By Dave Lindorff
We need to eliminate a bunch of euphemisms from our political vocabulary, if we’re going to have serious debates about the future of the country.
A new president, an ousted fascist predecessor, and an obstructionist opposition party that wants nothing to change despite losing a national election is a great time to take on this task.
So let’s go to it.
1. Change Department of Defense to Department of War.
The US has not played “defense” with its military since, in my view, the War of 1812 when the British attacked the young nation and burned it’s new capital to the ground. (And I wouldn’t be surprised if some expert on US history didn’t write in and tell me that actually the US started that war too.) Just to anticipate criticism, I’m not counting the Civil War, which wasn’t a foreign invasion, and as for WWII, which US mythology blames on the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, that claim ignores the moves the US had been making in the years leading up to that attack to strangle Japan of oil and other needed raw materials, an act of economic warfare that forced that island nation’s hand.
In any event, even if some may disagree with my view of US military history, nobody can make a legitimate or credible case that the US military has been defending this country since the end of World War II. Even the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9-11-2001 was not a war. It was a terrorist act that was used to launch a war by the US against first Afghanistan and then Iraq, two countries that had nothing to do with the attack.
Actually right up through World War II, the executive agency in charge of the military was aptly named the War Department, and was headed by the Secretary of War. Let’s go back to calling the Pentagon what it is: the War Department
2. No military action outside of the UN is a “humanitarian operation.”
When the US sends armed troops, or more often, fighter-bombers and armed drones, to a country it is never really a “humanitarian mission.” Statistics show that American military forces kill far more civilians than “combatants” on such missions. Let’s call them what they are. Without UN Security Council approval, they are simply unlawful military invasions.
3. There is no such thing as a “moderate Republican.”
The media are fond of this term, but the Republican Party, which stands for illegally retaining power despite a shrinking political base of white, racist or race-obsessed voters, win-by-vote-supression and gerrymandering policies, opposition to abortion rights, equal rights for women, opposition to environmental actions on pollution and climate change, and opposition to any gun-control laws or regulation, and supposed “moderates” in the party, by helping such a reactionary rightist party in gain control in legislatures and in Congress, are part of those policies. They cannot call themselves, or be identified as “moderates.” They are simply Republicans.
4. There are no “conservative” Democrats, either…
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: https://thiscantbehappening.net/fixing-the-language-of-journalism-to-reflect-reality/