One of the ways in which Bush and the media keep us duped is by the artful use of language, particularly euphemisms. I’ve railed in the past about the use of the term “contractors” in place of the more accurate “mercenaries”. If the correct word were used it would force us to confront the reality of what we’re doing in Iraq and what we’re doing to our Republic. But of course, that is the very reason why the correct word is not used. Our corporate media is not interested in confronting the truth. We might get upset and stop buying things.
Still every once in a while, the truth breaks through.
I can now happily link to Paul Krugman, who you now need not pay to read. (Downside: David Brooks is now harder to avoid). Today Krugman shows that it is not so hard, after all, to use the precise English term to describe hired soldiers:
Sometimes it seems that the only way to make sense of the Bush administration is to imagine that it’s a vast experiment concocted by mad political scientists who want to see what happens if a nation systematically ignores everything we’ve learned over the past few centuries about how to make a modern government work.
Thus, the administration has abandoned the principle of a professional, nonpolitical civil service, stuffing agencies from FEMA to the Justice Department with unqualified cronies. Tax farming — giving individuals the right to collect taxes, in return for a share of the take — went out with the French Revolution; now the tax farmers are back.
And so are mercenaries, whom Machiavelli described as “useless and dangerous” more than four centuries ago.
As far as I can tell, America has never fought a war in which mercenaries made up a large part of the armed force. But in Iraq, they are so central to the effort that, as Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution points out in a new report, “the private military industry has suffered more losses in Iraq than the rest of the coalition of allied nations combined.”
Had we been subjected to this sort of direct vocabularly from the start, instead of the warm and fuzzy obfuscation to which we’ve grown so accustomed, we may have had an honest debate in this country when we needed it. In fact, if we could engage in an honest debate now we’d be better off, but so far folks like Krugman are lonely outposts of sanity in a vast insane wasteland.
As a sort of related postscript, at least in my mind, let us give thanks to Dan Rather, who has turned on his former corporate masters big time. I’ve spent some enjoyable minutes reading the complaint in his lawsuit against CBS. Assuming it stays in court, and it’s hard to see how it won’t (CBS doesn’t yet have governmental immunity), it may lay bare the unholy alliance between our corporate and governmental masters. Of course, that very corporate media will cover it only superficially, and you can bet that Rather will be portrayed as an embittered old man who pushes conspiracy theories. So if you want meaningful coverage, you’ll probably have to go to Firedoglake.