The Language of Conquest.
A very interesting study area, in that it studies the ways in which power articulates Empire Logic, the logic of social dominance.
"How do a country and its citizens justify genocide and land theft?
How do they transform obviously wrong or immoral actions into something righteous and worthy of celebration?
To answer these questions one need only examine the beloved classic 'Little House on the Prairie'³ to observe how expertly Laura Ingalls Wilder crafted a narrative that transformed the horror of white supremacist genocidal thinking and the stealing of Indigenous lands into something noble, virtuous, and absolutely beneficial to humanity.
Unfortunately, rather than recognize the perversion of morality inherent in Wilder’s book, the American public celebrates the work as laudable children’s literature"
(pp. 66-80) Waziyatawin Angela Cavender Wilson
(From : Unlearning the Language of Conquest)
I have been using the term Empire Logic ever since I created the aphorism "Empower: it never strikes back!" in response to the dull, repetitive Revolutionary Violence good, Oppressive Violence bad, bipolar narrative of "The Empire Strikes Back' : entertainment and ideological bigotry posing as Science Fiction.
Star Wars, dull as.
Empire Logic.
The logic created by those who seek to dominate others.
Power has one directive and that is to preserve it's status - to that end, everything.
That means that Power must enhance it's material ability to control, coerce, influence, intimidate or corrupt anyone, and any organisation and thus retain the capability to determine the situation.
To do that Power must have access to vast renewable economic resources, in the form of immense, unspeakable wealth and an endless supply of expendable people, with which - people in this system are objects, things to be used - to maintain the bureaucracies, militaries, police forces, prison and compulsion systems and other institutions such as 'education' and 'entertainment' that operate together to preserve the status quo.
There are many aspects of the language of conquest that euphemise coercion, abuse, even rape and mass murder in order to 'preserve the social order'.
George Carlin has a routine about the euphemism of the language used to describe combat trauma - shell shock, battle fatigue, operational exhaustion, post traumatic stress disorder... each moving the description further away from the lived experience towards an abstraction.
History proves that Institutional Power ensures that a constant flow of instruction is being disseminated via the State, the Media, the Temple and The Flag; the message is broadcast to the school house, to the workforce, into the homes of all the women, the men, the children, the nation.
"This conquest is good. This system is the best. It has flaws, but who doesn't?"
or
"You cannot judge the men who destroyed an entire culture and all its people in the Caribbean in the 1490s by the standards of todays society."
and
"You cannot judge the gropey, misogynistic men of the 1970s with the standards of #metoo."
Wrong.
We can.
We really ought to. Sure, one can claim 'they did not know any better', nonetheless they ignored the harms they caused, they dismissed the qualitative experience and diminished the meaning of those harms just as they dismissed the humanity of those they harmed, and that is the point.
And at the same time, one has to be context aware, in the sense that so much behaviour is culturally engendered, we can understand that free will is a truism rather than a fundamental. A person traumatised in childhood or at any other time, who is rendered unable to heal that trauma will present behavioural patterns with unconscious or subconscious elements of which he or she has little awareness. They hate but they do not know why.
In empire cults, here are cultural dynamics that enable abusive behaviour.
Any traditional assumptions that justify abuse must be challenged and the culture changed in order to ensure that prevention is possible and then the cultural behaviour will be healed.
In any situation, in any time, in any language, for every person experiencing the reality - one person using power to take abusive advantage over another person - is still a dehumanising and sickening act.
Be it 4,000 BC in Mesopotamia, 40AD in the Roman Empire, Verdun 1916, Vietnam in 1970 or Yemen in 2020 war remains a dehumanising lived experience.
No human being is born designed for that outcome.
George Carlin has a routine about the euphemism of the language used to describe combat trauma - shell shock, battle fatigue, operational exhaustion, post traumatic stress disorder... each moving the description further away from the lived experience towards an abstraction.
History proves that Institutional Power ensures that a constant flow of instruction is being disseminated via the State, the Media, the Temple and The Flag; the message is broadcast to the school house, to the workforce, into the homes of all the women, the men, the children, the nation.
"This conquest is good. This system is the best. It has flaws, but who doesn't?"
or
"You cannot judge the men who destroyed an entire culture and all its people in the Caribbean in the 1490s by the standards of todays society."
and
"You cannot judge the gropey, misogynistic men of the 1970s with the standards of #metoo."
Wrong.
We can.
We really ought to. Sure, one can claim 'they did not know any better', nonetheless they ignored the harms they caused, they dismissed the qualitative experience and diminished the meaning of those harms just as they dismissed the humanity of those they harmed, and that is the point.
And at the same time, one has to be context aware, in the sense that so much behaviour is culturally engendered, we can understand that free will is a truism rather than a fundamental. A person traumatised in childhood or at any other time, who is rendered unable to heal that trauma will present behavioural patterns with unconscious or subconscious elements of which he or she has little awareness. They hate but they do not know why.
