Here is the great America that used to be and many still dream of:
"Americans are innately superior to the people of other countries and that therefore they have a high destiny to fulfill in the leadership of the world's forces for peace, freedom, democracy, and --not to be forgotten-- private corporate investment and profitability."
TRIPLESPEAK
During the take-off toward a more perfect capitalism, the debasement of the language moved no slower than the abasement of the currency through creeping inflation. The myths of the cold war gave us the imagery of a "free world" that included many tyrannical regimes on one side and the "worldwide communist conspiracy" to describe the other. The "end of ideology" ideologies gave us the myth of all-powerful knowledge elites to flatter the egos of intellectuals and scientists in the service of a divided Establishment. The accelerating rise of scientific and pseudoscientific jargon fragmented social and natural scientists into small ingroups that concentrated more and more on small slices of reality, separating them more than ever before from the presumably unsophisticated (although functionally literate) working-buying classes.
In the early days of this process, George Orwell envisioned a future society in which the oligarchs of 1984 would use linguistic debasement as a conscious method of control. Hence the Party Leaders imposed doublethink on the population and set up a long-term program for developing newspeak. If Orwell were alive today, I think he would see that many of his ideas are now being incorporated in something just as sophisticated and equally fearful. I am referring to the new triplespeak: a three-tiered language of myth, jargon, and confidential straight talk.
Unlike Orwell's doublethink and newspeak, triplespeak is not part of any overall plan. It merely develops as a logical outcome of the Establishment's maturation, an essential element in the tightening of oligarchic control at the highest levels of the Golden International. Without myths, the rulers and their aides cannot maintain support at the lower levels of the major establishments, and the might itself --as well as the legitimacy of empire-- may decay. Jargon is required to spell out the accumulating complexities of military, technological, economic, political, and cultural power. Straight talk is needed to illuminate the secret processes of high decision making and confidential bargaining and to escape the traps created by myth and jargon.
Herein lie many difficulties. With so much indirection and manipulation in the structure of transnational power, there is no longer any place for the pomp and ceremony that helped foster the effulgent myths surrounding past empires --no imperial purple, no unifying queen, king, or imperial council, no mass religion or ideology to fire the emotions of dependent masses. Hence the symbolic trappings of past empires must be replaced by smaller mystifications that at least have the merit of helping maintain the self-respect and motivations of the elites at the middle and lower levels of the national Establishments. Thus the operating rules of modern capitalist empire require ascending rhetoric about economic and social development, human rights, and the self-effacing role of transnational corporations in the promotion of progress and prosperity. The more lies are told, the more important it becomes for the liars to justify themselves by deep moral commitments to high-sounding objectives that mask the pursuit of money and power. The more a country like the United States imports its prosperity from the rest of the world, the more its leaders must dedicate themselves to the sacred ideal of exporting abundance, technology, and civilization to everyone else. The further this myth may be from reality, the more significant it becomes --and the greater the need for academic notables to document its validity by bold assertion and self-styled statistical demonstration. "The might that makes right must be a different right from that of the right arm," the political scientist, Charles Merriam, stated many years ago. "It must be a might deep rooted in emotion, embedded in feelings and aspirations, in morality, in sage maxims, in forms of rationalization . . ."
Thus, in 1975 and 1976, while the long right arm of the American presidency was supporting bloody dictatorships in Chile, Brazil, Indochina, and Iran (to mention but a few), Daniel P. Moynihan, the U.S. ambassador at the United Nations, wrapped himself in the flag of liberty and human rights. His eloquent rhetoric --deeply rooted in emotion and embedded in feelings and aspirations-- set a high standard of creative myth-making. At that time, his superiors in Washington failed to realize that Moynihan's approach was, in Walter Laqueur's terms, "not a lofty and impractical endeavor, divorced from the harsh realities of world endeavor, but itself a kind of Realpolitik." Within two years, however, the next president, Jimmy Carter, seized the torch from Moynihan's hand and, without thanks or attribution, set a still higher standard by clothing the might of his cruise missile and neutron bomb in human-rights rhetoric even more deeply rooted in morality, sage maxims, and forms of rationalization.
