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SAN FRANCISCO, USA, Oct 06 (IPS) – It’s unhealthy sufficient that mainstream information shops routinely name the Pentagon funds a “protection” funds. However the truth that progressives in Congress and even many antiwar activists additionally do the identical is a sign of how deeply the mindsets of the nation’s warfare state are embedded within the political tradition of the USA.
The deceptive first title of the Protection Division doesn’t justify utilizing “protection” as an adjective for its funds. Quite the opposite, the ever-present use of phrases like “protection funds” and “protection spending” — just about all the time written with a lower-case “d” — reinforces the false notion that equates the USA’s humongous navy operations with protection.
In the actual world, the USA spends more cash on its navy than the following 10 nations all collectively. And most of those countries are navy allies. What about navy bases in international nations?
The U.S. at the moment has 750, whereas Russia has about two dozen and China has one. The writer of the landmark guide “Base Nation,” American College professor David Vine, simply co-wrote a report that factors out “the USA has a minimum of 3 times as many abroad bases as all different nations mixed.”
These U.S. bases overseas “value taxpayers an estimated $55 billion yearly.”
As this autumn started, Vine noted that President Biden is “perpetuating the USA’ countless wars” in nations together with “Iraq, Syria, Somalia and Yemen” whereas escalating “war-like tensions with China with a navy buildup with Australia and the UK.”
All that is being funded through a “protection” funds? Calling George Orwell.
As Orwell wrote in a 1946 essay, political language “is designed to make lies sound truthful and homicide respectable, and to present an look of solidity to pure wind.” In 2021, the recent air blowing at gale pressure by way of U.S. mass media is so steady that we’re apt to scarcely give it a second thought.
However the euphemisms would hardly imply something to these in faraway nations for whom terrifying and lethal drone attacks and different parts of U.S. air wars are about life and dying relatively than political language.
You may contemplate the Pentagon’s Aug. 29 killing of 10 Afghan civilians including seven children with a drone assault to be a case of “respectable” homicide, or negligent murder, or mere “collateral injury.”
Likewise, you could possibly take a look at numbers like 244,124 — a credible low-end estimate of the variety of civilians straight killed through the “struggle on terror” in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq — and contemplate them to be mere information factors or representing people whose lives are as treasured as yours.
However at any fee, from the vantage level of the USA, it’s farfetched to assert that the billions of {dollars} expended for ongoing warfare in a number of nations are in a funds that may be legitimately known as “protection.”
Till 1947, the official title of the U.S. authorities’s central navy company was the Warfare Division. After a two-year interim model (with the clunky title Nationwide Navy Institution), it was renamed the Division of Protection in 1949.
Because it occurred, that was the identical 12 months when Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” appeared, telling of an always-at-war totalitarian regime with doublespeak slogans that included “Warfare Is Peace.”
At present, the Division of Protection stays an appropriately capitalized correct noun. However the division’s official title doesn’t make it true. To name its massive and escalating budget a “protection” funds is nothing lower than internalized corruption of language that undermines our capacities to suppose clearly and speak straight.
Whereas such corroded language can’t be blamed for the existence of sloppy pondering and degraded discourse, it commonly facilitates sloppy pondering and degraded discourse.
Let’s blow away the linguistic fog. The Pentagon funds will not be a “protection” funds.
Norman Solomon is the nationwide director of RootsAction.org and the writer of many books together with Warfare Made Simple: How Presidents and Pundits Preserve Spinning Us to Dying. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic Nationwide Conventions. Solomon is the founder and govt director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.
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© Inter Press Service (2021) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service
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