organize and enter the public arena, that’s not democracy. Rather,
it’s a crisis of democracy in proper technical usage, a threat that
has to be overcome in one or another way: in El Salvador, by death
squads; at home, by more subtle and indirect means.
Or take free enterprise, a term that refers, in practice, to a
system of public subsidy and private profit, with massive
government intervention in the economy to maintain a welfare state
for the rich. In fact, in acceptable usage, just about any phrase
containing the word “free” is likely to mean the opposite of its
actual, literal meaning.
Or take defense against aggression, a phrase that’s used—
predictably—to refer to aggression. When the US attacked South
Vietnam in the early 1960s, the liberal hero Adlai Stevenson (among
others) explained that we were defending South Vietnam against
“internal aggression”—that is, the aggression of South Vietnamese
peasants against the US air force and a US-run mercenary army,
which were driving them out of their homes and into concentration
camps where they could be “protected” from the southern
guerrillas. In fact, these peasants willingly supported the guerillas,
while the US client regime was an empty shell, as was agreed on all
sides.
So magnificently has the doctrinal system risen to its task that to
this day, 30 years later, the idea that the US attacked South Vietnam
is unmentionable, even unthinkable, in the mainstream. The
essential issues of the war are, correspondingly, beyond any
possibility of discussion now. The guardians of political correctness
(the real PC) can be quite proud of an achievement that would be
hard to duplicate in a well-run totalitarian state.
Or take the term peace process. The naive might think that it
refers to efforts to seek peace. Under this meaning, we would say
that the peace process in the Middle East includes, for example, the
offer of a full peace treaty to Israel by President Sadat of Egypt in
1971, along lines advocated by virtually the entire world, including
US official policy; the Security Council resolution of January 1976,
introduced by the major Arab states with the backing of the PLO
[the Palestine Liberation Organization], which called for a two-state
settlement of the Arab-Israel conflict in the terms of a near-
universal international consensus; PLO offers through the 1980s to
negotiate with Israel for mutual recognition; and annual votes at the
UN General Assembly, most recently in December 1990 (approved
ann
(Ann)
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