The Semantic Front
by Neville E. Hanover, director, The SemantiCentre, Greater Freelton Area College of Applied Arts and Technology, Freelton, Ontario
[For a discussion of the stunning prescience this article turned out to demonstrate, click here.]The imperialist mission of the United States of America has entered a new semantic phase with the accession of George W. Bush to power. Initially Mr. Bush erected his justification of American hegemony on the foundation laid after the Second World War. American foreign policy had been floundering since the disappearance of the Evil Empire whose existence President Reagan claimed to have discerned. Since the Second Word War it has been apparent that to get Americans interested in the world outside the borders of the United States you have to depict foreign countries as full of evil people conspiring to destroy America, take its women, and outlaw hunting.
For years the Communists filled the bill as the evil headliners, but then they inconveniently fell from power in most of the countries in which they held sway. China remained conveniently Communist, but allowing it to continue as the evil headliner on the wrestling card of world politics might have impaired the efforts of American business to exploit the vast market they believed existed there for American goods, or for American-owned goods at least.
Efforts were made to promote other groups as the source of all evil in the world, principally the Serbs. However, the obvious lack of Serbian influence outside Yugoslavia made it difficult to portray Serbs as the evil opponents of the American way throughout the world.
In general the problem was the absence of any nation or group with enough international influence to scare the bejesus out of Americans. Even al-Qaeda was too limited in scope to be plausibly depicted as a potential destroyer of the American way of life. George W. Bush's masterstroke was to realize that if no one nation could fill the bill, three might. From this realization came the Axis of Evil. Each of the three nations in the Axis of Evil might not appear to threaten the existence of the United States, but the three of them acting together might.
So far Mr. Bush's policy was simply one of restoring the traditional themes of American foreign policy – paranoia, hysteria, and megalomania. However, in recent weeks he has made his own contribution to the history of American foreign policy. While it has been made at the level of semantics, it is nevertheless a potent and far-reaching one.
This modification is the introduction of the term "weapons of mass destruction." Of course, it is reasonable to speculate that the reason Mr. Bush introduced this term is that his advisers were not confident of his ability to pronounce the phrase "nuclear and biological weapons" correctly. However, the problem with that explanation is that "nuclear and biological weapons" is a much more terrifying phrase than "weapons of mass destruction." After decades of scare propaganda the mere mention of nuclear or biological weapons can get people worried. There must have been a serious reason for the abandonment of this phrase and the obseesive parroting of the new one.
The point, of course, is that every nation on the face of the earth has weapons of mass destruction. September 11, 2001, showed that airliners can be weapons of mass destruction, and even Canada still equips its armed forces with standard weapons of mass destruction such as bombs (although I am sure the Canadian armed forces' bombs are very nice ones which are only dropped after an adequate bilingual warning has been given).
That Iraq, then, possesses weapons of mass destruction is scarcely to be wondered at. That possession of such weapons is to be considered adequate justification for an American military expedition should occasion the rest of us non-Americans considerable unease. The next time Canada complains about hardwood tariffs, for example, need we worry about the discovery by the American administration of weapons of mass destruction in Canada?
Perhaps that is why Tony Blair has been so quick to leap on the American bandwagon. The United Kingdom is replete with weapons of mass destruction – why, its numerous highly priced restaurants lay waste to the principles of cuisine every day! It has recently even conducted its own successful military adventures, thanks to its large and well equipped armed forces. If the United States is out to rid the world of weapons of mass destruction, it wouldn't take much to get it interested in the United Kingdom.
So Mr. Bush's simple semantic change has expanded the imperialistic mission of the United States. Previously it has justified its armed intrusions into the affairs of other countries as necessary to restore order or democracy. Since most countries have order and not all that many have democracy, these pretexts seriously limit the scope for intervention. Weapons of mass destruction, though – everybody's got those.
Many people have described the United Sates' goal in foreign relations to be the establishment of itself as the world's policeman. A fairer assertion might be that the United States' goal is to be the world's crazy neighbour, peering out from behind his (or, of course, her) curtains at the strange people whom the voices have revealed are plotting against him and longing for a chance to sort the evil conspirators out with a selection from his own carefully tended cache of weapons of mass destruction. The difference, of course, is that when the crazy neighbour gets out and starts shooting up the neighbourhood, the police come. When the United States makes one of its armed forays abroad, the authorities wring their hands or get very indignant, but mainly they just tremble and take cover.
September 20, 2002
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