On Bad Terminology, Misused Words

and the Slander and Perversion of Language

Dear readers: I got a few requests for a written-up version of yesterday’s audio. Here it is (below). I changed the title a little.

So I think today I’ll do one of my periodic talks about terminology, about the words we use in discussing political and historical phenomena and how some of those words are in my view highly problematic the ways they are used.

Democracy

I’ll start with an easy one – democracy.  We all know or at least should know what it means: one person, one vote and equal political voice and policy influence for all regardless of class, wealth, race, culture, national origin, al, gender and other social distinctions. This concept of democracy generally translates into the notion of majority rule.   

The concept itself isn’t that difficult or at least it shouldn’t be. But two problems arise in terms of how it is employed. The first difficulty emerges when the term is used to describe modern capitalist nations like, say the United States, whose leaders have long arrogantly and absurdly called their country “the world’s greatest democracy.” 

I’ll stick to the United States on this question but similar things could be said about other wealthy capitalist states.

The problem here is that one person, one vote, equal political and policy voice for all, and majority rule don’t remotely exist here.  There’s a library’s worth of basic empirical research on how majority public opinion is trumped by concentrated wealth and power on one key policy issue after another again and again and again some more in the United States.  I’ve written at length about this and won’t go into all the details here. 

The main taproot of the mismatch is the basic contradiction between capitalism and democracy not simply in the boss-dominated workplaces where Americans spend the majority of their waking lives but also within the broader social, political, and legal order where, to quote an old working-class slogan, “money talks and bullshit walks.”

Democracy is about the dispersion and downward distribution of power.  Capitalism, by contrast is about big dogs eating small dogs, big firms eating up small firms, masses being knocked down into the proletariat, and the upward concentration of wealth and hence power.  Capitalism is a mode of production based on private for-profit ownership. It includes a state, political and ideological superstructure consistent with and conditioned by that mode of production.  It is consistent with slavery, dictatorship, and fascism. Democracy in any true sense is not.

At the same time, the US constitutional order is a richly anti-democratic Minority Rule structure fundamentally opposed to one-person, one vote and majority rule.  And that is more than just accidentally consistent with the world view of the nation’s excessively venerated and militantly propertarian aristo-republican18th Century Founders, for whom democracy was the ultimate nightmare, an existential threat to their wealth in land, capital, ships, and slaves. I’ve written a great deal about the US Constitution and how it continues to cast a remarkably durable dark and anti-democratic shadow on American politics and policy to the present day. I’ll put some of my leading pieces on this topic in the comments attached to this audio (transcribed audio).  

The second problem with how the term democracy is employed is that it is commonly used to describe the greatest thing a social and political order could ever strive to be.  Is it? Most liberals and progressives and lefties I know and read and listen to seem to think so. I don’t agree.  Majority rule is not always a good thing, certainly not when the real or effective majority has been led to believe moronic and dangerous things.

Imagine that we had an actual socialist revolution in this country five years from now.  Imagine that after the revolution it emerged that a popular US  majority wanted to sustain a perverse standard of living based on the ruthless exploitation of the natural environment and of impoverished nations around the world.  Imagine that this popular majority backed a resumption of large-scale fossil fuel extraction and burning, calling for the reversal of the new government’s mandates on  sustainable practices. So, gee, would it then be the right thing for the new socialist government to say, in the name of holy democracy, “oh well, one person, one vote, that’s what the majority wants, so be it, let’s go apeshit again with fossil fuels and turning the planet into a Greenhouse Gas Chamber”?  No, it would not. That government would hopefully know and insist that keeping fossil fuels in the ground is an existential imperative for livable ecology, regardless of majority opinion. It would understand and patiently explain to the masses that there’s no decency or democracy or justice or beauty, no decent future on a dead planet!  

“Conservative”

Let’s take another word, one that is in common political and media use to describe the Republican Party – “conservative.”  We hear and read it all the time, references to the “conservative” Donald Trump, the “conservative” House Speaker Mike Johnson, “conservative” Steve Bannon, “conservative” Michael Flynn, “conservative” FOX News, “conservative” OAN, “conservative” Ron DeSantis, and the “conservative” anti-abortion movement and so on. 

It’s total bullshit. I have demonstrated over and over and so have many other commentators that the Republican Party today has become radical, radical right, and indeed now full-on fascist.  It  is headed by a malignant and maniacal genocidal putschist who calls leftists “vermin,” who promises “retribution” against his political enemies, who advocates the extrajudicial execution of suspected shoplifters, who promises to invade Mexico, and who is calling for the building of giant concentration camps for asylum seekers and for the end of birthright citizenship. The Republi-fascist Party has embraced political violence and is waging a nonstop war on truth. It is full of vicious revanchists who are ready, willing, and  very possibly now able to replace the previously normative US bourgeois republic and rule of law with a Christian white nationalist de facto dictatorship. There’s nothing conservative about it. Their vision is radical – radical right and neofascist. (And it’s not “populist,” another misleading word that is commonly used to describe the Trump-era Republicans.)

“Foreign Policy,” “The Vietnam War,” and “the Israel-Hamas War”

Let me turn now to some bad terminology regarding the past and ongoing history of US imperialism, regularly euphemized in the dominant American political discourse as “US foreign policy.” 