Domestic myths are the daily bread of the restructured Radical Right and the old-style and new-style conservatives. Many of the ideologies discussed in the last section of this chapter serve not only as cover-ups for concentrated oligarchic power. They provide code words for the more unspoken, mundane myths that define unemployed people as lazy or unemployable, women, blacks and Hispanics as congenitally inferior to other people. Presidential candidates invariably propagate the myth that Americans are innately superior to the people of other countries and that therefore they have a high destiny to fulfill in the leadership of the world's forces for peace, freedom, democracy, and --not to be forgotten-- private corporate investment and profitability. Trying to flatter the voting public as a whole, they ascribe most of America's difficulties to foreign enemies or a few individuals at home --like Richard Nixon-- who have betrayed the national goodness. Not so long ago, General Westmoreland went much further when, to reassure the more naive members of the American officer corps, he soberly declared that "Despite the final failure of the South Vietnamese, the record of the American military of never having lost a war is still intact." With the arrival of [Judeo]fascism, myths like these would no longer be greeted, at least not publicly, with the degree of skepticism they still provoke. Instead, the Establishment would agree that the domestic tranquility afforded by these convenient reassurances qualified them, in contrast to more critical, less comforting diagnoses, as "responsible." As old myths get worn out or new myths punctured, still newer ones (shall we call them "myths of the month"?) are brought into being.
The momentum of jargon would not abate in a [Judeo]fascist society but move steadily ahead with the ever-increasing specialization and subspecialization in every field. New towers of Babel are, and would be, continuously erected throughout the middle and lower levels of the Establishment. Communication among the different towers, however, becomes increasingly difficult. One of the most interesting examples is the accumulation of complex, overlapping, and mystifying jargons devised by the experts in various subdivisions of communications itself (semiotics, semantics, linguistics, content analysis, information theory, telematics, computer programming, etc.), none of whom can communicate very well with all the others. In military affairs, jargon wraps otherwise unpleasant realities in a cloak of scientific objectivity. Thus, "surgical strike," "nuclear exchange," and even the colloquial "nukes" all hide the horrors of atomic warfare. The term "clean bomb" for the new neutron bomb hides the fact that although it may not send much radioactive material into the atmosphere it would kill all human life through radiation in a somewhat limited area; this makes it the dirtiest of all bombs. Similarly, in global economics the jargon of exchange rates and IMF conditions facilitates, while also concealing, the application of transnational corporate power on Third World countries. The jargon of domestic economics, as I have already shown, hides the crude realities of corporate aggrandizement, inflation, and unemployment behind a dazzling array of technical terms that develop an esprit de corps which unites the various sectors of Establishment economics.
Rising above the major portion of jargon and myth is straight talk, the blunt and unadorned language of who gets what, when and how. If money talks, as it is said, then power whispers. The language of both power and money is spoken in hushed whispers at tax-deductible luncheons or drinking hours at the plushest clubs and bars or in the well-shrouded secrecy of executive suites and boardrooms. Straight talk is never again to be recorded on Nixon-style tapes or in any memoranda that are not soon routed to the paper shredders.
As one myth succeeds another and as new forms of jargon are invented, straight talk becomes increasingly important. Particularly at the higher levels of the Establishment it is essential to deal frankly with the genuine nature of imperial alternatives and specific challenges. But the emerging precondition for imperial straight talk is secrecy. Back in 1955, Henry Kissinger might publicly refer to "our primary task of dividing the USSR and China." By the time the American presidency was making progress in this task, not only Kissinger but the bulk of foreign affairs specialists had learned the virtues of prior restraint and had carefully refrained from dealing with the subject so openly. It may be presumed that after the publication of The Crisis Democracy, Samuel Huntington learned a similar lesson and that consultants to the Trilateral Commission will never again break the Establishment's taboos by publicly calling for less democracy. Nor is it likely that in discussing human rights the American president will talk openly on the rights and privileges of American-based transnationals in other countries. Nor am I at all sure that realists like Irving Kristol, Raymond Aron, George Liska, and James Burnham will continue to be appreciated if they persist in writing boldly about the new American empire and its responsibilities. Although their "empire" is diligently distinguished from "imperialism," it will never be allowed to enter official discourse.
For imperial straight talk to mature, communication must be thoroughly protected from public scrutiny. Top elites must not only meet together frequently; they must have opportunities to work, play, and relax together for long periods of time.
Also, people from other countries must be brought into this process; otherwise there is no way to avoid the obvious misunderstandings that develop when people from different cultural backgrounds engage in efforts at genuine communication. If the elites of other countries must learn English (as they have long been doing), it is also imperative for American elites to become much more fluent in other tongues than they have ever been in the past. In any language there are niceties of expression --particularly with respect to money and power-- that are always lost or diluted if translated into another language. With or without the help of interpreters, it will be essential that serious analysis, confidential exchanges, and secret understandings be multilingual. Thus, whether American leadership matures or obsolesces, expands or contracts, English can no longer be the lingua franca of modern empire. The control of "Fortress America" would require reasonable fluency in Spanish by many top elites (although not necessarily by presidents and first ladies). Trilateral Empire, in turn, imposes more challenging --but not insuperable-- linguistic burdens.
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