I write here against anti-Sinitism.
Never heard of it? Oh dear. It must be the only "hate" speech not yet on the government Index. If you didn't know it, our ruling class, for our own salvation and for the salvation of all men, has taken on the task of cleansing us of our own thoughts...and indeed, from thinking.
Admittedly, for a large number of people this would probably be a very good thing. But the rest of us would like to reclaim our cogitations, as well as the vocabulary in which we mutter them.
We want our language back.
Take "hate."
In the good old days, hating someone meant you actually felt visceral dislike toward them. Hate expressed itself in clearly recognizable ways. You spewed invective at the people you hated, you dunked spit-balls in their beer, you snickered at their dress-sense, you aspersed their ancestors and compared them unfavorably to lesser primates.
If you were in the press, you advocated deporting them.
If you were in political office, you set up gas ovens and tried exterminating them, along with their uncles, nieces, and third cousins....
At the very least, you cut up their photos and refused to invite them over for tea.
But those were the old days...when Pravda was propaganda and 1984 was still fiction.
Comes the twenty-first century and "hate" today includes some fairly innocuous things:
- Holding opinions the ruling class doesn't like (traditional, religious, libertarian, anti-state)
- Researching subjects the ruling class would rather ignore (9-11, Federal Reserve activities, gold manipulation, banker fraud, media disinformation, torture, the CIA, Wall Street control of the media, Zionism)
- Treating people with different political opinions from yours like human beings, instead of pond-scum
It's obvious from this that we're ruled by brutes who don't own decent thesauruses or dictionaries. Which means a lot of innocent Anglo-Saxon words are currently blubbering underwater in the necrotic swamps of DC.
Spare a kind thought for them.
And while you're at it, I'd urge you to adopt some stray palabra yourself, before Washington reaches out and touches them with its clammy paws.
In fact, I just got me some palabra of my very own.
Here goes:
1. Anti-Sinites
Anyone who supports the devaluation of the US dollar and/or treasury debt, now largely held by the Chinese government and by Chinese and other Asian savers is an anti-Sinite.
Since debt devaluation would wipe out the savings of creditors, it's clearly motivated by anti-Asian (specifically, anti-Chinese) bigotry. Anti-Sinites want Asians to go broke.
Well-known anti-Sinites include Alan Greenspan, Hank Paulson, and Ben Bernanke.
2. Helicopter Revisionists
Anti-Sinites include Helicopter Revisionists in their ranks.
Helicopter Revisionists question the size of Ben Bernanke's helicopter. That's the one from which Ben promised to drop all that money into the economy, remember?
The bigger Ben's copter, the more money he can drop. The more money he drops, the more the currency depreciates...and the more everything costs in dollar terms.
Helicopter Revisionists claim Ben's helicopter was never that big. Thus they play down inflation.
Copter Denialists go even further than the Revisionists. They don't believe inflation even exists.
$10 jar of coffee? $4 loaf of bread? That's demand, baby.
Yep – all them Pakis, Chinks, Russkies, and Latinos swilling java and stuffing their faces – that's what's pushed prices up.
[Never mind that Pakis, Chinks, Russkies, and Latinos have been stuffing their faces for decades without the prices budging.]
3. Shooters (See also para-shooter, green man, leprechaun)
Just as birthers show an untoward preoccupation with Barack Obama's birth certificate, shooters spend an inordinate amount of time looking for "green shoots" in the economy. Where everyone else sees dry brown weeds, shooters see lush tropical foliage with jobs flowering, the stock market surging, a glint in Jim Cramer's eyes, and a song on every broker's lips.
Most psychiatrists consider shooters dangerously delusional. They note that shooters often overlap as a group with anti-Sinites. Greenspan, for example, is both an anti-Sinite and a shooter.
A small radical group of psychologists, however, claims that shooters are harmless visionaries, no different from the people who claim to see little green men or leprechauns. Following intense lobbying by these radicals, shooters were reclassified in the DSM-IV as suffering from a personality disorder rather than a psychosis.
[A sub-class of the shooter is the para-shooter. Para-shooters, as their name suggests, are a parasitic group, largely made up of incompetent CEOs and bureaucrats. Para-shooters, while usually not shooters themselves, depend on shooters to hang onto their perks and privileges. This is especially true of one variant of para-shooter, the golden para-shooter. Golden para-shooters are nearly always full-blown psychopaths].
4. Healthers (See also Rahm-page)
You've heard of 9-11 truthers – those right-wing theorists of the 9-11 attacks who insist that the guv'mint "dunnit."
Well, Healthers are left-wing theorists of health-care.
And they wish the guv'mint "dunnit."
