本文发表在 rolia.net 枫下论坛美对伊拉克战争中路人皆知的Doublespeak
摘抄了几段对布什政府在伊拉克战争中的政治宣传的批判性文字，来自由美国民间反战组织领导人和写的一本名叫《Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq》的书。 两位作者Sheldon Rampton和John Stauber是Centre for Media and Democracy的director，这个组织以以正视听为己任，一直通过对官方内部信息的搜集和调查来揭露并反驳布什政府的政治宣传和所谓的“愚民教育”。 涉及到伊拉克战争和“大规模杀伤性武器”的各种论述向来极富争议性，这些观点难免陷入以偏概全或断章取义之类的种种误区，论者本人也会出于自身利益而选择性地挑一些对自己有力的证据来说明问题。 像伊拉克战争这么大的话题本身就没有一个绝对正确或错误的解释，很难说这本书里的观点一定可信，但这之中却是有很多引人深思的insight，作为一家之言读起来还是有其价值的。 当然，读任何这类的书时都要选择性的吸取其中的内容，不宜全盘否定，也不可尽信。 更不能排除这本书本身就是一个deception的可能，呵呵。 我粗略翻了一下，感觉这本书的言辞还是相当犀利的，对布什政府的批评也是不留情面，支持其论述的“事实依据”也比较有说服力。 读者本人如果反对布什政府的话，那读起这本书来一定会大加赞同，感觉相当“解气”。 摘抄的这一章以Doublespeak为题，doublespeak这个词指的是那种心口不一的假话，在文章里所指就是大众传播里发明的一些迷惑人的宣传词令，这些词语的功效无非就是制造假象，蛊惑人心，为战争制造借口，创造条件。 文章以乔治·奥威尔的话开篇：
“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible,” George Orwell wrote in 1946. “Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”
奥威尔这几句话似乎总结了political speech的定义，那就是defense of the indefensible。这么看来所有的政治意图在这位讽刺家眼中都是indefensible的。这本书的作者也继承了奥威尔的这种critical的论调。 下面简单介绍了doublespeak这个词的起源。
Orwell was a shrewd observer of the relationship between politics and language. He did not actually invent the term “doublespeak”, but he popularized the concept, which is an amalgam of two terms that he coined in 1984, his greatest novel. Orwell used the term “doublethink” to describe a contradictory way of thinking that lets people say things that mean the opposite of what they actually think. He used the term “newspeak” to describe words “deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them.”
下面的不少例子很有意思，很多细节都是我们平时没有想过的。仔细想想，很多宣传词语我们确实没经过多少思考便无条件的接受了，比如所谓的“邪恶轴心”，或“国际反恐同盟”等等。
For example, consider the now-famous phrase, “axis of evil,” which was first used by president bush in his January 29, 2002, state of the union address. Bush characterized Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an “axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States.”
The concept of an “axis,” of course, evokes memories of the “axis powers” of world war II and functions to prepare the public for acceptance of war against nations that purportedly belong to the axis. However, this use of the term is misleading. It suggests an alliance or confederation of states that pose a significant danger precisely because of their common alignment – a menace greater than the sum of the parts. In fact, Iran and Iraq have been bitter adversaries for decades, and there is no pattern of collaborations between North Korea and the other two states.
To say that these nations are “evil” depends in part on your theology and in part on your politics. There is no question that Iran, Iraq and North Korea have all committed horrible violations of human rights, the singling out of these particular nations as evil, however, invites the question of why the bush administration failed to include u.s.-supported nations that violate human rights on a comparable scale, such as Colombia or Saudi Arabia, as well as countries that already possess nuclear weapons, such as China, France or Israel – not to mention India and Pakistan, which recently came close to using them. In reality, “axis of evil” is a term chosen to selectively stigmatize countries for the purpose of justifying military actions against them.
Coalition of the coerced
If the bad guys have an “axis,” the good guys have a “coalition of the willing,” to use the term preferred by Colin Powell and other U.S. officials and often repeated uncritically by major television news outlets. The word “coalition” attempted to evoke the feeling of international unity that existed in 1991, when the first bush administration persuaded the United Nations to endorse a broad international coalition of nations that participated in the war to drive Iraq from Kuwait.
