Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Trump's Politics accelerates the degeneration of the English Language into euphemisms and metaphors to cauterize conscience



Democracy and Class Struggle has found Trump's supporters sensitive  to naming what they stand for and do - they prefer euphemisms and metaphors to hide their vile political aims.

We see this clearly in Spicer's Press Conferences and Trump Talking Heads on Fox.

This road has been taken before in Germany with German Language and it is time to remember it.

The debasement of language and the traducing of the psyche, dependent as it is upon the organ of speech, is a process observable in varying degrees in all western language.

The case of the German language is only an example of more so...one notes in advanced capitalist societies that the command of nuanced and subtle language in public discourse has all but disappeared.

 "What allowed...the degeneration of German speech, over the length of a half century, from the rich, imbricated, responsible pursuit of truth into the garbled, vulgarized German authorized and distributed by the Nazi press, Nazi literature, and official bureaucratic speech  ? "

The debasement of language, the stripping of its shading and moral intensity began in the West long before Hitler and continues after he is gone.

It will help us to explain a kind of cauterization of conscience by the use of metaphor and euphemism;

To understand that in official Nazi language the extermination of Jews was precisely that-- the disinfectant of lice, the burning of garbage, the incineration of trash, and hence language never had to say exactly what acts its words commanded: kill, burn, murder that old Jew, that middle-aged Jew, that child Jew"

 Source : Cohen, Arthur, The Tremendum, (Continuuum 1993). An extremely bitter interpretation of the Holocaust in history, from a Jewish theological perspective.
Cohen, pp. 7-8.

“In the Bannon repertoire, no metaphor is too direct,” wrote Joshua Green for Business Week. “His films are peppered with footage of lions attacking helpless gazelles, seedlings bursting from the ground into glorious bloom.

Bannon is White House Chief Strategist for Trump on the National Security Council - need we say more !

SEE ALSO LINK BELOW FOR MORE DETAILED ARTICLE

http://democracyandclasstruggle.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/the-new-language-of-white-nationalists.html