Carrol
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: [BRC-ANN] QUOTE: Noam Chomsky Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2001 21:39:30 -0500 (EST) From: Art McGee <radicalnegro at yahoo.com> To: brc-announce at lists.tao.ca
QUOTE: Noam Chomsky
There are certainly questions about the use of language, that's a very important question but you don't have to be a professional linguist to say anything about those. Those are just common sense.
Take, say, a word like `terrorism,' for example. Like most terms of political discourse it has two meanings: there's a literal meaning and if you want to know what that is you can look up the official U.S. code or army manuals, they'll tell you what terrorism is. And it's what you would think, terrorism is "the calculated use of violence against civilians to intimidate, induce fear, often to kill, for some political, religious, or other end."
That's terrorism, according to its official definition.
But that definition can't be used. Because if that definition is used, you get all the wrong consequences. For one thing, that definition turns out to be almost the same as the definition of official U.S. policy. Except, when it's U.S. policy, it's called `counter-insurgency' or `low-intensity conflict' or some other name. But, in fact, if you look at the definition, it's essentially terrorism. In fact, almost a paraphrase. Furthermore, if you apply the literal definition, you conclude that the U.S. is a leading terrorist state because it engages in these practices all the time. It's the only state, in fact, which has been condemned by the World Court and the Security Council for terrorism, in this sense. And the same is true of its allies. So, right now, they're putting together what they call a `coalition against terror', for the `war on terror', and if you run down the list, every one of them is a leading terrorist state.
So obviously you can't use that definition.
So therefore, there's a propagandistic definition which is the one actually used and in that definition terrorism is "terrorism which is directed against the United States or its allies and carried out by enemies." Well, that's the propagandistic use and, if you read the newspapers and the scholarly literature, they're always using that use. And that's not just the U.S. Every country does that, even the worst killers, the worst mass murderers do it. Take the Nazis, they were combating an occupied Europe. They combated what they called terrorism, namely partisan resistance, which often was, in fact, terrorism in the technical sense.
Resistance usually is.
The American Revolution is a good example -- plenty of terrorism. So, the Nazis were combating terrorism and they called what they were doing, which was extraordinarily brutal, `counter-terrorism'. And the U.S. basically agreed with them. The U.S. Army, after the war, made extensive use of Nazi training manuals... did studies which did careful analysis of them, thinking what was right, what was wrong -- meaning did it work or didn't it work -- essentially accepting the same framework, and, furthermore, immediately started carrying out the same actions against, pretty much, the same enemies. The U.S. Army manuals, on what is called `counter-terrorism', drew from German manuals and even involved the high German officers -- Wehrmacht officers -- who were used as consultants. And, in every other state, it's the same. The terrorism they don't like is called `terrorism' and the terrorism they do like, because they carry it out or their allies carry it out, is called `counter-terrorism'.
Well, this all has to do with the use of language. But you certainly don't have to be a professional linguist to see this. This just requires having ordinary intelligence and looking at the facts. And the same is true throughout, I mean the terms that are used are twisted in ways to satisfy the needs of whoever's using them, which turns out mostly to be concentrated power centers, state or private, and that's true wherever you look.
--Noam Chomsky
"Gangster Pimping in the Culture of Terrorism"
Guerrilla News Network
November 6, 2001
<http://www.guerrillanews.com/counter_intelligence/207.html>
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