The bush administration frequently compared the level and scope of international support for its military operations in Iraq to the coalition that fought the first Persian Gulf War. “The coalition against Iraq, called operation Iraqi freedom, is large and growing,” stated secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld at a press briefing on March 20, 2003. “This is not a unilateral action, as is being characterized in the media. Indeed, the coalition in this activity is larger than the coalition that existed during the gulf war in 1991.” As the Washington post’s Glenn Kessler pointed out, however, these statements were “exaggerations, according to independent experts and a review of figures from both conflicts.”
The so-called “coalition of the willing” was almost entirely a U.S.-British campaign, with virtually no military contribution from any other country except Australia. “It’s a bald-faced lie to suggest that” the coalition for this war is greater than that for the 1991 war, said Ivo H. Dalder, a former Clinton administration official who supported the war against Iraq. “Even our great allies Spain, Italy and Bulgaria are not providing troops.”
The nations that participated in the 1991 war but refused in 2003 included many of the leading nations of Europe, the middle east and other parts of the world: Bahrain, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, morocco, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the united Arab emirates. In their place, the United States recruited countries such as Albania, Azerbaijan, the Dominican Republic, el Salvador, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, the Marshall islands, Micronesia, Nicaragua, Palau (total population: 18,766), Rwanda, Uganda and Uzbekistan. By comparison with the first gulf war, very few of the nations in the 2003 coalition provided money or supplies or troops. Instead, they offered token support, such as political endorsements or permission to use their airspace for flyovers by U.S. warplanes. Rather than providing material support, in fact, many nations sought substantial financial aid packages or other U.S. support – such as admission to NATO – in exchange for their endorsements.
By the date that war commenced, the united states had cobbled together a list of 30 nations that were willing to be publicly named as supporting the war, and it claimed to have a list of another 15 nations that secretly supported the war but wished to remain anonymous – described sarcastically by critics as “the coalition of the unwilling to be named.” Even in the nations that were willing to be named in support of the war, the actual people of those nations mostly opposed it. According to a survey of the British population in January 2003, 68 percent remained unconvinced of the need for war. In Spain, 80 percent opposed the war, as did 73 percent in Italy, 79 percent in Denmark, 67 percent in the Czech republic, 82 percent in Hungary and 63 percent in Poland.
Nobel warriors
Doublespeak has accompanied war for thousands of years. English professor William Lutz has found examples as early as Julius Caesar, who described his brutal and bloody conquest of Gaul as “pacification.” “The military is acutely aware that the reason for its existence is to wage war, and war means killing people and the deaths of American soldiers as well,” he states. “Because the reality of war and its consequences are so harsh, the military almost instinctively turns to doublespeak when discussing war.” Doublespeak often suggests a noble cause to justify the death and destruction. Practically speaking, a democratic country cannot wage war without the popular support of its citizens. A well-constructed myth, broadcast through mass media, can deliver that support even when the noble cause itself seems dubious to the rest of the world.
