George Orwell (Eric Blair) was not the first or only person to write that empire needs euphemism as well as control over language and not just the people who use it. ((George Orwell, Politics in the English Language, 1946.)) Mark Twain and even Ernest Hemingway also captured this quality although they were usually less explicit in their illustrations. In contemporary memory George Carlin gave what was probably the best classic rendition of the pathology.
RT reported that Texas estate agents have decided that residential property descriptions should no longer use the term “master bedroom”. Instead the term “primary bedroom” is to be used. ((“Texas realtors ditch term ‘master’ for bedrooms and bathrooms, despite it having no connection to slavery”, RT News, 26 June 2020.)) Perhaps the proper consequence of eliminating the term “master bedroom” ought to be to rename all ordinary accommodation “slave quarters”. After all if someone has a mortgage rather than clear title or is dependent upon a job to raise “hut tax” (local property taxes), then he or she is certainly no master.
The diversion of protest energy into the Northern elite’s ideological war against the populist South is a more than unfortunate development. It will consume lots of time and energy that would better be focussed on the real content of white supremacy in the US. However, by removing all the Confederate and other traces of the white supremacist culture propagated by the ruling elite, it will be possible to sanitize the language of the new versions of slavery that have been in operation and expanding. It will remove the traces of the dominant culture from physical space — having already achieved the concealment of the dominant culture in the media space.
The truth is that of all the lives that do not matter to the ruling elite, Black lives are simply those kept historically at the least value. Being Black in the US can be compared to the treatment of an underlying asset in a financial derivative transaction. Such a model was described sarcastically in Dead Souls. ((Nikolai Gogol, 1842.)) The book’s hero, Chichikov, in anticipation of the czar’s decree abolishing serfdom, with its promise of compensation to those who lose their serfs, travels throughout the country buying the dead serfs from landowners. He has a careful plan, which he conceals with his jovial sociability and willingness to pay above average prices. The dead serfs he wants are those not yet registered as dead. Even those who suspect him of sharp dealing do not grasp that he plans to recover his fortune by filing for compensation for all the dead serfs he has bought — once the czar’s decree becomes law. While the system of white supremacy in the US Empire — like serfdom — is odious, there are those who see every option to profit even from ostensible attacks on it.
There are clearly multiple waves on this sea of troubles. This year the wave of resistance and opposition to police terror against Blacks (but also in general) was joined by the wave created by the ruling class under the auspices of its eugenicists, Gates, Rockefellers, et al., namely, the virus wave unabashedly promoted for profit and population control. The virus wave meant the extended incarceration of much of the workforce that is not already serving as bonded labour in US prisons. The violence done to millions who were or will be deprived of their sources of income was compounded by the quasi-house arrest imposed by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) counter-insurgency command together with its sister components in the National Institutes of Health (NIH). After four years of non-stop assault against the POTUS with utter disregard for any other social or economic policy (unless for personal enrichment of those in office and their friends), the discrepancy between the euphemism of America’s return to “greatness” and the real conditions for ordinary people in the Empire had become almost intolerable.
It is not clear yet whether all these waves could merge into a tsunami or “killer wave”. BLM (Black Lives Matter™) has been shaped by its three “founders” and trademark holders into an American “Pussy Riot” — desecrating the icons of the South instead of fornicating in Orthodox churches. ((BLM (2013) founders are Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi. Pussy Riot has been described as a “feminist protest punk rock and performance art group” in Russia, notorious for a performance staged in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour on 21 February 2012. They were arrested, charged and convicted of “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred”. It became a cause celebre for Putin opponents, especially in the West.)) Meanwhile less than lip service is paid to the wanton destruction of the SME sector in the US and Europe. Instead hot and cold hysteria are being applied along with the same kind of censorship and repression from the worst anti-communist purges. Masks are not just metaphors for muzzles. They physically restrain debate about the criminal liability of the great corporate cartels that rule the US through their proxies in Washington and the state capitals. Western Europe is held hostage by its own viral vassals of the Pharmaceutical and Banking cartels– determined to wage this phony war at least until Trump is defeated or they get their wonder vaccination into the hands of the UN Witch Hunting Organisation (WHO) and can start turning all of us into GMOs. ((Also known officially as the World Health Organisation (WHO). GMO is a genetically modified organism.)) It is not ironic nor is it accidental that the two biggest waves in the storm that hit us were catalysed by people and forces for whom fewer lives matter.