In empire cults, here are cultural dynamics that enable abusive behaviour.
Any traditional assumptions that justify abuse must be challenged and the culture changed in order to ensure that prevention is possible and then the cultural behaviour will be healed.
In any situation, in any time, in any language, for every person experiencing the reality - one person using power to take abusive advantage over another person - is still a dehumanising and sickening act.
Be it 4,000 BC in Mesopotamia, 40AD in the Roman Empire, Verdun 1916, Vietnam in 1970 or Yemen in 2020 war remains a dehumanising lived experience.
No human being is born designed for that outcome.
Conquest and enslavement, misogyny have always been dehumanising crimes, irrespective of their legal status at any time, then and now, and they always will be.
World War II was not 'Won'.
Vietnam was not 'Lost'.
Iraq is not 'pacified'.
War is never the bringer of freedom from oppression, it is itself a direct tool of ultimate oppression.
Bloody Euphemisms!
World War II was not 'Won'.
Vietnam was not 'Lost'.
Iraq is not 'pacified'.
War is never the bringer of freedom from oppression, it is itself a direct tool of ultimate oppression.
Bloody Euphemisms!
We, all of us in the industrialised militarised state systems (this is true in every modern developed country to some degree) had no choice but to grow up within a social and material environment we did not make, and we will have tended to internalise, without noticing it, some of that language, and with it, the thinking and behaviour becomes habituated as normal range within that oppressed situation, and naturally enough we come to think of the internalisations as if it is our own thought, our own behaviour, our exercise of free will.
Who are we?
"I am Irish" is abstract,
"I am this human being" is real.
I have been taught to think I am Irish. However I am not, because I am a human being first and last.
It just so happened that I was born in London, and all my surviving siblings were born in Ireland. Accident of birth applies to princes as it does to paupers.
Alpha Male, Competing for Dominance, Victory, Authority, Good Violence, God's Enemies, Husband, Wife, Heirs are all part of the language of conquest.
Much of modern corporate language is the language of conquest, as is all marketing. Marketing is largely the craft of conquest by guile, Empire rules through fear of violence and destitution, aspirational marketing rules by peer pressure and fear of missing out.
Who are we?
"I am Irish" is abstract,
"I am this human being" is real.
I have been taught to think I am Irish. However I am not, because I am a human being first and last.
It just so happened that I was born in London, and all my surviving siblings were born in Ireland. Accident of birth applies to princes as it does to paupers.
Alpha Male, Competing for Dominance, Victory, Authority, Good Violence, God's Enemies, Husband, Wife, Heirs are all part of the language of conquest.
Much of modern corporate language is the language of conquest, as is all marketing. Marketing is largely the craft of conquest by guile, Empire rules through fear of violence and destitution, aspirational marketing rules by peer pressure and fear of missing out.
That the ubiquity and intensity of disruptive opinion messaging associated with the hostile environmental habituation to bullying leads to a variety of chronic stress dynamics that tend to become the most serious breakdowns of health is hardly surprising.
It is also clear to say that resolving those external stressors and de-colonising our own minds and bodies from the language of conquest would do as least as much as any health care intervention might, and probably more. Prevention deserves a healthy budget yet cannot thrive within a hostile environment.
Even if I think you am English, I am not.
There is no such thing as English Flesh. There is no such thing as an English heart, and English Brain - there are no internal biological markers of Englishness.
The idea of Brexit is abstract. That is why no one really knows what it means.
Even if I think you am English, I am not.
There is no such thing as English Flesh. There is no such thing as an English heart, and English Brain - there are no internal biological markers of Englishness.
The idea of Brexit is abstract. That is why no one really knows what it means.
More about the book 'Unlearning The Language of Conquest' here
"The language of conquest is ultimately a language of deceit. It echoes in the corridors of every American institution, building illusion upon illusion while robbing all of us of our collective Indigenous wisdom. This book is an effort to expose and replace this deception.
Although it speaks specifically to the colonization and oppression of America’s First Nations and their potential contributions, which have been suppressed by the lies of our dominant culture, no single race of people can lay claim to “Indigenous wisdom.” It lives deep within the heart of every living creature."
Babies
What this probing of the language of conquest also raises for me is the question of what is language before conquest? If I have never been bullied, what language would I draw upon to tell the story of being bullied for the very first time?
What language dynamics prevail among healthy egalitarian human cultures? The oldest cultural modality of the human species, within which we have truly evolved.
"The language of conquest is ultimately a language of deceit. It echoes in the corridors of every American institution, building illusion upon illusion while robbing all of us of our collective Indigenous wisdom. This book is an effort to expose and replace this deception.
Although it speaks specifically to the colonization and oppression of America’s First Nations and their potential contributions, which have been suppressed by the lies of our dominant culture, no single race of people can lay claim to “Indigenous wisdom.” It lives deep within the heart of every living creature."
