Anyone today who attempts to understand what
is happening in the West (America, Europe) – the collapse into a cloaca that is
the solipsistic Face Book pop culture, the avalanche of nihilism, the ciphers
and the soft-totalitarian apparats, now seemingly unimpeded, closing their
long, velvet-covered fingers around our necks – might wonder how a resurrected
George Orwell would reflect on the rampant corruption that has greased the
slide into this sewer.
In our age there is no such thing as
‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself
is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
Well,
yes. This is, indeed, “our age,” politicized right down
to the dictated pronoun assignation of transgendered whatever they fantasize
they are and their restroom privileges, and you find yourself chocking on the
daily output of the “mass of lies” from the sneering, self-infatuated pygmies
resting on their glorified perches in the government, journalism, the entertainment
industry, the NGOs and tenured professorships. Not to forget the social justice
warrior CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg or the vapid, preening Hollywood celebrities who
never tire of massaging their bloated egos and publicly wallowing in their invincible
ignorance.
The aftermath of the recent
leftist-inspired mob violence in Charlottesville with the Pravda-like organs of the mass media in high dudgeon has given us a
clear and terrifying vision of the cultural Marxist monopolized control and
manipulation of language that is used to shape the public perception of social
conflict.
To get a better sense of what the left is
all about with the relentless labeling of any and all opposition as fascist,
racist, proponents of hatred, etc., and in the spirit of Orwell to try to
understand how language in the service of ideology has become so corrupted, it
might be helpful to consider the notion of “performative utterances” (hereafter,
performatives) as developed by J. L. Austin, a British language philosopher
from the last century.
From: How to Do
Things with Words,
ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisá. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1962.
[Defining the
Performative]
Utterances can be
found… such that:
· They do not
‘describe’ or ‘report’ or constate anything at all, are not ‘true or false,’ and
· The uttering
of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action, which again would
not normally be described as, or as ‘just,’ saying something.
Performatives,
as Austin explains, are not, logically speaking, propositions, that is,
assertions that can be shown to be true or false. They do not attempt to
describe the world or to affirm or deny some aspect of reality. They are
“utterances,” actions that change the social world. Austin gives a number of
examples, but let me offer a couple to demonstrate the point.
A
minister or priest performs a marriage ceremony and at the conclusion utters, “I pronounce you man and wife.” A judge at
the conclusion of a trial says to the defendant, “I sentence you to ten years at hard labor.” Neither the minister
nor the judge with these sentences describe the world; their utterances are socially
sanctioned actions that change it. Now married, the couple has a different social
status. The man and woman are viewed and treated differently, view themselves
differently and have different roles, expectations and obligations than they
had before the performative was made. Likewise, the accused now becomes a
convicted criminal who is viewed and treated differently after the judge’s
performative.
How
then does this notion of performatives apply to the current efforts of the
cultural Marxists to control and manipulate public perceptions of politics and
morals? The left engages in a profound dissimulation that disguises what are
actually performatives as demonstrable true propositions or assertions about
reality. While they pretend to be describing someone or something, what they
are really about is acting in a way that demoralizes
and ultimately de-legitimates the
status of those who may compete with them for power or resist their incursions
into their lives. As employed by the left, these performatives do not inform; they
deform people who refuse to conform. They are weapons the left uses to destroy
those whom they always perceive as morally inferior beings, their enemies.
Think of Hillary Clinton’s horrific “basket of deplorables” slur during the
last Presidential campaign.
How,
specifically, do these weaponized performatives work for the left? Let’s begin
with oldest, the most reliable and the most predictable: “You are a fascist.” The speaker in making what appears grammatically
to be an assertion depicting some feature of reality is really acting out in a
well-established social ritual that seeks to alter social reality in two
mutually reinforcing ways. First, it elevates the speaker’s social status as a
morally superior and courageous person who recognizes evil and stands far above
and against it. The speaker becomes immaculate. Second, the moral polarity
comes into play and the “authority” of the accuser is established. Very good
people must be opposed by very bad people, and what catch-all word seems to
work best to capture all those malignancies associated with the villains who
occupy the imaginations of the folks who write the opinion columns in the New York Times and who blabber on CNN
and MSNBC– bigotry, intolerance, sexism, racism, etc.? “Fascist” works very
nicely. There is, of course, no room for Fascists anywhere in “our democracy,”
as they like to say (“our democracy” being their euphemism for “our
invitation-only clubhouse”). Such an individual is morally contaminated, “irredeemable,”
“not part of America” in Hillary Clinton’s parlance, someone beyond the pale,
whose ideas and beliefs must be extinguished.
