Wordnapping: The Totalitarian Left's Subversion of Language

Kidnapping: The crime of unlawfully seizing and carrying away a person by force or Fraud, or seizing and detaining a person against his or her will with an intent to carry that person away at a later time.

                                                          http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/kidnapping

Criminality is the modus operandi of the Left.  Stalin in his early Bolshevik days robbed banks to help finance the Leninist power grap.  Later when in full-satrapy the Great Oarsman stepped up his game to mass-murder (by the tens of millions), ethnic cleansing and war crimes.  The resume of any A-list Marx-inspired chieftain you care to name – Lenin, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot – will be a document of extensive criminality.  

American Bolshevik, Bill Ayers in the early 1970s busied himself with bombing public buildings. His spouse, Bernardine Dohrn, was a capo in the Weather Underground, a Marxist, terrorist cell that bombed police stations and advocated killing “pigs”, aka policemen. She remained on the FBI’s most wanted list for three years.  In that same era the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion, aka, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, in Germany and the Red Brigade (Brigate Rosse) in Italy bombed, kidnapped and murdered their way across central and southern Europe. 

Bill Ayers, as noted in Wikopedia, now passes himself off as “an American elementary education theorist” which suggests that the meanings of the words “education” and “theorist” have been mutilated beyond recognition. Unlike some other infamous American criminals like John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson and Bonnie and Clyde, the Pentagon bomber managed to coast into a comfortable retirement as a “professor” from the University of Illinois at Chicago, College of Education. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Ayers). Bernardine Dohrn from 1991 to 2013 was a Clinical Associate Professor of Law at the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University School of Law.  (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardine_Dohrn).  So much for the old saw, “crime doesn’t pay” – tenured sinecures, hobnobbing with future U.S. Presidents, and basking in the glow of ex-radical celebrity-hood are the perks for leftwing terrorist seniors.

And so with at least a hundred years of criminality embedded in the molecular structure of left-wing politicking and governance, the  pathetic grand finale of the 2016 Democrat primary for the White House should not have been a surprise.  It turned out to be a rigged contest between a simple-minded Marxist crackpot like Bernie Sanders, who captured the affection and votes of millions of (particularly young) Americans, and a corrupt, colorless harridan who promised to turn the U.S. into a Peronist-style dictatorship where the rule of law gives way to the 3-Cs of Clintonism, corruption, collusion and coercion.  Her campaign, in the crudest, reductionist terms, was a constantly expanding quest for “clients” who in exchange for their votes get more of the government favors and loot she will dole out.  She referred to the bribes she offers as “investments.”

The descent of American politics into an abyss inhabited by the likes of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Al Sharpton and Black Lives Matter thugs is made possible in part by the corruption of language.  The left resorts to what I call, “wordnapping”, seizing and detaining a word and distorting its meaning to serve as a propaganda tool.  It is now possible to compile a dictionary of words that the left has stripped of their clear, original meanings and are now used exclusively to smear opposition and eliminate dissent.  Below, a few of the hostages they have taken.

Racism: Racism was once simple, clear and straight forward. A racist was anyone who believed that members of his race were superior to those of a different race.  The left, however, in a consummation of Orwellian-style word corruption, has now turned the meaning upside down: “racism” for the left is the recalcitrance of white, European-descendant peoples to acknowledge their unique moral inferiority, i.e. their continuing responsibility for the oppression and exploitation of “people of color” and their refusal to atone for “white privilege”, the vehicle and cause of the continuing pathologies that plague the black community.  To be racist today is to be a white person who is reluctant to engage in the ethno-masochism that is de rigueur in the universities and popular culture.  From “Yes, All White People are Racists and Let’s Do Something about It”, here is the typical braying from one of the many race baiters, a shakedown laced with the usual strains of condescension, calumny and abuse.

What if Americans changed the way they talk about race? What if white people tried to confront their own shortcomings, and accepted that the default presumption should probably be "implicitly racist"? Maybe then, whites would start to work harder, collectively and individually, to show their alliance with (and acceptance of) people of color — through their words, their actions, and their deeds. After all, wouldn't it be better to live in a world where white people made a constant, concerted effort to overcome implicit racism? Particularly when it lurks within themselves.  http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/yes-all-white-people-are-racists-now-lets-do-something-about-it

It should be fairly obvious from this that what we used to understand as “racism” is now a main staple of black “activism” and its extortionist methods.  (See: http://fosterspeak.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-left-masters-of-extortio.html) 

