The Semantic Circus

Kurt Jonassohn
August 1999

There seems to be a considerable amount of consensus on the factors required for achieving a democratic and prosperous society. The most important one of these is the introduction of the rule of law - the quite novel idea that the law should apply to everyone equally. But the rule of law is not able to function except in an open society. It has only quite recently been recognized that a Freedom of Information (FoI) act is essential if the rule of law is to be observed. The great question is: what is it that such a FoI act should be concerned with?  The naive answer would be: ‘everything’. In the real world such an answer is unacceptable because individuals, businesses, organizations, and governments all defend their right to define what should be personal, confidential, secret, or a threat to national security. This tension between the openness required by a democratic and prosperous society and the several actors’ needs for privacy or secrecy leads to innovations in language use and terminology. Some of these innovations are the topic of this discussion.

Of course, the manipulation of language by political elites to further the acceptance of their hidden agenda is not exactly a new invention. In fact, a whole history of such techniques could be written. But while the general methods have been known for a long time, their application has to be adapted to the specifics of each particular situation. The only thing that is relatively new is the use of these methods by economic enterprises in the marketing of their products. Needless to add that these methods are not always successful. Thus, ‘Oil of Olay’ had marketed their beauty products quite successfully until the competition’s marketing played up that their products did not contain any oils. This forced ‘Oil of Olay’ to mount an elaborate campaign assuring the public that their products contained no oil. By such missteps the consuming public learned to apply to commercial campaigns what they had long ago learned about political statements: that their truth value is not to be taken for granted.

By the end of World War II the world was thoroughly disenchanted. The misdeeds of Germany and Japan were increasingly exposed to a shocked public. There was little left of the traditional images of heroic battles and glorious victories. Instead, both World Wars had produced untold millions of dead and maimed on both sides. Neither soldiers nor non-combatants were spared. The League of Nations which was meant to prevent future wars, was a signal failure. The new United Nations had the same goal, but its founders had learned a few things. While it has so far failed to accomplish many of its stated aims, it has for over half a century been successful in preventing the occurrence of another world war. In addition, it has passed a long series of bills, conventions, covenants, declarations, principles, proclamations, and protocols specifying various aspects of human rights. Many of these were separately affirmed in the Helsinki accords. In addition, a number of treaties were negotiated among the major powers to control the production, stock piling, and use of weapons of mass destruction.

Many of these instruments received massive popular support as a result of wide-spread publicity, activism of many NGOs, and the innate appeal of guarantees of human rights. This support was at variance with the positions adopted by dominant elements in governments, military establishments, or industrial elites. They saw to it that many of these instruments were not ratified by many of the UN member countries who had voted for them in the UN Council. Even when ratified, many of these undertakings were observed mainly in the breach. This deplorable state of affairs had two important results. The first one was that, instead of openness, organizations imposed increasingly sophisticated methods of controlling access to information. The second one was that semantic language changes were introduced that were designed to obscure what was going on.

The first of these results is easily observed by the reduction of investigative reporting. It does not matter whether this is the result of financial restrictions, refusals of access, carefully phrased press releases, or self-imposed censorship. Many governments do not have FoI acts or restrict their usefulness. The latter may be accomplished by overriding confidentiality regulations, by claiming national security or executive privilege, or simply by bureaucratic delays. Many industries not only claim privacy and confidentiality for their records, but they are also able to control what is published about them by withholding advertising support or even by outright ownership of the media. All of these methods dramatically reduce the openness that is so essential to the life of a society that is based on the rule of law.

The second result of not implementing human rights legislation is the deliberate confusion of issues through the manipulation of language. This may be accomplished by introducing new words or new phrases, by changing the meaning of old expressions, or by manipulating the meaning of the context in which such old expressions occur. Whatever the particular type of manipulation of language, its goal is to cover up the commission or omission that the relevant human rights legislation was meant to prevent. This can best be discussed by examining some of these efforts to either introduce new terms or redefine old ones.

