I don’t like words that hide the truth. I don’t like words that conceal reality. I don’t like euphemisms, or euphemistic language. And American English is loaded with euphemisms. Cause Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent the kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it, and it gets worse with every generation.
George Carlin, “Euphemisms”
Sometimes a globalist is just a globalist.
paraphrase of fake Sigmund Freud quote
I grew up in the 1950s, in a “more innocent time.” It was a time when people didn’t curse, not openly that is. When I hit my thumb with a hammer in shop class, instead of shouting “Jesus Fucking Christ!,” I was told to say “Jiminy Cricket!” I envied my Polish-born dad who could let loose a string of Polish expletives whenever he injured himself.
It was actually a more euphemistic time, when great pains were taken to soften and hide reality in the name of politeness and gentility. As the rest of the Carlin routine sadly if humorously illustrates, the WWI term “shell shock” had been transformed into the WWII term “battle fatigue” and was in the process of becoming “operational exhaustion” during the Korean War. I would witness its transmutation yet again into “post-traumatic stress disorder” during the Vietnam War.
Euphemisms substitute mild, indirect, or deliberately vague words for ones considered offensive, harsh, or too blunt for the listener’s own good and the audience’s sensibilities. We use plenty of them today, from passed away or departed for died, and correctional facility instead of jail, to differently-abled or handicapped instead of disabled, and ethnic cleansing for genocide. They’re not to be confused with code words, where a word or phrase has a very specific meaning to a very specific audience, while remaining innocuous to the uninitiated. Code words are used a lot in dog-whistle politics, a relatively new term where words and phrases that are intended to mean one thing to the general population are deliberately used to convey different, additional, or more specific meanings for targeted specific demographics. Terms like “family values” and “pro-family” are intended to be innocuous to the public while conveying homophobic and misogynistic meanings to those in the know. Code words also conceal reality.
In Ventura in the 1960s I knew the town character, a slightly lopsided silver-haired old man named Quince. Quince liked to attend civic events and city functions dressed in what appeared to be a WWII uniform, although upon closer examination he’d incorporated elements of WWI, Civil War, and even Revolutionary War uniforms into the mix. On Saturdays he hung out on the sidewalk in front of the post office with a card table of mostly John Birch Society literature. He was big into the perils of the International Communist Conspiracy, but among the literature was a booklet entitled “Banking and Currency and The Money Trust” by Charles A. Lindbergh.
I knew that Lindbergh had been the first to fly solo across the Atlantic in a single engine monoplane called The Spirit of St. Louis and was nicknamed Lucky Lindy. When Quince saw me thumbing through the small volume he sidled up to me and spoke in a low voice.
“Congressman Lindbergh was one of the first to warn against the cabal of international bankers such as Morgan, Rockefeller, and Rothschild who instituted the Federal Reserve System in 1913 giving them control of interest rates, the stock market, and the capacity to create money out of thin air. He called those international bankers the ‘Money Trust’ and denounced the Federal Reserve Bank’s control over the American republic’s economy, causing inflation, the continuous decline of the dollar, and skyrocketing national debt ever since.”
“Didn’t Congress and President Wilson create the Federal Reserve?” I asked, having been a precocious history buff in my adolescence.
“There were sinister powers behind the Federal Reserve Act.” Quince talked as if he were revealing a dangerous secret. “Lucky Lindy was a great American hero, but even he had to be circumspect about revealing the true evil force behind the greedy power grab by those international bankers.”
Quince glanced about, reached into his coat, and surreptitiously pulled out a plain covered pamphlet that read “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem” by Henry Ford.
That was my first experience of a euphemism colliding with a code word. The modern conspiracy theory about who REALLY rules the world was ancient even back then, with the Illuminati, Freemasons, international bankers, New World Order, and alien shapeshifting lizards now prominent among the covert cliques identified as secretly running the world from behind the scenes. But conspiracy wingnuts purporting to expose those truly responsible for the clandestine system of global domination almost invariably circle back to their OG suspects, “the Jews.”
The promising anti-globalization movement of the 1990s and early 2000s was susceptible to rightwing antisemitic tendencies from its inception which then developed into “soft” antisemitic organizations like AdBusters. AdBusters went on to initiate the Occupy Wall Street movement which, while largely leftwing, attracted rightwing elements that blamed the Federal Reserve, international “banksters,” and the Jews for all that was wrong with the world. On the Right, the terms “international bankers” and “Zionists” have frequently gone beyond euphemism to become code words for Jews. The current use by Trump nationalists and their supporters of “globalists” and “cosmopolitan elites” to characterize their opponents employs code words that imply that the Jews are behind it all. Those on the Right who now rail against “cultural Marxism” never mention that their original Nazi trope blamed the Jews for being behind the evils of both Communism and capitalism. Again, the current meme of “cultural Marxism” goes beyond euphemism and even code words into “snarl words” that tar anyone with progressive politics as a secret Communist while implying that the Jews are covertly responsible for all the world’s ills.
Euphemisms are intended to soften the impact of difficult ideas. Code words disguise the meaning of those same problematic ideas for the general public while specifically targeting a select audience for incitement. Snarl words are derogatory terms that always attack and can never be used in neutral or positive ways. But what about words that hide something that is always kept in plain sight? Words that simultaneously conceal and reinforce concepts with which we are all too familiar?
“Capitalism” and “capitalist” are just such words. Nobody denies that capitalism and capitalists rule the world. There is no conspiracy, no clandestine cabal, no secret government bent on world domination. Capitalism is as natural as the air we breathe, according to capitalists, because humans are individualistic, selfish, and greedy by nature. Their “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange” is also part of human nature and gives rise to capitalism naturally. The ascendance of a powerful stratum of capitalists is also natural. If capitalism is the natural order of things, then capitalists gain power and rule naturally, rightfully due to merit and not by force or conspiracy.
Capitalists comprise a social class and constitute a ruling elite however, according to Marx. And capitalists go about their activities mostly in the open. They form associations openly, from the Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers to the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. They make their plans openly—in the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times—with no conspiracy necessary. And they carry out their plans, create their organizations, and govern openly with the consent of the people who freely exercise their right to vote as citizens of a democracy. Conspiracies do occur. The secret US war in Laos and Cambodia, the Watergate break-in, and the Arthur Andersen-associated scandals in the 1970s were all conspiracies. But by and large, capitalism and capitalists operate in the open.
This is all to disguise that there is a capitalist ruling class; that capitalism functions through exploitation, appropriation, and outright violence; that in a democracy politicians are bought and paid for by the capitalist ruling class; that the state is the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence; and that “[t]he executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” Capitalists are the original globalists. The current talk about “nationalists” vs “globalists” is actually about the power struggle between two factions of capitalists for control within the international bourgeoisie. It’s all about misdirection, so I call such words sleight-of-hand words.
Capitalism as an economic system has been around for a little over 750 years and did not achieve global dominance until 1989-91. Hominids have been around for about six millions years, modern humans for around 300,000 years, human behavioral modernity for around 50,000 years, and human civilization for about 6,000 years. Most human societies prior to capitalism were communal, hunter/gatherer, and tribal. That’s another reason why capitalism is neither natural nor a product of human nature.
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