Healthers have a near-superstitious belief in "health-care" – which they strangely confuse with "being healthy." Indeed, healthers have little interest in health at all. They're obsessed with pushing questionable pills and procedures through an incestuous web of medical licensees, insurers, and litigators to people who mostly don't want them.
A gang of healthers that occupies public territory, demands immediate government action, and incites cash hatred (see below) is said to be on a Rahm-page
5. Cash Warfare (See also Cash-hatred)
Way too much attention is paid to the notion of class-war, according to which, the rich hate the poor so much they want to wipe them out. Of course, this makes no economic sense at all. A never-ending pool of cheap labor is every CEO's midnight fantasy.
Nor can one notice much hatred of the rich by the poor either. Most of the poor worship at the feet of the rich.
Kick me, it feels so good, is the motto of the average working joe.
No, no, no.
The real battle is between the people who save and lend and the people who borrow and spend.
Creditors versus debtors.
Cash-rich versus cash-poor.
And the story of the last twenty years is how the borrowing class got its hands on the cash of the saving class, spent it all, and then sent the bill...you guessed it...back to the saving class.
Now that's warfare...
6. Red-Washing
Green-washing, as you know, is the way some firms put an environmentally-positive spin on business-as-usual.
Well, red-washing is the way the government puts a red state-friendly, conservative spin on policies that are the same old big-government, tax-and-spend liberalism.
"Compassionate conservatism," for example, was mostly red-washing.
Red-washing is also used to describe the devious public relations tactic of portraying left-anarchists who are really libertarians as "reds" or "commies" to bamboozle people on the right into supporting the police state.
7. Debt-Squads (See also, ARMs race)
Self-explanatory. Mortgage-brokers, credit-card salesmen, loan sharks – these were the debt squads that roamed the empire for the past fifteen years, beating up (economically-speaking) on anyone dumb enough to miss the fine print and sign up for their one-way tickets to financial assassination – adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs).
You're upside down on your double-wide? Your McMansion's been foreclosed on? Grandpop's moved into a trailer? Thank the debt-squads for it.
8. War on Terra Mater
The neo-conservative war-on-anything-that-moves-within-our solar-system has obviously got very little to do with just Islamic terrorism. Apart from the hackneyed point that you can't make war on a noun, does anyone really think that an empire that faced down a Soviet Union bristling with nukes needs this much muscle power for Osama and his merry band of jihadists?
Nope. War on Terra (Mater) is more like the truth.
9. Global Browning (See also, Gold Thuggery).
Global Browning, in our opinion, is far worse than global warming. It's the threat posed by an insidious flunky of the British state called Gordon Brown. Herr Brown sold Britain's gold at the very bottom of a twenty-year bear market in gold over the red flags waved by his brightest and best. Then, as PM, he presided over the bankruptcy of the British banking system. It's got us wondering. Accidentally or accidentally-on- purpose? We don't know, but we can take a guess.
Gordon Brown, we figure, is a gold thug. The distant and repulsive cousin of the stodgy gold bug, the gold thug wants nothing more than to sell the yellow metal as fast as he can to hide his own festering monetary sins. Gold thuggery is rampant in central banks world over, who, under the influence of the Brown brigade, depress gold prices to keep the wind in the sales -er- sails of their inflationary schemes, thus robbing the hard-working peons whose savings pay the bloated salaries of these parasites.
Experts believe that it's the last twenty years of unremitting Global Browning that's burned the economy to a crisp
10. Swine Floozy (see also, Avian Floozy, Tami-Floozy, Hillary Health, Nurse Ratched).
We hasten to point out that we use the term floozy gender-neutrally. By floozy we simply mean a cheap tart who'll sell you anything to make a buck.
There are male, female, gay, bi, transgendered, gender-bendered and fender-bendered floozies, but whatever gender they are, their agenda is the same. They sell you government cures. In almost all cases, these cures are worse than the disease.
Swine floozies want you vaccinated yesterday for a flu epidemic that may show up next week.
If there isn't an epidemic, they'll make one up. Or borrow last year's plague.
A Tami-Floozy is a variant of the genus. Tami-Floozies make a direct killing from investing in the drugs sold to cure the diseases hyped by the other floozies. Donald Rumsfeld is the best-known of the type.
Lila Rajiva [send her mail] is the author of the ground-breaking study, The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American Media (MR Press, 2005), and the co-author with Bill Bonner of Mobs, Messiahs and Markets (Wiley, 2007). Visit her blog. All responses to email are posted at my blog in the comment section after the relevant article, with personal information omitted to ensure privacy.
Copyright © 2009 Lila Rajiva