As an historian, I’ve long been uncomfortable with the commonplace history textbook phrase “The Vietnam War.”  It’s not for nothing that the Vietnamese call the massive US assault on Vietnam during the 1960s and 1970s “the American War.”  A better name for the conflict would be “The US Imperial War on Vietnam.” Better yet is Noam Chomsky’s phrase at the time: the US “crucifixion of Southeast Asia.”  Chomsky’s phrase rightly captures the savage depth of the US invasion and widens the geographic lens to properly include Laos and Cambodia in describing a remarkably one-sided war in which world history’s most powerful industrialized state and military empire assaulted a small peasant nation and two of its neighbors with massive force for more than a decade.

Years ago, the Detroit-based writer and activist Frank Joyce mocked the reigning US narrative claiming that America suffered as much as the Vietnamese during and after so-called Vietnam War:

“Did Vietnamese troops invade the United States?,” Joyce asked? “Did the Vietnamese air force spend years spraying millions of tons of Agent Orange onto forests and crops in California and Ohio?,” Joyce added. “Are there pictures ,” Joyce wrote. “of naked girls fried with napalm in Alabama that we haven’t seen? Were hundreds of thousands of civilians in Canada and Mexico killed to pursue Vietnamese military objectives in the U.S? Did Vietnamese troops massacre women, old people and babies and dump their bodies into mass graves in Missouri, Montana and Michigan?”

The United States lost 58,000 soldiers in an imperial invasion that killed as many as 5 million Southeast Asians between 1962 and 1975. The massive and prolonged U.S. onslaught laid waste to vast stretches of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. It spread disease and birth defects across the region. The Vietnamese, by contrast, did not kill a single American solider – much less a U.S. civilian – on U.S. soil.  Just one joint CIA and U.S. military program alone, Operation Phoenix, killed 40,000 South Vietnamese, equivalent to more than two-thirds of the total U.S. body count in Vietnam!

“The Vietnam War” is a deeply misleading phrase.

And so, by the way is the phrase “the Israel-Hamas War.” Recently a leading left intellectual published a brilliant critique of how US political and intellectual culture is enabling and justifying Israel’s vicious genocidal war of ethnic cleansing. The critique is flawed by two key and related mistakes.  The first mistake is to omit the central historical and ongoing role of the American Empire in backing Ziofascist Israel’s vicious  policies of occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide in and against Palestine.  The second mistake is to call US-funded, US-equipped, and US-protected Israel’s incredibly one-sided, mass-murderous attack on the people of Gaza.

“The Israel-Hamas War”? Please. We’re talking here about the dropping of US-made 2000-pound bombs on dense urban areas, burying thousands of children in rubble while 85 percent or more of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been forced out of their homes and on to a modern day Trail of Tears,  dodging bombs, artillery fire, and bullets on foot and donkey carts and bicycles on roads filled with dead bodies while jets and drones roar and buzz overhead and while the sick imperialist bastard Joe Biden vetoes United Nations Security Council ceasefire resolutions and bypasses Congressional oversight rules to rush new weapons to help Tel Aviv slaughter more Palestinian women and children.  

“The Israel-Hamas War”? Try this instead: “The US-Israel Crucifixion of Gaza.” The number of Gazans killed by US-Israel since October 7th is now nearly twenty times greater than the number of Israelis killed by Hamas’ military wing and other Gaza-based terrorists on that day. The number of Gazan children slaughtered by Biden-Netanyahu/US-Israel is far beyond the total 10-7 body count.  The US-Israel assault has murdered nine Gazan civilians for every Hamas fighter killed.

Intifada Revolution and “From the River to the Sea”

Speaking of Gaza and the perversion of language in the US, I’m sure most of my readers have seen that the “conservative” Republi-fascist Party and its Weimar-like Democratic Party collaborators have gone full on neo-McCarthyite by raking some elite, supposedly left US academic institutions over the coals for permitting students who oppose the US-Israel Crucifixion of Gaza to use two supposedly antisemitic phrases in campus demonstrations calling for a humanitarian ceasefire.

Here are the two phrases: “Intifada revolution” and “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free.” 

The leading Congressional Republi-fascist Elise Stefanik (Rf-NY) has called  the presidents of Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before the US House to hector them with the claim that these phrases are calls for the genocidal eradication of the Jewish people. 

The charge is totally absurd. “Intifada” means quite simply uprising, and rebellion, a mass upheaval to throw off oppression.  In the Palestinian context, it refers to revolutionary movements to thrown off the 75-year-old yoke of US-backed Israeli occupation, apartheid, embargo, and terror. There’s nothing about wiping out Jewish humanity in the phrase – nothing. It is loathsome slander to charge that one is a genocidal antisemite because one chants “there is only one solution, Intifada revolution.”   

“From the River to the Sea” is a flexible and malleable phrase that can easily be taken to mean and commonly does mean the restoration of the tolerant,multi-ethnic, and religiously diverse Palestine that existed prior to the horrific genocidal Israeli attack – the “Nakba” (Arabic for “catastrophe”) – of 1948. It is loathsome slander to charge that one is a genocidal antisemite because one chants “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” 

Sadly enough, none of the university presidents called before Tailgunner Stefanik’s Republi-fascist Inquisition (one of whom has been forced to resign)  had the brains and/or decency to point out the absurdity of calling these phrases “genocidal” and “antisemitic”