“Racism” is the left’s greatest agit-prop triumph of our time, one that even a master of “the big lie” like Joseph Goebbels would be proud to own.  It is increasingly difficult to remember what a “racist” used to be before the invention of “micro-aggressions”, the professionalization of race hustling and the reign of the “diversity” inquisitors. Racism the left wants us to believe has burrowed into every crevice of American society. Which means that its pervasiveness and insidiousness must be comprehended through the mediation of self-appointed experts who unfold its complex taxonomy and illustrate its constantly expanding mutations: “structural racism”, “systemic racism”, “institutional racism”, “individual racism”, “environmental racism”, “economic racism” “covert racism”, “subtle racism”, etc., ad infinitum.  Zeba Blay in a Huffington Post article jumps off the deep end with 11 kinds of racism including such gems as “free speech racists”, “hipster racists” and “voyeuristic racists”, an indication that the word no longer possesses any recognizable boundaries and that those who make a living charging others with it should not be taken seriously, or taken very seriously as twenty-first century versions of Der Stürmer publisher, Julius Streicher, the raging Nazi anti-Semite hanged by the Allies after WWII.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/11-types-of-racists-who-need-to-stop_us_563786e0e4b0c66bae5d088a

Recently President Obama, presumably after perusing the pages of abstruse genetics journals, announced that “racism is a part of our DNA.”  By “our DNA” I assume he means the DNA of the descendants of white slave owners.  Not clear is whether those “white folks”, as he likes to refer to that inferior race, whose ancestors were not slave owners are likewise contaminated by this moral blight, and, by having a white mother, whether his DNA is implicated.  Perhaps further research in genetics will clarify this. 

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/US-not-cured-of-racism-its-a-part-of-our-DNA-Barack-Obama-says-citing-legacy-of-slavery/articleshow/47773999.cms 

Twenty-first century “racism” emulates twentieth-century “fascism” – it has become a word empty of specific meaning, used to condemn a critic as, well … a very bad person.  In its routine applications, “racism” is the favorite big club of today’s social justice warriors, to beat up on whatever opposition they encounter in their efforts to limit free speech, rationalize and defend minority criminality and destroy traditional American institutions.  “Racism” is a broad brush assault, perhaps unique in its smearing capacity in that, unlike with other kinds of allegations of moral or legal culpability, once charged, there is no way to demonstrate that you are not a racist. It is possible to prove that you are not a liar, a fool, a rapist, a robber, and a plagiarist; you can never effectively dispute the claim that you are a racist.  No protest or evidence counts. Name one person who has ever been successful in doing it?  Being a racist now is sort of like it was to have “cooties” back when you were in fifth grade.  There was no remedy for the mysterious virus of cooties and you were deemed infected because someone decided that they didn’t like you.   

Hate: “Hatred” is another favored smear of leftwing propagandists, one they employ to remain immune from criticism. “Hatred” for them is the not the usual word one uses to describe that visceral often irrational emotion of loathing one may feel toward someone or some group.  “Hatred” for the left means disapproval. Nothing less than affirmation and approval for their programs and policies for  the 21^st century utopianists can only mean hatred.  If you object to gay marriage, you hate gays.  If you oppose affirmative action, you hate black people. If you favor lower taxes, you hate the government.  If you support the deportation of illegals, you hate Mexicans.  Leftist opponents are not reasonable or considerate, not individuals who have a different, arguable view or perspective about a controversial issue.  They are morally defective, irrational, purple-faced “haters”.  Republicans are now routinely pilloried as “haters” in contrast to Democrats who are all about compassion.

The persistent hate smear in contemporary leftist politics, however, should be understood as a stunning display of psychological projection.  When it comes to frothing-at-the-mouth emissions of visceral loathing and detestation for those of different political persuasion no one can match an aggrieved leftist. Here is New Republic writer, Jonathon Chait, completely unhinged, when having to think about George W. Bush.

“I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it. I think his policies rank him among the worst presidents in U.S. history. And, while I'm tempted to leave it at that, the truth is that I hate him for less substantive reasons, too….  And, while most people who meet Bush claim to like him, I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more…. There seem to be quite a few of us Bush haters. I have friends who have a viscerally hostile reaction to the sound of his voice, or describe his existence as a constant oppressive force in their daily psyche.” https://newrepublic.com/article/67136/mad-about-you

During the Presidency of George W. Bush, writers from the “party of compassion” were offering their readership these models of dispassionate political discourse:

The I Hate George W. Bush Reader: Why Dubya Is Wrong About Absolutely Everything (The "I Hate" Series, 2004, Clint Willis, editor);

The I Hate Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice... Reader: Behind the Bush Cabal's War on America (The “I Hate Series, 2004, Clint Willis, editor); 
The I Hate Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage... Reader: The Hideous Truth About America's Ugliest Conservatives (The "I Hate" Series, 2004, Clint Willis, editor)