The “code names” used to designate wars have also become part of the branding process through which war is made to seem noble. Rather than referring to the invasion of panama as simply a war or invasion, it became “operation just cause.” (Note also the way that the innocuous word “operation” becomes part of the substitute terminology for war.) The war in Afghanistan was originally named “operation infinite justice,” a phrase that offended Muslims, who pointed out that only god can dispense infinite justice, so the military planners backed down a bit and called it “operation enduring freedom” instead. For the invasion of Iraq, they chose “operation Iraqi freedom.” In PR Week, columnist Paul Holmes examined the significance of the term. “It’s possible, I suppose, that Iraqi freedom might be a by-product of this campaign,” he wrote, “but to pretend that it’s what the exercise is all about is intellectual dishonesty at its most perverse.” However, the phrase served as a powerful framing device. Television networks including Fox and MSNBC used “operation Iraqi freedom” as their tagline for the war, with the phrase appearing in swooshing 3D logos accompanied by imagery of flags and other symbols of patriotism. Other phrases favored by the bush administration – “the disarmament of Iraq,” “coalition forces,” the “war on terror,” “America strikes back” – appeared frequently in visual banners, graphics, and bottom-of-the-screen crawls, repeating and reinforcing the government’s key talk points in support of war.更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net
摘抄了几段对布什政府在伊拉克战争中的政治宣传的批判性文字，来自由美国民间反战组织领导人和写的一本名叫《Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq》的书。 两位作者Sheldon Rampton和John Stauber是Centre for Media and Democracy的director，这个组织以以正视听为己任，一直通过对官方内部信息的搜集和调查来揭露并反驳布什政府的政治宣传和所谓的“愚民教育”。 涉及到伊拉克战争和“大规模杀伤性武器”的各种论述向来极富争议性，这些观点难免陷入以偏概全或断章取义之类的种种误区，论者本人也会出于自身利益而选择性地挑一些对自己有力的证据来说明问题。 像伊拉克战争这么大的话题本身就没有一个绝对正确或错误的解释，很难说这本书里的观点一定可信，但这之中却是有很多引人深思的insight，作为一家之言读起来还是有其价值的。 当然，读任何这类的书时都要选择性的吸取其中的内容，不宜全盘否定，也不可尽信。 更不能排除这本书本身就是一个deception的可能，呵呵。 我粗略翻了一下，感觉这本书的言辞还是相当犀利的，对布什政府的批评也是不留情面，支持其论述的“事实依据”也比较有说服力。 读者本人如果反对布什政府的话，那读起这本书来一定会大加赞同，感觉相当“解气”。 摘抄的这一章以Doublespeak为题，doublespeak这个词指的是那种心口不一的假话，在文章里所指就是大众传播里发明的一些迷惑人的宣传词令，这些词语的功效无非就是制造假象，蛊惑人心，为战争制造借口，创造条件。 文章以乔治·奥威尔的话开篇：
“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible,” George Orwell wrote in 1946. “Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”
奥威尔这几句话似乎总结了political speech的定义，那就是defense of the indefensible。这么看来所有的政治意图在这位讽刺家眼中都是indefensible的。这本书的作者也继承了奥威尔的这种critical的论调。 下面简单介绍了doublespeak这个词的起源。
Orwell was a shrewd observer of the relationship between politics and language. He did not actually invent the term “doublespeak”, but he popularized the concept, which is an amalgam of two terms that he coined in 1984, his greatest novel. Orwell used the term “doublethink” to describe a contradictory way of thinking that lets people say things that mean the opposite of what they actually think. He used the term “newspeak” to describe words “deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them.”
下面的不少例子很有意思，很多细节都是我们平时没有想过的。仔细想想，很多宣传词语我们确实没经过多少思考便无条件的接受了，比如所谓的“邪恶轴心”，或“国际反恐同盟”等等。
For example, consider the now-famous phrase, “axis of evil,” which was first used by president bush in his January 29, 2002, state of the union address. Bush characterized Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an “axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States.”
The concept of an “axis,” of course, evokes memories of the “axis powers” of world war II and functions to prepare the public for acceptance of war against nations that purportedly belong to the axis. However, this use of the term is misleading. It suggests an alliance or confederation of states that pose a significant danger precisely because of their common alignment – a menace greater than the sum of the parts. In fact, Iran and Iraq have been bitter adversaries for decades, and there is no pattern of collaborations between North Korea and the other two states.
To say that these nations are “evil” depends in part on your theology and in part on your politics. There is no question that Iran, Iraq and North Korea have all committed horrible violations of human rights, the singling out of these particular nations as evil, however, invites the question of why the bush administration failed to include u.s.-supported nations that violate human rights on a comparable scale, such as Colombia or Saudi Arabia, as well as countries that already possess nuclear weapons, such as China, France or Israel – not to mention India and Pakistan, which recently came close to using them. In reality, “axis of evil” is a term chosen to selectively stigmatize countries for the purpose of justifying military actions against them.
Coalition of the coerced
If the bad guys have an “axis,” the good guys have a “coalition of the willing,” to use the term preferred by Colin Powell and other U.S. officials and often repeated uncritically by major television news outlets. The word “coalition” attempted to evoke the feeling of international unity that existed in 1991, when the first bush administration persuaded the United Nations to endorse a broad international coalition of nations that participated in the war to drive Iraq from Kuwait.