We are witnessing a massive counter-insurgency program. The forces that combined a century ago to wage war against the German Empire have again combined to wage war against what they imagine will be the empire to supersede them. To wage that war a century ago, the fathers and grandfathers of our rulers felt no amount of death and destruction was too much if it meant crushing their opponents at home and abroad. Working and lower class manhood was slaughtered from 1915 until 1920 and again from 1939 until 1945. ((See, for example, The Great Class War, reviewed by this author “Romanticism and War”, Dissident Voice, 15 September 2015.)) Samuel Cohen, renowned as the father of the “neutron bomb”, felt he had conceived the ultimate weapon for making atomic war tolerable — just killing people, without destroying buildings and infrastructure. ((Samuel T. Cohen (1921-2010), American physicist. The neutron bomb was also referred to as a low-yield tactical atomic weapon.))
Ronald Reagan — who together with Margaret Thatcher — initiated the campaign to destroy what remained of social benefits in the 20th century state– became a sponsor of this solution. No later than the ascendancy of Reagan as the first surrogate for the Bush dynasty, did the concerted effort begin which has culminated in the viral solution to the population problem. The destruction of the public sector and its capacity — in the US always very limited — to mediate the real needs of the population was a prerequisite for imposing loyalty and dependency upon private business corporations. Defunding health, education and housing long preceded today’s demand to defund the police. Defunding the police would potentially make them even less accountable by returning them to the private sector from which they originated. That is not an argument against abolition but a warning of the conflicting interests causing the waves throughout the West. When the ruling class decides to abolish an institution that serves it, then that is most certainly not motivated by desire for its own demise. Rather it usually means a nascent replacement is in the nest, waiting to be hatched.
One indication for the kind of institution has been the obsessive work in the field of gene manipulation over the past three decades. One profit stream already envisioned — which would complement the disabling and closure of most large hospital systems — is the individual medicine based on patented genetic therapies. No generic health care will be offered but only medical treatment tuned for people who have registered genetic properties to match with appropriate individual (patented and exceedingly specific) measures that cannot be easily reproduced and certainly are not generic — suitable for mass production at lower costs. Another profit stream is the vaccine-based treatment of regularly updated viruses. This is simply the “Medical Microsoft model”. Applied, however, on a large scale like that being pushed through the WHO, this profit stream is analogous to the GMO model used to consolidate global agriculture (to the extent not already owned by the biggest agro-cartels). The GMO model is the successor to the Monsanto product pair of hybrid seed with Roundup herbicide. ((Roundup is a glyphosate herbicide launched by Monsanto in 1974. Bayer acquired Monsanto in 2018.))
The investments of Gates in Monsanto were also philosophical. For those who are unfamiliar with this: Roundup basically killed every plant in a field except the hybrid seed, which was immune to it. The CIA applied the same principle in Korea and Vietnam — kill everyone who has not been put in a strategic hamlet, those who are alive behind barbed wire will survive as non-communists (or anti-communists). Vaccines are essentially weapons. Bill Gates likes to call them “therapeutics”; it is a nice euphemism — sounds friendly, helpful, courteous, kind — and all the rest of the Boy Scout oath. ((BBC Breakfast Interview cited in “The First Circle”, Dissident Voice, 24 April 2020.)) The “therapeutics” for the masses will include identifiers. It is a kind of electro-chemical identity policy. Yes, identity policy derived from identity politics — the agenda of the ruling class which is now backing covertly and philanthropically (with money washed away from taxation with the detergent of “charity”) the purging of the culture from a range of unacceptable identities, especially those with historical significance. ((Paul Street, “What would the Black Panthers think of Black Lives Matter?”)) The ultimate euphemism is the language that can be used free of any traces of what it dare not name.