knock down price on behalf of
bankers’ (not the nation’s) interests without being held up
to genuine public scrutiny. Some say that was the first
‘bail out’ (7). That’s why taxpayers’ money, unbeknown to
most of the taxpayers, is being used unaccountably and
undemocratically to help prop up banks and to topple various
countries and bring death and destruction to thousands via
‘covert ops’. Covert – hidden from the public who remain
blissfully unaware of where their hard earned dollars,
pounds or euros are actually going.
That’s
why the state-corporate fraudsters, murderers and liars who
wrap themselves in the language of freedom and
democracy have been getting away with it for
so long. Sadly, that’s why they continue to do so.
Notes
Copyright ©
Colin Todhunter, Global Research, 2013
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