Language in the North American Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
Language in the North American Union of Soviet Socialist Republics [align=left] Brent Jessop
Knowledge Driven Revolution.com
Tuesday April 3, 2007 [/align]
The Security and Prosperity Partnership. What a wonderful name. How could you oppose something as benign and noble as that? Do you not want security? Are you against prosperity? What is wrong with you?
I recently wrote a series of articles on the North American Union ID card (Database, Data and Old Idea; New Sales Pitch) and could not help but notice the deceptive and changing language used to promote the idea. Back in 1998, they appeared as ??Computerized Smart Cards?. Are those opposed to that not instinctively stupid? They have morphed into new driver??s licenses with a variety of names like ??Passport Lite? or ??High-Tech Driver??s Licences? or "Laser Visas".
These new cards are nothing like the names would suggest. They are filled with every conceivable piece of information about you that you could imagine. Your fingerprints, retinal scans, DNA, health records, driving history, a picture of your house, internet habits, etc. All the new cards, regardless of their name, contain an RFID tracking chip and are connected to a centralized database for good measure. They are meant to track, trace and catalogue everything you do from birth to death.
Should we keep calling these cards by their government issued names? Or should we call them what they are? At least call them a ??National ID Card? or ??North American Union ID Card?. Or maybe something more descriptive like the ??Track and Trace Card? or ??Human Resource Card" or ??Human Cattle Card? or something with some historical flair like ??Your Papers Please Card?. Would it have made any difference if the Soviets had said ??Your Smart Papers Please?? Maybe something more forward thinking like ??Rations Card? or ??Do You Qualify For a Job Card? or ??Have You Paid Your Taxes Card?.
Of course, language is used to deceive and misrepresent in many other areas as well. ??Peace Keeping? is one of my favourite ways of saying war and occupation. If you don??t believe ??Peace Keeping? means war, here is a nice article by the Canadian Press doing a really bad job of telling you differently. They even have ??War Games,? I mean ??Peace Keeping Games? or ??Role-Playing Exercises?. But doesn??t ??Peace Keeping? sound much nicer then ??Occupation? or ??Invasion? or ??Regime Change??
Sadly, language only seems to get any widespread attention during comedy shows. Jon Stewart recently had a show about Bush's ??reasonable proposal.? The proposal was about whether or not Karl Rove and others would be testifying under oath. Bush??s use of the word ??reasonable? is very telling, especially at the end when he almost forgot to say it. It is a good example of how politicians and other manipulators choose their words very carefully and repeat them until it becomes someone else's reality.
In a recent article, Charlotte Iserbyt proposed that the alternative media stop calling the Police-State / Dictatorial behaviour of politicians like Bush, Fascism. I am personally guilty of pointing some of these parallels out. She proposes using the term Communism because of the ??leftist? association people have with the word, as oppose to Fascism which is viewed as being on the far right of the false political spectrum. The differences between applied Communism and Fascism are minimal, if not trivial, but the use of the word Communism is much more powerful when applied to supposedly ??right-wing conservatives? like Bush.
When the Europeans were trying to name what eventually became the ??European Union,? there was outrage against the idea of naming it the ??United States of Europe? because the ??American? connotation it had. Nobody seemed to look east to the former ??Soviet Union? for some perspective on what they were getting into.
The alternative media is far behind in its use of language and too readily adopts the use of terminology used by the ??politicians? or ??professional liars? or ??smiling puppets? or whatever you would like to call them. Are more people going to resist the ??Security and Prosperity Partnership? or ??Deep Integration? or ??North American Union? or ??North American Union of Soviet Socialist Republics?? Personally I think the NA-USSR has a nice ring to it, and makes a nice acronym too.
