The common language of oppressors

One of the ways in which oppression and tyranny betray their existence, at least for the least corrupt and historically short-sighted, is through the style and content of the language that is used to legitimate its existence.

In terms of style, oppressors employ a coded language of semantic deception, often qualifying as Orwellian newspeak. Such abuses of language range widely over the historical landscape of oppression. It is both employed ad captandum vulgus (to win over the minds of the masses, whose moral pretensions would be offended if the torture, exclusion and victimization society doesn't seem able to cope without were called by their proper names) and in order to protect its practitioners from guilt feelings. The oppressor always makes language an accessory to his crimes, and is outraged by the lese majeste of those people who refuse to accept his or her abuses of language. Sadly, in the masses, who are ever receptive to oppression's wiles and casuistries, oppression has another reliable accomplice, who'll always trust the word of the powerful over the powerless, whose gullibilty is limitless when confronted with the accoutrements that signal power and authority, as countless social-psychological experiments have demonstrated.

Another marker is the rhetoric of paternalism and protectionism. Patriarchal oppression, racial oppression, religious oppression, political and psychiatric oppression have all been characterized by the stubborn insistence by the oppressor that their victims and subjects are like little children to whom the oppressor must act in a parental capacity in relation to them.

Then there is the appeal to necessity. One of the reasons why chattel slavery lasted so long was because it was taboo to question the social necessity of the institution. The same applies today with psychiatric slavery. In the former case, the slave was seen as a savage, who would quickly degenerate into lunacy and savagery if not kept in what was deemed his natural state, whose subjugation checked his base instincts, and on top of this it was also seen as an economic necessity. The psychiatric slave must also be enslaved, because, as received and authoritative opinion would have it, in his psychotic, irrational state, he is wild and unpredictable, and he needs the sane psychiatrist to dominate him. In the former case, we have unashamed white supremacism; in the latter, psychiatric supremacism.

Similarly, in Nazi Germany, disposing of the Jews by whatever means necessary was seen as a necessity, as evidenced by the discussion of "the Jewish question" in culture, as if there was a question that had to be answered, as if something had to be done. With the recent school shootings, and the lunacy it has fomented, there is now a "seriously mentally ill" question; many is the time I have heard people in America saying "what to do about the mentally ill?", as if there is a problem that demands a solution (a climate of opinion which organized psychiatry is exploiting for its own aggrandizement in a most repugnant display of political opportunism, though such opportunism should not surprise anyone conversant with the history of this self-serving profession).

Even today, lobotomy is being justified according to the bizarre syllogism, "something had to be done; this is something; ergo its justified". Of course, the premise is wrong, but such reasoning makes perfect sense to psychiatrists, who like the rest of us, have a tendency to deceive themselves wherein they find it convenient to deceive themselves.

"It is evident how much men love to deceive, and be deceived...And it is vain to find fault with those arts of deceiving, wherein men find pleasure to be deceived."

TBC