Language Wars: The Truth Behind Obama’s Social Construction of Reality

by Dark Knight

It’s no surprise to anyone that the Obama administration is attempting to distance itself from and discredit the Bush administration’s War on Terror. What may be shocking to some is its brazen Audacity of Scope. The euphemistic change of “War on Terror” to “Overseas Contingency Operations,” and of “Islamic terrorism” to “man-caused disasters” is morally atrocious but it is not new. Already in the early years of the Iraq War, the Left-dominated media started deleting the term “Islamic” and “Muslim” from referring to terrorist attacks that were of course Islamic and Muslim. Now, Islamic terrorists are not only not Islamic, they are also no longer terrorists, but “militants” or “insurgents.” Rioting Muslims in France have magically disappeared and become “disaffected youth.” The result, if not the intent, of all these euphemisms is obvious, to change the public’s beliefs to the following: Terrorism is not a networked worldwide threat, radical Islam is not the source of it, and Islam is not an imperialist religion of global conquest. And don’t forget the Obama Newspeak of defining words as the opposite of what they really are by calling taxes “investment” and a debt increasing spending bill as an “economic stimulus bill.” Well, folks, this is the “change” that 56% of the public voted for. A change of the definition of reality, or as Obama said, “a transformed America.” (And lest we forget, now that scientists are starting to admit that the earth has been cooling, not warming, they’ve changed “global warming” to “climate change” so they won’t be caught with their pants down. Too late.) 

As I said, none of this “politics of deconstruction” is new. Bill Clinton was our first postmodern president, known for his infamous line, “That depends on what the meaning of the word is is.” It is important to understand that when Clinton said those words, he was not merely pulling another Slick Willy dodge of personal moral responsibility. He was expressing his actual philosophical belief in the postmodern social construction of reality that he and Hillary learned at the university from their radical professors. But at least Clinton was a typical politician in his lies, pursuing personal prestige and orgasm by his own “is.” When Obama lies by denying he believes in super-sizing government, or redefining terrorism, he is trying to change what American society means by “is.” He is engaged in an ideological “social construction of reality.” 

Anyone with an experience in the humanities or social sciences of American higher education have been exposed to the highfalutin esoteric language of postmodernism. Buzz words like “post-structuralism,” “masks of power,” and “the social construction of reality” can often cause the uneducated hoi poloi to shake their heads in incredulity at the irrelevance of the academic “ivory tower.” But to make such gestures of dismissal are not only wrong, they’re dangerous. Though there is plenty of lunacy to criticize in postmodern theory, there is enough truth that we need to be aware of if we want to understand and defeat the monsters we are fighting in our culture. 

And history shows that monsters have achieved great success in maintaining their destruction of civilization through changing the language in order to divert the moral conscience of the people. Antebellum slaves were called “chattel” (property), murdering the mentally and physically handicapped in America and Nazi Germany was called “euthanasia” (which means, “good death”), The Jewish holocaust was called the “Final Solution,” killing unborn children is called “evacuation of fetal tissue” or “termination of pregnancy,” doctors murdering patients is called “physician assisted suicide,” and now, terrorism is called “man-caused disasters” and terrorists,”militants” or “freedom fighters.” As Winston learned in Orwell’s 1984, language is an instrument of oppression and is used to diminish the capacity of the populace to think with moral clarity. 

In the book Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris, Hannibal Lecter, the brilliant cannibal lectures FBI agent Clarice Starling on her inability to overcome her enemy if she does not understand him. “You can’t reduce me to a set of influences. You’ve given up good and evil for behaviorism, Officer Starling. You’ve got everybody in moral dignity pants-nothing is ever anybody’s fault. Look at me, Officer Starling. Can you stand to say I’m evil?” Clarice’s own worldview did not take into account the true human nature of evil and therefore, she could not win the fight over that evil. Her own worldview had created language that covered over evil with euphemisms of behaviorism. A euphemism is an agreeable expression that is substituted for an offensive one. And that euphemistic covering of evil is the problem we are facing right now. 

Radical university professors and other Left Wing theorists, news media and Obama politicians are just as self-aware as was the fictional Hannibal Lecter. In fact, these new cannibals are also seeking to use the ignorance of the masses to engage in a campaign of controlling the culture through the use of euphemistic language. And they are doing so based on those hoity-toity theories that us plebescites have such a hard time understanding. It’s the technical jargon that has kept their nefarious intentions clouded in the fog of war. But those theories have trickled down into the popular culture and we are seeing them in action. We need to understand the origins of this Hannibal cannibalizing of language if we want to be able to effectively combat it. 