“Fascist”
is one of the most important words in the lexicon of the left, wrenched from
its historical, political moorings, so vague and protean that it is
descriptively useless. Bearing only vague, emotional associations, it has been
stripped of its referents, and thus serves as an all-purpose,
expandable-contractible label for prospective targets who may pose as obstacles
or irritants.
Once
upon a time there were real flesh and
blood fascists, people who were recognized as such because they actually called
themselves “fascists,” dressed up in black shirts, took power for a time and
talked about how great fascism was as compared to the decadent bourgeoisie. As
we know, things turned out badly for them, and Benito Mussolini, the man who
brought fascism to the world ended up as a battered corpse hanging upside down
from a steel girder above a gas station in Milan next to his mistress, Claretta
Petacci in 1945.
That
marked the grisly end of fascism as embraced and practiced by people whom
everyone, including themselves, recognized as fascists; as an ideology and a
movement that attracted a mass following it was kaput, an attraction that has
lingered on for a few out on the fringe.
It
was Joseph Stalin who recognized the mobilizing power of the word, “fascist”
and fashioned an abstract, malleable “fascist,” introducing a being, unlike
Mussolini, immortal and ubiquitous (Leon Trotsky was “baptized” by Stalin as
one). Fascists who populate the Stalinist universe can only be contained by
their antipodes, thus, “anti-fascist,” a word which endows one thus designated
with a heroic, moral invincibility. The anarchists during the Spanish civil war
who raped and murdered nuns and burned down churches were anti-fascists and
thus remain vanquished heroes who fought a losing battle for “democracy.” The
antifas who attacked and beat up people recently at Charlottesville and other
rallies are lauded predictably by Nicholas Scylla Kristof
and Mitt Charybdis Romney as
opponents of bigotry and hatred. Stalin’s “fascist” was the gift to the left
that keeps on giving and every generation of leftists since his demise has
happily and eagerly attached it to whomever displeases them, most recently
Donald Trump and his supporters.
The
“You are a fascist” performative is the paradigm for the cultural Marxists’
engagement with all dissent and opposition. It moralizes the speaker, enveloping him with goodness and virtue. As
well it immunizes him from (moral) criticism and (legal) accountability and at
the same time demoralizes the accused
making him into an enemy who represents an existential threat to their
fictional “our democracy.” “Politics” for the left is shorthand for conniving
at the destruction of the opposition, politically, always, physically, if
possible.
“Racism”
works in tandem with “fascism.” “You are a racist” is a weaponized performative
camouflaged as a descriptive, yet another one of the expulsion rituals that
render the accused “untouchable” while confirming the impeccable moral credentials
of the speaker. Like “fascist,” “racist” has migrated from being a word that
once perhaps referred to real and distinguishable features of someone to a
slippery, nebulous abstraction that means whatever the speaker wants it to mean.
This is why racism which has risen to the heights of a raging moral plague has
of necessity been metastasizing into various strains such as, “covert racism,”
“legacy racism,” “economic racism,” “environmental racism,” “systemic racism,”
“institutional racism.” There is no relief, no escape from it; with this the left
is refereeing a game of whack-a-mole that never ends.
No
one today accused of racism can prove the accusation to be false. This means
that the accuser cannot be held accountable, and because of this, as long as
the threat of being accused of racism is widely and commonly resisted and
feared, the left will use it with increasing recklessness and indifference to
whatever damage it does. It has worked to perfection for them; whenever the
threat goes down, the white flag always goes up. So, it is a near certain
prediction that the racism that plagues the West will continue to mount toward
epidemic proportions.
What
Austin’s performative utterances may help us to understand is that for the left
politics in all of its manifestations is war with no Geneva Convention-style
restrains, with unconditional surrender as its end game. For them there is no
compromise, no loyal opposition, no notion of fair play or rules of a civil
society that limit what the players should do. We are the enemy. We forget it
at our peril.