The bush administration frequently compared the level and scope of international support for its military operations in Iraq to the coalition that fought the first Persian Gulf War. “The coalition against Iraq, called operation Iraqi freedom, is large and growing,” stated secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld at a press briefing on March 20, 2003. “This is not a unilateral action, as is being characterized in the media. Indeed, the coalition in this activity is larger than the coalition that existed during the gulf war in 1991.” As the Washington post’s Glenn Kessler pointed out, however, these statements were “exaggerations, according to independent experts and a review of figures from both conflicts.”
The so-called “coalition of the willing” was almost entirely a U.S.-British campaign, with virtually no military contribution from any other country except Australia. “It’s a bald-faced lie to suggest that” the coalition for this war is greater than that for the 1991 war, said Ivo H. Dalder, a former Clinton administration official who supported the war against Iraq. “Even our great allies Spain, Italy and Bulgaria are not providing troops.”
The nations that participated in the 1991 war but refused in 2003 included many of the leading nations of Europe, the middle east and other parts of the world: Bahrain, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, morocco, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the united Arab emirates. In their place, the United States recruited countries such as Albania, Azerbaijan, the Dominican Republic, el Salvador, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, the Marshall islands, Micronesia, Nicaragua, Palau (total population: 18,766), Rwanda, Uganda and Uzbekistan. By comparison with the first gulf war, very few of the nations in the 2003 coalition provided money or supplies or troops. Instead, they offered token support, such as political endorsements or permission to use their airspace for flyovers by U.S. warplanes. Rather than providing material support, in fact, many nations sought substantial financial aid packages or other U.S. support – such as admission to NATO – in exchange for their endorsements.
By the date that war commenced, the united states had cobbled together a list of 30 nations that were willing to be publicly named as supporting the war, and it claimed to have a list of another 15 nations that secretly supported the war but wished to remain anonymous – described sarcastically by critics as “the coalition of the unwilling to be named.” Even in the nations that were willing to be named in support of the war, the actual people of those nations mostly opposed it. According to a survey of the British population in January 2003, 68 percent remained unconvinced of the need for war. In Spain, 80 percent opposed the war, as did 73 percent in Italy, 79 percent in Denmark, 67 percent in the Czech republic, 82 percent in Hungary and 63 percent in Poland.
Nobel warriors
Doublespeak has accompanied war for thousands of years. English professor William Lutz has found examples as early as Julius Caesar, who described his brutal and bloody conquest of Gaul as “pacification.” “The military is acutely aware that the reason for its existence is to wage war, and war means killing people and the deaths of American soldiers as well,” he states. “Because the reality of war and its consequences are so harsh, the military almost instinctively turns to doublespeak when discussing war.” Doublespeak often suggests a noble cause to justify the death and destruction. Practically speaking, a democratic country cannot wage war without the popular support of its citizens. A well-constructed myth, broadcast through mass media, can deliver that support even when the noble cause itself seems dubious to the rest of the world.
The “code names” used to designate wars have also become part of the branding process through which war is made to seem noble. Rather than referring to the invasion of panama as simply a war or invasion, it became “operation just cause.” (Note also the way that the innocuous word “operation” becomes part of the substitute terminology for war.) The war in Afghanistan was originally named “operation infinite justice,” a phrase that offended Muslims, who pointed out that only god can dispense infinite justice, so the military planners backed down a bit and called it “operation enduring freedom” instead. For the invasion of Iraq, they chose “operation Iraqi freedom.” In PR Week, columnist Paul Holmes examined the significance of the term. “It’s possible, I suppose, that Iraqi freedom might be a by-product of this campaign,” he wrote, “but to pretend that it’s what the exercise is all about is intellectual dishonesty at its most perverse.” However, the phrase served as a powerful framing device. Television networks including Fox and MSNBC used “operation Iraqi freedom” as their tagline for the war, with the phrase appearing in swooshing 3D logos accompanied by imagery of flags and other symbols of patriotism. Other phrases favored by the bush administration – “the disarmament of Iraq,” “coalition forces,” the “war on terror,” “America strikes back” – appeared frequently in visual banners, graphics, and bottom-of-the-screen crawls, repeating and reinforcing the government’s key talk points in support of war.更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net