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Witness the first casualty of war: language.
I copied this from a friend's post elsewhere. SHE, posted a link from NYT, I can not access NTY due to pay wall, SO I hope it is OK to post this as I have...
The Youngest Child Separated From His Family at the Border Was 4 Months Old
Baby Constantin spent five months of his first year in a foster home. His family got a painful look at America’s experiment with family separation as an immigration policy.
NY TIMES
Witness the first casualty of war: language. Propaganda is the first theatre of battle. "Border separation" is actually "regime kidnapping." But we don't notice, because child kidnapping falls under the new rubric of national security, border control, family separation, legal bureaucracy that keeps America safe. This is the story that government agencies and spokespeople are circulating. Children who die in regime custody are casualties of the regime, victims of the government's criminality. Except that it isn't criminal, because regimes decriminalise crime, which is when a government becomes a regime. Another subtlety of words that news organizations are loathe to expose, because it seems partisan.
Each stage of the erosion of language softens the next and the next, with a sugar coated poison pill as the result, manufactured by the propaganda machine of the regime, publicized and internalized by sheer force of repetition, until no one notices that babies are being stolen from their parents by the United States government, because we've been told it is necessary, for our own good, and therefore it must not be illegal, and it cannot be immoral. And the language we use for it isn't just part of the cover up. It is an integral well considered factor. It is intentional. This is why the Nazi's had a propaganda minister. It is fundamental to the face of the government in transition to a regime to establish trustworthiness on the basis of redefining words in order to justify formerly illegal actions, as a way of desensitizing the population. This is what has been visible for over two years, hidden in plain sight.
This is similar to things that are ongoing, as an example, in commonly overlooked racist and misogynistic terminology and imagery. Miley Cyrus is assaulted in a crowd. The news headline reads "...kissed by a fan." Two different articles about a black man and a white man who are wrongfully incarcerated: The news piece about the white man will show him smiling in a family photo, while the news piece about the black man will show his mug shot. Mathematicians from NASA are honoured with a street name.
The news photo is from the movie about them, from a scene in which they are at home in a kitchen, laughing and talking. The street name is not their names. It is the movie/book name. And the mathematicians are some of the brightest and most important women in the history of the US, and in the world of science. And they also happen to be amazing incredible black women not honored by NASA before the book became an award winning movie that sparked an outcry about their contributions never having been publicly acknowledged or lauded. Concentration camps in some parts of Germany under Hitler were intentionally given complicated banal names to disguise them. A widely unknown fact is that these murder factories where prisoners died producing the Nazi weapons of war, were given the names of women, such as, Dora, to further conceal any nefarious purposes of the factories. Language, like children, is an easy first victim of war. Few take notice, because the consequences are happening to the those who can't defend themselves. But we can. And we must.
Each stage of the erosion of language softens the next and the next, with a sugar coated poison pill as the result, manufactured by the propaganda machine of the regime, publicized and internalized by sheer force of repetition, until no one notices that babies are being stolen from their parents by the United States government, because we've been told it is necessary, for our own good, and therefore it must not be illegal, and it cannot be immoral. And the language we use for it isn't just part of the cover up. It is an integral well considered factor. It is intentional. This is why the Nazi's had a propaganda minister. It is fundamental to the face of the government in transition to a regime to establish trustworthiness on the basis of redefining words in order to justify formerly illegal actions, as a way of desensitizing the population. This is what has been visible for over two years, hidden in plain sight.
This is similar to things that are ongoing, as an example, in commonly overlooked racist and misogynistic terminology and imagery. Miley Cyrus is assaulted in a crowd. The news headline reads "...kissed by a fan." Two different articles about a black man and a white man who are wrongfully incarcerated: The news piece about the white man will show him smiling in a family photo, while the news piece about the black man will show his mug shot. Mathematicians from NASA are honoured with a street name.
The news photo is from the movie about them, from a scene in which they are at home in a kitchen, laughing and talking. The street name is not their names. It is the movie/book name. And the mathematicians are some of the brightest and most important women in the history of the US, and in the world of science. And they also happen to be amazing incredible black women not honored by NASA before the book became an award winning movie that sparked an outcry about their contributions never having been publicly acknowledged or lauded. Concentration camps in some parts of Germany under Hitler were intentionally given complicated banal names to disguise them. A widely unknown fact is that these murder factories where prisoners died producing the Nazi weapons of war, were given the names of women, such as, Dora, to further conceal any nefarious purposes of the factories. Language, like children, is an easy first victim of war. Few take notice, because the consequences are happening to the those who can't defend themselves. But we can. And we must.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/16/us/baby-constantine-romania-migrants.html?fbclid=IwAR0N8SAP9WDSdRhVZC1ewsSHyLA2UzqsF1A85d9FLk1VYPjluQJ4xMl5o90