Hatred for the entire field of Republican, conservative scumbags in 2004 was so popular with Democrat readers, that a publisher series was dedicated to poring out scorn and contempt.  But as we are constantly reminded, the Republicans are the party of hatred – as Chait or one of his colleagues might say, following the lead of Groucho Marx:  "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?"
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/g/grouchomar128465.html

Intolerance: to continue with the practice of psychological projection, leftists love to talk about how intolerant their critics and opponents are on the right.  Once again, a word has been wrenched from it moorings and turned into reflexively-used smear.  “Intolerance” in its corrupted usage mirrors “hatred”.  Anything less than affirmation and enthusiasm for the leftist-defined march of “progress” makes one into a knuckle-dragging bigot.  Recall Presidential candidate, Barack Obama’s condescending sneer in 2008 about those “white folks” who “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them….”  Of course!  The only reason why a white, rural voter would not vote for a black Marxist demagogue who mocks and demeans them is racial bigotry.  No other possibilities exist.

The problem is that the practice of toleration is a tricky business.  A genuinely tolerant person is someone who, even though he finds the beliefs, perspectives and life-style of another objectionable, treats that person in a way that conveys basic human respect and a live-and-let-live attitude.   No one has to be tolerant around people he esteems and approves of: it is only required for someone who confronts people who he in some way or aspect disapproves of, an accommodation of sorts, peaceful coexistence.  Of course, no one is or should be tolerant of everything and everyone, and finding those boundaries is what makes toleration such a tricky affair.  The irony that seems to complete escape the leftists is that they disapprove of conservatives and Republicans (see Jonathan Chait above) but cannot tolerate them.  President Obama and Hillary Clinton refer to them as their “enemies”.  http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/item/3439-obama-calls-his-critics-enemies   You do not tolerate your enemies, you eliminate or destroy them whenever you can.  Intolerance is the inevitable stance of leftist ideology because leftists, believing that they are uniquely virtuous and enlightened, view their competitors for power as corrupt and heartless, atavists submerged in bigotry and ignorance. 

In doing battle with our enemies, “the left” it is extremely important to know their “dictionary”, to recognize their subversion of language.  This will help us to resist the intimidation, refute the falsehoods and expose the hypocrisy.

Woodrow Wilson meets his Princeton Students

                                                                                                        

 

 

Students gather inside Nassau Hall during a sit-in, Thursday, Nov. 19, 2015, in Princeton, N.J. The protesters from a group called the Black Justice League, who staged a sit-in inside university President Christopher Eisgruber's office on Tuesday, demand the school remove the name of former school president and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson from programs and buildings over what they said was his racist legacy.

Poor Woodrow Wilson. His reputation is being savaged by young political radicals at the very institution (Princeton University) where he reigned as President before becoming New Jersey Governor and then the 28th President of the United States. Wilson was an early 20^th century avatar of the “progressivism” that Barack, Hillary and their ilk claim make them our inevitable saviors. 

Wilson’s current detractors practice a Stalinist historiography of sorts that seeks to “erase” anyone or anything from history they perceive to be ideologically contaminated.  Just as Stalin had Leon Trotsky expunged from Soviet history for his deviationism, Wilson is on his way to being a non-person for believing what many if not most American politicians of his era similarly believed, that black Americans were inferior to white Americans. The celebrated American President has become one more piñata for the contemporary Left to whack away at, but only recently.  After all, he was a Democrat and, as mentioned, a “progressive” and an intellectual, a trifecta of goodness for today’s cultural Marxists whose capacity for forgiveness is vast for anyone who expounds liberal-left pieties and is not tainted by any sort of conservative affiliation or an aversion to the dismantling of the traditional social institutions, like marriage. 

But the bar has been raised and Wilson has recently been “outed” by the angry Maoists at Princeton University as: white, Christian and a segregationist. This, of course, is only breaking news to the students who make it to the Ivies these days in a combined state of historical hibernation and high dudgeon.  Awakened, they find it unbearable to imagine that the world outside the cocoon that protects their PC existence might harbor unpleasant realities that they have to grapple with.  The students have called for the removal of Woodrow Wilson’s name from the School of Public and International Affairs.

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/nov/23/princeton-woodrow-wilson-racism-students-remove-name

All of this is richly ironic since Wilson himself was a model for today’s self-righteous, censorious pontificators of the Left who perceive themselves as uniquely virtuous and are unable to tolerate anyone who does not swoon or at least capitulate when they dispense their moral certainties followed by the non-negotiable demands.

Winston Churchill nicely captured the American President’s uniquely grandiose sense of intellectual and moral superiority when he encountered him Paris in 1919.  Wilson arrived at the Peace Conference expecting to preside over it like a modern day Solomon and then observe the world harmony that would follow upon the recognition of his unparalleled wisdom of his Fourteen Points and their practical implementation.

