The slow grind of sleaze
The rectification of names and the indignation of acquiescence
"If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant;
if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone;
if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate;
if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion.
Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said.
This matters above everything." (Confucius)
Let me start with a few disparate stories that led me to my point today.
About two months ago, I had a stupid little accident, someone rear-ended my car when I stopped at a stop sign. The damage didn’t look like much, but cars being what they are today, the whole back panel had to be replaced. After a lot of phone exchanges, estimates and all I took my car to a body shop.
I was given a rental car that was delivered to me to the body shop. After going through the paper-work, (well, tablet-work) the agent turned on the engine to check the odometer and said “Oh, geez, I forgot to fill up the car, but that shouldn’t be a problem, I mark here that it was only 1/8th full so you can bring it back empty and it will be fine.” I was a little taken back, but I said “Sure, whatever, it’s ok”.
The guy left; I got into the car fuming. I was pissed. Not with the guy or the scam, but with my acquiescing to it. For going along. I should have told him to get in the car, and bring it back to me with a full tank.
Because this kind of petty sleaze and petty scams are poisoning our societies.
(…and of course, I returned the car with over half a tank of gas in it)
Around the same time, I got a notification on Substack that someone liked my comment on the post “To Shatter Men’s Souls” of
, so I re-read the whole post. You should read it too.I can relate to it, …….. sort of. When I got arrested at the age of 19, Hungarian communism was in its phase that was described by Nikita Sergeyevich (Khruschev) as ‘goulash-communism’; “the happiest barrack” in the soviet world. I was never tortured, or seriously beaten. I had no secrets they needed. I was just a convenient patsy to make an example of.
Still, I ended up in the Hungarian version of the Lubyanka, and the rank of my interrogator was lieutenant-colonel. They took the case seriously. I was interrogated on several occasions.
They had all the power, but they still needed my cooperation. It went something like this:
He asked a question, I answered, he followed up with further questions to clarify, I answered him.
Then he started on his typewriter to write down my confession in the first person. MY answers were written down the way HE chose to interpret them. Then he handed to me the full document to review and sign every page to confirm that it was indeed what I said. It never was. His job was not to document my answers to his questions, but to create a narrative from our conversation. He had to shape the conversation to manufacture the guilt. He wrote everything in (my) first person, and my signature was to attest that all of that came straight from me.
For the first few days, I was protesting, pointing out the distortions and misrepresentations of what I said. Invariably, he asked: do you want me retype it?” I insisted a few times, and he did it, but with an air of tangible tension.
At times he was trying to dismiss my concerns saying that it does not really matter. That I will have plenty of opportunity to make may case at the court, but for now, I shouldn’t try to make his life difficult. He is trying to help me, so I should check my attitude.
I felt violated and indignant, but I acquiesced.
What he said was, of course, a lie. The court had the power to choose what to take into evidence: my live testimony or my signed ‘confession’. They asked me: were you forced to sign? By then, I understood that if I push back, I will end up with a much heavier punishment. They could have slapped a ‘slandering a state official’ on top of the sedition charge. Distorted language, ‘unrectified names’ was the foundation of my sentence.
The Pitești Prison Experiment; The Stanford prison experiment show us the darkness, while books like Darkness at Noon or Solzhenitsyn’s First circle looks at the psychology of resistance, compromise and resignation.
What I realized eventually is that the real damage to society is in the little lies and our little submissions to them.
Then just a few days ago, it downed on me: this is the same kind of indignation I feel reading
. Her posts are filled with subtle but sleazy lies. Her posts read like my coerced, but ‘signed’ interrogation transcripts in that communist show-trial.Distortions, misrepresentations, assumptions and insinuations, unfounded accusation, hints, misquotes, cherry-picked information and at times blatant lies. All of it done by just the misuse of language.
Alexander Mercouris of The Duran in a conversation with Mel K. mentions the Confucian concept, “the rectification of names”. That is what we need indeed. In a way, this is what I was talking about in my post “The not-so-smart books of Yuval Noah Harari” as well.
Let me illustrate the problem with just one example from HCR’s post from 2024-11-08
In several of her posts she is using the expression ‘enslavement’ for slavery and ‘enslaver’ for slave owners. I can only speculate why, but whatever the reason is, the expression is a de facto lie.
