BUSH CONCEALING IMPERIALIST GOALS
BEHIND DEMOCRATIC RHETORIC

By Michael James

[This article was published in: The People, May-June 2005.]


Webster’s defines euphemism as the “substitution of an inoffensive term for one considered offensive.” Euphemistic language is designed to conceal truth and to soften the impact of a statement. It is a subtle and somewhat sophisticated communications tool, allowing the speaker or writer to say something without really saying it, to make the point without provoking or exciting the target audience.

There are, for example, two key euphemisms that cloak and conceal the reality of bourgeois rule in America. These two euphemisms are mere words, small words at that, but they work marvelously to mask, to mystify, to mislead. In other words, our corporate ruling class maintains power with military and police might but also with words. Consider the way that the working class is duped, swindled and led into false consciousness by the following two euphemisms.

The first euphemism, which helps to prolong capitalism and mentally enslave the working class, is served up daily in the corporate media, but a recent editorial in U.S. News & World Report serves as a specific example.

Editorialist Michael Barone credits George W. Bush with “a breathtakingly ambitious goal: to bring democracy to the entire world.” This is euphemism number one: democracy.

Sometimes corporate spokespersons such as Bush or Barone use related euphemisms such as freedom or liberty. But what they really mean is capitalism.

Now let us take Michael Barone’s sentence and revise it so that he accurately credits Bush with “a breathtakingly ambitious goal: to bring capitalism to the entire world.” Now it rings true.

The point is that capitalism has little to do with democracy or freedom or liberty. Genuine democracy with a just and humane allocation of natural and social wealth, would pose a grave threat to capitalist-class accumulation of profit.

What Bush and other corporate gangsters really want to impose upon the world is capitalism’s brutal exploitation of labor, degradation of the natural environment and class conflict. No worker in his or her right mind would embrace that agenda. So Bush and Barone and other bourgeois spokespersons dress up ruling-class politics with pretty words guaranteed to dupe the working class. After all, who can oppose democracy or liberty or freedom?

Barone continues his euphemistic gushing: “Bush means to spread liberty around the world. And by force of arms when necessary.” Again, a slight and simple revision of his statement gives it honesty and integrity: “Bush means to spread capitalism around the world. And by force of arms when necessary.”

Note that Barone does not question or criticize, much less condemn, this “force of arms.” He serves capitalism well by endorsing U.S. aggression abroad. Indeed, any nation that opposes this spread of “democracy,” meaning the spread of U.S. business interests and the ability of the corporate ruling class to globalize, appropriate and exploit, will pay a severe price. Marx analyzed it beautifully:

“The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization, into their midst, i.e. to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.” (Communist Manifesto).

In other words, capitalism brings imperialism, and from which it takes no stretch of the imagination to recognize that imperialism brings war. American history, with numerous wars and acts of aggression against other nations, is nothing less than a bloody confirmation of this Marxian insight.

War is romanticized and glorified in our capitalist society to sell it to the working class. Beneath the romance and glory, however we see that war is a horrible but inevitable tool or strategy in service of ruling-class profit. This brings us to the second example of euphemisms adopted by our bourgeois masters and propagated by their editorial sycophants to ensure that workers serve as cheerleaders for corporate crimes.

Professor of English and euphemisms expert Dr. William Lutz has called this one the “doublespeak coup of the century.” He is referring to the fact that, for over 150 years, the United States had a Department of War: Then, in 1947, the Department of War became euphemistically renamed the Department of Defense.

Don’t be fooled by mystifying, manipulative language. Our ruling class is devoted to its own enrichment. It unleashes bombs and troops or economic sanctions upon any nation that opposes the corporate will. Democracy is not what capitalism is bringing to the world. Capitalism is imposing itself on the world-not simply by choice, but as a consequence of its own inner contradictions and compulsions.

Capitalism cares nothing for democracy in the abstract, and is concerned with democratic forms in politics only because they are the least destructive method of refereeing cockfights in the cockpit of capitalist competition.

Bush, Barone and others like them are devoted to exploitative, violent and criminal capitalism. Their words would enslave the minds of the proletariat.

The words of Marx and The People liberate us. We must build socialism.