Dworkin on the manipulation of language and Marilyn Waring on economics and human rights

Dworkin offers some fascinating criticisms of language and frames that are worth contemplating. These too are from her book "Scapegoat" with page numbers noted after each quote.

"It is hard to use language to convey meaning; it is laughable to try to use language to search for truth; the truth itself is laughable, a partly visible stage on which clowns slip on banana peels. Language has ceased to be human, or part of the human endeavor toward self-determination and dignity" (135).

"In the United States, language exists in a vacuum as if it were isolated from any community of values or actions. A recent thirty-year reinterpretation of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects speech, assembly, and religion from government sanction, fetishizes all expressive language: words become sacred totems, untouchable, an archeology of immutable ruins. Pulled away from its context, surgically excised by literalist courts of law, language is the dead corpse at the party--murdered, but by whom and so what?"(136)

"It is not hard to see how words determine human destiny: "The Auschwitz syndrome: the enemy must be wiped off the face of the earth," writes George Konrad. "And the enemy is anyone who has been declared an enemy" (136).

"The line between the violence of words and the violence of crowds is sometimes real; but more oftensuch a line is a product of jurisprudential artifice and fictive sociology. Indeed, it is hard to imagine violent acts surrounded by silence: riots without words; mobs without slogans; threats so quiet they remain unheard; mute masses of vandals. These actions happen but there is no sound. In Argentina under military rule the language was simply tranquilized, flattened out, a strategy that helped cliche emerge as political principle: "We were defrauded by democracy, which was not what we had expected";...Timmerman explained that there was no state censorship during the tyranny. Instead, writers disappeared. He called it "biological censorship" (137).

"Instead of recognizing the power of language, which is complex and difficult to untangle or understand, the notion that words have consequences is ridiculed; any attempt to try to understand the linguistic dimensions of hate is treated as if the effort itself were
a form of fascism" (143).

"There are bad words. Words become bad precisely because or when they cannot be separated from the shedding of human blood. The delusion of separation is, of course, consoling" (143).

"The Nazis also photographed and filmed the torture and eventual murder of German officers who tried to depose Hitler and failed... Goebbels's idea was to take the movie footage and make a propaganda film, which he did. It was shown once in Berlin. Full-dress Nazis were nauseated and made physically ill. It was fine to photograph Jews being clubbed to death in public; but watching adult, Aryan, military men die was another thing altogether, which suggests that torture as entertainment requires dehumanization of an enemy and that enemy's stigmatized powerlessness...Enjoyment in the debased photographic object requires that the viewer never identify with the victim so that, whatever his future, the viewer knows that he will never be that abject and soiled" (164).

"International law is extremely important to the future of women. Crimes against humanity are inevitably crimes against women and children as well as stigmatized men; and inside countries and racial or ethnic groups--in which women and the internal enemy and men are the rapists and rulers--human rights must be framed to free women from male domination, especially from the systematic violence of male dominance. The androcentric heart of religions must be faced. The harm of objectification and dehumanization must be recognized as prelude to normalized violence" (337).

These the last quotes here are from Marilyn Waring's film: "Who's Counting?"

"The international trade in arms is the biggest growth industry of all.
The five permenant members of the security council are also the 5 leading arms exporters of the world. War is the perpetual market for these five countries who sell and make the bulk of weapons. It has been in the U.S.'s interest to sustain war and political tensions in the Persian Gulf region since the oil shock of 1974 and 1975. War is marketable and contributes to growth and development."

"Economics is a tool of people in power."

This quote from Warring is paraphrased:
Female sexual slavery is also a major growth industry worldwide in which ten year olds in the Phillipines are available for sex to tourists, despite sexual slavery being "illegal."