Babies
What this probing of the language of conquest also raises for me is the question of what is language before conquest? If I have never been bullied, what language would I draw upon to tell the story of being bullied for the very first time?
What language dynamics prevail among healthy egalitarian human cultures? The oldest cultural modality of the human species, within which we have truly evolved.
Preconquest Consciousness
an essay from the book Tribal Epistemologies: Essays in the Philosophy of Anthropology
E. R. Sorenson
"The preconquest type of consciousness detailed below survives today
only in a few, now rapidly vanishing, isolated enclaves.
Although those
we contacted were widely dispersed, they shared a distinctive type of
consciousness--one very different from the postconquest type that
dominates the world today. It emerged from a type of child and infant
nurture common to that era but shunned in ours.
The outstanding demographic condition required for such a life is
small populations surrounded by tracts of open territory into which
anyone can diffuse virtually at will.
This allows those discomfited by
local circumstance, or attracted by conditions further on, to move as
they wish with whoever might be similarly inclined. This was the case
even in the smallest of all the preconquest enclaves seen.
The
outstanding social condition is a sociosensual type of infant and child
nurture that spawns an intuitive group rapport and unites people without
need for formal rules.
The outstanding psychological condition is
heart-felt rapprochement based on integrated trust. This provides
remarkable efficiency in securing needs and responding to nature's
challenges while dispensing ongoing delight with people and surroundings"
The language of the infant and the mother infant relationship of empathy and nurture, developed during pregnancy being the beginnings of human language learning.
What does the language of leaving an infant alone, to cry to sleep teach?
What does it speak of?
Brexit
The Surrender Bill aka The Benn Act or The EU Withdrawal (No.2) Act 2019
Language, again.
Conquest Language, Saboteurs, Traitors, Collaborators, Enemies of The People, Super State, Sovereignty.
Kill Bill. The heroic psychopath you can identify with.
"Humbug!" to concerns about verbal threats and abuse associated with political violence against MPs.
Again, and again The Surrender Bill.
A deliberate caricature designed to incite emotional anger at the thought of 'betraying' of the loss of ''Sovereignty', triggered within people who have, through no fault of their own, internalised the language of conquest, as independent minded conquerors reclaiming their native independence when we are in fact powerless and too distant from power to ever mediate it.
We all are, in the face of the State, and other large institutional power bases, rendered impotent.
And as we witness the escalation of language to increase tension, to trigger anger, rage, wrath and fear.
The media public is not the real public. There are too many decent people, already active
The media public is a caricature.
The real public is real people : diverse, mostly decent, kind people dealing with what ever they are faced with, with as much dignity and grace and love as they can muster, doing their best under some very trying circumstances, within a dysfunctional hierarchy culture.
Entertainment within a culture of hierarchy of power and status and privilege must function as political conditioning theatre, a distraction narrative, aimed at the consumers, as voters in factions, whilst in board rooms, conference halls and in hotels and on yachts, in think tanks and public and private funded University and research institutions, the detailed work progresses privatisation of the commons in unison.
They use the language of conquest to divide us, they use democratic deliberation among themselves to wage war against us.
We need to build social solidarity through honesty and meeting our real needs as persons, as human being, not as institutionalised commodities - as in The Expendable Work Force. That is not who we are.
We need to use more than questioning, more than the 'I don't trust them' approach to bear down upon the lies and manipulation, the liars and the gaslighting.
We need to understand, to know what we are truly dealing with. We need to grapple with the evidence, and we need to set belief and opinion aside to do that.
The media public is a caricature.
The real public is real people : diverse, mostly decent, kind people dealing with what ever they are faced with, with as much dignity and grace and love as they can muster, doing their best under some very trying circumstances, within a dysfunctional hierarchy culture.
Entertainment within a culture of hierarchy of power and status and privilege must function as political conditioning theatre, a distraction narrative, aimed at the consumers, as voters in factions, whilst in board rooms, conference halls and in hotels and on yachts, in think tanks and public and private funded University and research institutions, the detailed work progresses privatisation of the commons in unison.
They use the language of conquest to divide us, they use democratic deliberation among themselves to wage war against us.
We need to build social solidarity through honesty and meeting our real needs as persons, as human being, not as institutionalised commodities - as in The Expendable Work Force. That is not who we are.
We need to use more than questioning, more than the 'I don't trust them' approach to bear down upon the lies and manipulation, the liars and the gaslighting.
We need to understand, to know what we are truly dealing with. We need to grapple with the evidence, and we need to set belief and opinion aside to do that.
Kindest regards
Corneilius
"Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe"
Thank you for reading this blog. All we need to do is be really honest, responsive to the evidence we find,and ready to reassess when new evidence emerges. The rest is easy.
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