One of the elements of postmodern theory is that reality is socially constructed. The postmodern argues that there is no objective form of scientific or rational knowledge that the Enlightenment sought to prove. There is no universal reasoning that is not rooted in the bias of a cultural situation. And culture both defines and limits the extent of what a person can know about reality through its language. So for instance, a primitive culture that has never experienced a motorcycle, may describe it as a lifeless horse with strange legs. Because it lacks a linguistic reference, it is limited in its understanding of reality. 

Since there is no underlying reality that can be discerned apart from human interpretation (hermeneutics), all truth or knowledge claims are ultimately autobiographical expressions of a group’s prejudices. There is no objective absolute that transcends cultural interpretation and becomes a universal criteria for truth. The infamous phrase, “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” expresses the fact that each side in a war sees themselves as the hero of the story and the other side as the evil enemy. But the postmodern left takes it farther than mere interpretive humility. It concludes that there are no absolutes and therefore, all claims to universal knowledge are power grabs intended to impose one’s will over others. Neither side can be called wrong because there is no universal absolute criteria to judge between them. There really are no such things as “terrorists” to these people. All truth is of necessity relative to the language user and their cultural prejudices. This is why we heard all the condescending attacks on Bush’s “simplistic language of good and evil.” 

If there is no absolute truth and knowledge about reality is socially constructed by our ethnic, religious and political groups, then the attempt to appeal to a universal ethic is imperialist oppression of one culture over another. Society cannot be ruled by an agreed upon transcendent authority or criteria because there is none. In short, Left Wing radical theory, and by extension the Obama administration is the demonic stepchild of Nietzsche’s “will to power.” There is no truth, just people seeking to impose their wills upon others. This is why liberals, and other left wing radicals are the juvenile kings and queens of protest and out-shouting their adversaries. This is why you hear liberals reduce culture to “power relations.” This is why they have pursued the control of education, the media, law and government. Because they believe in the will to power as the ultimate truth. This is why they are so effective at creating slogans like “Proposition Hate,” and “Bush lied, people died.” Because they believe in the power of language to shape knowledge. Whoever controls the instruments and institutions of knowledge controls “reality.” If you change the language, you change reality to be what you want it to be rather than what your opponent thinks it is. 

And therein lies the dirty little secret of Leftist political theory: They engage in the very same imposition of power over those whom they accuse of imposing power over others. They are modern fascists, who in fact worship power as deity. It is no coincidence, as Jonah Goldberg has proven in his book, Liberal Fascism, that the Left has a history of a fascistic abuse of power, and as Gene Veith has pointed out in Modern Fascism, postmodernism asserts the same doctrines and philosophy as does fascism. It is no coincidence that the rise of the Obama Left brings with it the Fairness Doctrine (Which hereafter all conservatives need to continually call, The Fascist Doctrine). After all, fascism is a worldview of the will to power. When you negate transcendent absolutes like the Law of God or natural law, you are left with power as the only ultimate, and the State becomes the transcendent absolute or the deity of society. And that is why the State must get busy circumscribing every aspect of society, because the deity is always the absolute sovereign of every aspect of life. Socialism is a religion of creation and salvation through the State. Like God in Genesis who creates through his mere pronouncement of words “Let there be…” and separates his creation from chaos, so the Obama administration seeks to create reality through its mere pronouncement of words to separate Islamism from its chaotic essence of terrorism. Talk about a Satanic inversion of truth. Obama is lying, people are dying. 

Of course, there is always some truth in every big lie. Language does define and limit our interpretation of reality. Therefore, our use of words does in fact affect the way we see and interpret our existence. Where the postmodern Left is wrong is in their belief that language creates reality. Language is an epistemological tool of knowledge, not an ontological tool of reality. Language may affect our finite mind’s ability to understand or interpret reality, but it does not create that reality. That claim is sheer hubris. Newtonian mechanics may have worked for us to some degree in understanding and utilizing reality, but it was ultimately deficient in doing so and had to be replaced with Relativity. But reality never changed, merely our interpretation of it and our utility of it changed. So, even though the Left is wrong in its philosophy of power, it nevertheless, like Newtonian physics, works well enough for people to control others with it. 

For fifty years conservatives have been fighting a “culture war.” But I think it is trickier than that. I think we are fighting a language war. It’s not just a battle over values, it’s a battle over reality as society defines it through language. He who controls the language of reality controls the knowledge of society, which controls the society.


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Posted Apr 17th 2009 at 9:24 am in Politics | 216 Comments