( - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
In Part 1, "The Truth-Free Zone, Part 1: Truth And Lies Switch Places", I laid out a set of three closely-connected ideas, in response to an earlier post by Matt . These were:
- Truth and lies have switched places: Lies continually repeated function like the truth, while truths that go unuttered function as if they were lies. A prime example of this in the 2000 election was the conventional wisdom that Gore was a serial liar, while Bush was a man of great integrity-a straight-talker.
- Taken to the extreme, things that cannot possibly be so have taken the place of fundamental truths. A prime example of this is the so-called "war on terror"-something that makes absolutely no sense, if you stop and think about it.
- Verbal formulations are used that are inherently non-sensical and cannot be used rationally-at least in the existing total environment. "Supporting the troops" is a prime example of this.
Part 1 explored the first idea. Now it's time to examine the second one:
(2) Taken to the extreme, things that cannot possibly be so have taken the place of fundamental truths.
The most obvious, and dominant example of this is the so-called "war on terror," which started off as the "war on terrorism"-a very different concept. Terror is a state of mind. Terrorism is a strategy, though the adjective, terrorist-as in "terrorist attack"-more frequently refers to tactics that are part of a terrorist strategy. Neither is the sort of thing that one can fight a war against. Wars on abstract nouns generally do not turn out well, for the simple reason that abstract nouns can never surrender. The fact that the "war on terrorism" imperceptibly morphed into the "war on terror" is indicative of how vacuous and non-sensical the entire enterprise is.
We are way past Orwell's 1984 here. At least Oceana and Eurasia were the sorts of things that could have always been at war with one another. But neither terror nor terrorism are this sort of thing. Indeed, it's not simply false to say "we are fighting a war on terror" (or "terrorism"). It is worse than false. It is meaningless.
The great 20th Century physicist Wolfgang Pauli coined an expression that is applicable here. Having looked at a paper by a young physicist, he remarked that it "wasn't even wrong," meaning that it didn't even get the problem right, much less the solution. And such is the case with the "war on terror/terrorism," as well-although actions taken in its name, such as the Iraq War, can be much worse than meaningless, by greatly worsening the realworld situtation that "war on terror" so meaninglessly mis-describes.
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