“The French plan, however, did not at all commend itself to Mr. Wilson. It thrust on one side all the pictures of the peace conference which his ambition and imagination had painted. He did not wish to come to speedy terms with the European Allies; he did not wish to meet their leading men around a table; he saw himself for a prolonged period at the summit of the world, chastening the Allies, chastising the Germans and generally giving laws to mankind.” (Churchill, Winston S. (2013-09-23). The World Crisis, Vol. 4 (Winston Churchill's World Crisis Collection) (Kindle Locations 1587-1590). Rosetta Books. Kindle Edition.)

The complicated and monumental scope of Wilson’s life and career has collided with the crude reductionism of today’s identity politics and the clamoring campus Neanderthals who practice this ascendant tribalism.  So, for whatever else he was and did, Wilson is now rendered that singular, pathetic entity, the worst sort one can imagine these days … are your prepared? – a racist, which means nullification and erasure of his name from public places.

The Left now seems to be increasingly devoted to symbols, particularly to their circumscription. The scope of what they deem “offensive” constantly expands in direct correlation to the ever enlarging sense of their moral perfection and quivering, delicate sensitivity. With this conviction of moral perfection comes a furious compulsion to make the world they look out upon completely and consistently reflect their own unalloyed goodness and purity. And when it does not, they demand that it must. Any opposition or reluctance must be immoral or criminal. Symbols like the Confederate flag and statutes of Confederate generals spark their fury. Statues, street names, commemorative flags, even menus are symbols that give off coded messages that tell the wrong story. And for the Left, only one story is to be told.  Competition would be “hurtful” and thus not allowed.

The PC lexicon of the Left also offers a redefined meaning of “safety” consistent with the solipsism that seems to have enveloped the entire enterprise.  Solipsism is the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist.  Safety now means that one must be completely insulated from ideas, arguments, memories that might be troubling, which means that, above all, self-regard must be inflated, feelings protected, the “self” in effect must remain undisturbed by the intrusion of hurtful reality, completely swathed in its pristine ideological purity.   

This solipsistic bent of the leftwing ideologue is connected with self-esteem and the need to appear and feel virtuous.  Politics becomes fundamentally personal and self-referential.   Any given political act – how I vote, what protest I attend, what politician I execrate or deify – is determined by how virtuous it will make me feel.  The self is both the starting point and the final destination. This is why so much of leftwing politics is so given to theater and performance that features the participants making dramatic, emotional expression of their convictions.  Calling a conservative leader or candidate “Hitler” is a hyper-dramatic gesture that tells everyone how strongly I feel about what an awful person he is, how exquisite is my moral outrage, so why not call him the worst name I can think of, even it is silly? Obama’s 2008 campaign chant of his followers, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” is a masterpiece solipsistic mantra.  Nothing else exists outside of the “we” who waits and the very same “we” who is to arrive and take charge.  Politics is nothing less than the celebration of our own perfection.

Wilson’s recent take down is just another example of how the Marxist vision of history as the singular story of oppressors and those they oppress continues to operate and how it shapes the moral universe of today’s progressives and predictably guides their tactics.  Their world is continuously populated with new victims, which of course have histories of victimhood, each with a different crop of oppressors, some of whom are still in come circles held in high regard.  Political activism for them is the business of delegitimizing, as the French Jacobins in their demolition of the Ancien régime would cry:  écrasez l'infâme (crush the infamous thing). The past and all the evil it symbolizes must be erased.  High regard for the wrong people such as Woodrow Wilson is not legitimate and must not be tolerated.  

Unfortunately, as we look back over the last 100 years or so, the “delegitimizers” (“revolutionaries” as they called themselves – Bernie Sanders now claims to be one) who seek power so as to make the world much better than the one they execrate inevitably give way to the nihilists who believe in nothing but holding on to their own power.  In none of the utopias built by the great delegitimizers – Lenin, Mao, Fidel, Chavez – did anything emerge other than a ruling class made up of sociopaths more corrupt and venal that the original “oppressor” class they dispossessed.  

The Democrats, who were recently determined to make a woman under criminal investigation President, apparently wanted to move directly from idealism to stagnation and corruption, Leonid Brezhnev style.  It work out so well in Argentina with Kristina Kirchner, why not here. It is the robotic, seemingly embalmed while still alive Brezhnev who Hillary most closely resembled politically, a career ideological hack, a nihilist who believed in nothing other than his entitlement to power and the enjoyment of all of its special perks.  
     

History for the Left remains the story of oppression. It is increasingly a barren region with little to celebrate and many to execrate. So many to bring down, so little time.