‘Enslavement’, the turning of someone into a slave, is an act. Being or owning a slave is a legal status.
The black slaves who arrived to the USA were enslaved by black tribal chiefs or by Arab raiders in the interior of Africa and sold to traders on the cost. Most slaves were enslaved by their own kin.
The enslavement of a free person was a crime in the whole of the Unites States.
In some, it carried the death penalty.
I would expect a professor of American history to know that. I believe she does, which begs for the question: why is she lying? Why is she distorting history? Most likely because it makes the sin sound more serious. It makes it sound that the slave owners were the active instigators of robbing people of their freedom, not just participants of the system created by others, buying ‘property’ ‘enslaved’ by others.
I tried to find out where the use of this distorted concept start. I asked Bingchat:
The term "enslaved person" has gained prominence in recent years as part of a broader effort to use language that acknowledges the humanity of individuals who were subjected to slavery. While it's difficult to pinpoint exactly when the term was first used, it has become more widely adopted in academic and social discourse over the past few decades.
The shift from using "slave" to "enslaved person" reflects a growing awareness of the power of language to shape perceptions and attitudes. This change aims to emphasize that these individuals were people first and foremost, who were subjected to the condition of slavery, rather than defining them solely by that condition.
The adoption of this terminology has been influenced by scholars, historians, and activists who advocate for more respectful and accurate language when discussing the history of slavery and its impact on individuals and communities.
And:
Enslaver: This term focuses on the act of enslaving someone. It highlights the active role of the individual in capturing, buying, selling, and maintaining control over enslaved people. The term "enslaver" underscores the violence and coercion involved in the process of making someone a slave. [emphasis mine]
Just what I suspected, the expressions came into use as the result of deliberate manipulation, loading a judgement into a noun, actively destroying its original meaning.
What does it matter? – you could ask. It’s just a word, and slavery was a bad thing. What difference does it make? Well, a lot. Not by itself, not just this word. The problem is not one word here and there, but the deluge of misrepresenting reality. It may take me over 200 words (as it did here) to explain the problem with just one misused word.
The very pragmatic problem I have with Heather Cox Richardson is the same I have with Yuval Noah Harari; the fact that they are doing it without a break, without self-reflection, without shame.
Their bullshitting is instinctual. In their minds, reality is what they want it to be, not what it is.
Reality is just a narrative and they are both narrative factories. There is no way to keep up with BS.
The political left and the globalist power seekers are creating narratives one expression at a time. Just think about the hundreds of words postmodernism and wokism gave us. Even the words describing them are pure linguistic bullshit. They are just variations of Orwell’s concept of Newspeak.
Most of my conversations with leftists break down on my inability to make them define the terms they use. Just think about it: WHAT IS A WOMAN? The United States has a Supreme court judge, who cannot define it.
(Calling them ‘justices’, instead of ‘judges’ is another ‘name’ in need of rectification)
The left is using this heavily manipulated language as a bludgeon, forcing us into accepting their delusions as our shared reality.
The horrors of communism and fascism are intricately connected with this slow grind of sleaze.
As Confucius pointed out, the degradation of morals starts with the degradation of language.
Meaningful discussions can only start with finding common ground, starting with language and the ‘rectification of names’. Because “This matters above everything”.
I will stop here, but there is more to discuss. In the same post, HCR draws a historical analogy that is highly questionable and misleading. The matter also brings up a few important questions that I want to illustrate with very personal experiences about Sisal plantations, urbanized peasant girls and the dilemma of my father.
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To Shatter Men’s Souls
November 8, 2024 - by Heather Cox Richardson
November 3, 2024 - by Heather Cox Richardson
References
Newspeak - Wikipedia
and the text:
George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four -- Appendix: The principles of Newspeak
Republican Party Platform of 1860 | The American Presidency Project
Rectification of names - Wikipedia
It is a bitter pill to swallow that both individuals as well as group thinkers (think Tribal warfare),, will utilize every errant narrative and gaslighting they have at their disposal to make their malum prohibitum the only standard that they will accept. Politics is personal to those whose lives are invaded and affected by the inhuman and impersonal "Special interest groups". A consensus consciousness, without individual consent, which each child crying "Whats in it for me"? Slavery, re branded as criminal, and no body being the wiser to these constructive frauds is how they accomplish the unconscionable.