‘Humanitarian Intervention’ is one of those compound terms that have been engineered to make an oxymoron into an acceptable human rights label. The noun ‘intervention’ means what it has always meant: meddling into someone else’s affairs. Military intervention, also known as gunboat diplomacy, has long been a tool used by the strong against the weak. Adding the qualifier ‘humanitarian’ was meant to appease the defenders of human rights. Unfortunately, the latter were so keen to have their agenda recognized by the strong that they were only too ready to support such interventions. Reality soon caught up with them: the humanitarian interventions that have been carried out to-date, far from preventing or alleviating human suffering, have significantly contributed to its increase. When such failure becomes only too obvious, as in Kosovo, the compound term is dropped and replaced by the rather old-fashioned term ‘war’, albeit an undeclared one. Conversely, when outrageous human rights violations would have warranted intervention it did not occur, thus making it quite clear that violations of human rights are quite irrelevant to decisions to intervene. Those not blinded by the antics of the semantic circus know fully well that intervention has nothing to do with humanitarian considerations and conversely that such humanitarian considerations do not move the international community to intervene.

‘War’, according to the American College Dictionary, is "a conflict carried on by force of arms between nations or states, or by parties within a state" and, thus, should not be applied to a one-sided action. Even so, this inappropriate term has been used for one-sided actions because any alternate terminology would carry negative loadings for the aggressor.

Damage, as in ‘Collateral damage’, is defined in the same dictionary as "Injury or harm that impairs value or usefulness." This definition seems to make sense when applied to inanimate objects. It hardly seems appropriate when applied to human beings. Collateral means indirect or secondary to the main object of the action. Thus, collateral damage implies a damage that was not intended but was unavoidable. Using this terminology to describe the human beings that were maimed or killed, albeit unintentionally, seems designed to sidetrack the emotional reactions that we reserve for the fate of fellow beings but consider inappropriate for things. Clearly, the spin doctors know their trade, as evidenced by the quite modest reaction of the few who still believe that there is a significant difference between things and beings - even if the latter are not members of our own subgroup.

‘Peace’ is an "agreement between contending parties" and thus is not the right term to apply when one party imposes terms on another party. But once the spin doctors have had recourse to calling a humanitarian intervention a war, what other term was left to describe the withdrawal from that intervention? After all, the withdrawal from Somalia looked too much like a defeat. Given the continuing conflicts in Kosovo, it was decided not to withdraw, but rather to install an occupation force that would implement a peace.

‘Victory’ was used to describe one side’s successful conclusion to a conflict. Not any more. In Kosovo the interveners did not declare war; the intervened did declare war, but without defending themselves. When peace terms were eventually imposed, both were able to declare victory. Out of such creative semantics new myths may arise. ‘Down sizing’, ‘Restructuring’, and ‘Rationalizing’ are examples of how the corporate world attempts to distract the observer. The meanings of these terms seem to refer to an abstract process of managing an enterprise. Thus, they are meant to skirt the public’s concern with human rights, when in reality they simply refer to a drastic reduction of the number of employees. While the officially announced purpose of such actions is to maximize profits, there is no evidence that it does so in the short run. Whether that goal is actually achieved in the long run might well be explored in another paper. In the meantime, the public is becoming increasingly sophisticated in interpreting and discounting the more fanciful corporate impositions on their credulity - with the, albeit unanticipated, consequences that they deserve.

What is remarkable about these illustrations is this: the more the public shows concern and support for human rights, the more is this concern for human beings removed from the discourse of the elites. These elites, whether they are economic, industrial, military, or political, are preoccupied with increasing their wealth and their control over the means for creating that wealth. That also implies the power to control resources, the terms of trade, and the expressions of popular will. The traditional methods of achieving these ends by brute force having become less effective in democratic societies, a new profession has come to the fore. It is based on skills in manipulating communication, redefining language, and changing the web of meanings. Since these skills are now taught in many universities and can often lead to a Ph. D. degree, their practitioners are quite aptly called spin doctors.