Date Of Article: 11/1/2002
To Print This Story Goto File > Print
<<Back
Words of oppression
By: Stewart Lane
Western advertising today, one of our world’s greatest evils, is the art of deceiving, cheating, misleading and manipulating without ever telling an obvious lie. It has permeated every part of Western culture, and Westerners have become experts at it. It’s not surprising, then, that their lust for world domination is nowadays carried out primarily by advertising techniques. Sometimes this consists simply in finding new words for unpleasant things so that the things seem less unpleasant. Changing what something is called does nothing to change its nature, but it does temporarily fool some people into regarding it less negatively. Similarly, the IMF/World Bank when giving orders to their subject governments call them “guidelines” or “recommendations,” and assassination is called “regime change!” Another technique is to limit the meaning of a word to one small part of it’s real meaning. The West, for instance, has largely deceived the world into thinking that its peculiar form of democracy is the only “real” democracy. Thus, people struggling for a greater participation in decision-making think that their only choice is to embrace Western democracy, no matter how repugnant its mechanisms are to their traditional customs and values, or how badly it works in their society. A similar deception has been used with the word “education,” so that many in the world are fooled into believing that “schooling”—the Western form of education of the last few hundred years—is the only “education”. This is untrue. The traditional farmer, say, in the Misuku Hills, who has learnt everything there is to know about his environment and how to live in it without destroying it and who uses the resources at hand for every need is just as educated as an Oxford graduate, and a great deal more use in Mughese. The Oxford graduate, with all his knowledge of the West, would be just as helpless in Mughese as the farmer would be in Oxford. Most of the world’s greatest people through the ages never saw the inside of a Western-type school and many of the world’s ignorant fools spent years in one. The Western misuse of “education” to mean “schooling” has enabled them to persuade people who ought to know better that Westerners, being the only ones “educated”, always know best, whereas our experience of the aid industry shows just the opposite. Oppositely, words are used as if they meant much more than they do. “The international community” actually means people from any two nations, but is used to intimidate people by suggesting that everyone in the world but them demands that they change their behaviour, when it’s just a small arrogant portion of the real international community that does so. Yet another technique is to use a highly regarded word to mean something it doesn’t. The word “modern” comes into this category. The word actually means “whatever is fashionable now”. Thus what people do in Outer Mongolia or Mangochi East is just as “modern” as what people do in the West. The West has, however, persuaded people that their fashion is better than other people’s fashion, and uses “modern” to mean only their fashions so that “modern” takes on the meaning, in Western advertising, of “good” and people are persuaded that it is better to be “modern” than to be “old-fashioned” when often the opposite is true. Thus, the dishonest and greedy practices that are fashionable in the West today, among corporation CEOs or IMF executives, for example, or the sexually irresponsible modes of dress fashionable in the West today, are adopted by others in the world, supposing that “modern” means “good” despite their inner knowledge that those behaviours are really very bad. Some words are used because they have no fixed meanings, so can mean anything the Westerners want them to. Examples are “poverty”, “good governance”, “substandard”, “malnourished” “unfit” and “stunted”. Such words are always used to hammer home the misconception that whatever Westerners think is correct and whatever other people think is incorrect. Who decides what is “unfit?” Who sets the “standards” against which “substandard” can be judged? Who decides what is bad nourishment? The West, of course! The unbalanced, carbohydrate and fat laden over-nourishment typical of America is never called “malnourishment”, though it is a good deal worse than the average nourishment of a Malawian villager—in good years at least. What is “good governance”? Western-type governance, of course, no matter how badly it actually works in other places. And so on. Still other words are given absolutely false meanings that, because they are never defined, get by unchallenged. The words “universal,” “human” and “rights” in the phrase “universal human rights” are in this category. The “rights” declared in the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)” were never universal, but, cobbled together by Westerners based on their own culture. Nor are they “rights”, since “rights” are privileges granted by a specific group to the members of that group, in return for obligations to the group. The declaration of a right carries with it an obligation to pay its cost in money or limits on communal freedom. For instance, if a group wants to declare that schooling is a right for members of their group, they must pay for the schooling and limit their spending on other things. Children can only have “rights” if the parents in a group accept a limitation on their own rights. The so-called “rights” in the UDHR were declared by one group as binding on people in other groups, without the declarers accepting any obligation to limit their own freedoms or pay any costs. Thus they are not rights at all. The only defence against advertising, however it is used, or whatever is being sold, is to develop a habit of mind of never believing without careful checking what is said by people who have an agenda. The agenda of the West is world domination and we must look for possible deception in every Western pronouncement.
<<Back
© 2001-2002 Nation Publications Limited, All Rights Reserved