by Steven Poole
It should not be surprising, either, that the label ‘moderate’ has in recent years been applied to each of Howard Dean,14 Colin Powell,15 and Dick Cheney,16 although the views of those men are rather divergent. The neofascist British National Party, meanwhile, was criticised as being ‘too moderate’ by the father of its own leader.17 ‘Moderate’ is clearly an eminently movable feast.
Ideas of ‘moderation’ also threaten to debase substantive arguments by implying that thoroughly different factors should be accorded the same respect. A ‘moderate’ stance on the environment, for example, might hold that yes, on the one hand, global warming is a huge threat to the planet; but on the other hand ‘economic growth’ is very important, so we must not make too many onerous impositions on polluting businesses. One can better appreciate the erroneous logic of such ‘moderation’ by exaggerating the scenario somewhat. Say that a massive asteroid is hurtling towards Earth, threatening billions of deaths. Some people call for the mustering of all means possible to divert the rock so that it passes by harmlessly. Others say yes, well, this is obviously a problem, but it would cost a lot of money and effort to make absolutely sure we divert it; why don’t we adopt a ‘moderate’ solution and just knock it slightly off course so that it hits, say, Africa? Clearly there are some issues on which to be ‘moderate’, to compromise, is wrong.
The media has its own special analogue of ‘moderation’, called ‘balance’. Radio and television have a fetish for the duel. In what is called a ‘three-way’, the presenter will chair an argument between two people holding diametrically opposed views. Here again we see the three-points-on-a-line picture. Indeed, the presenter is said to ‘moderate’ the discussion, supposedly adopting a neutral middle ground. Maybe someone once dreamt that, as in the famous Hegelian formula thesis + antithesis = synthesis, such ‘debates’ would illuminate an issue. Mostly they are fatuous shouting matches. Worse, this model of ‘balance’ often leads to a distorted and untruthful view of the facts. Remember the story of the global-warming ‘sceptic’ in such a discussion on the BBC: he turned out to be paid by an oil company. But even if he hadn’t been merely an industry shill, the very fact of putting one person in front of a microphone to say that global warming is a threat, and another person in front of the opposing microphone to say that it is a phantom menace, implies that the debate at large is similarly ‘balanced’, with about half of experts agreeing with each guest. In the case of global warming, as with evolution versus ‘intelligent design’, this is patently false.
Even if one’s coverage is heavily politically biased, one can still easily claim ‘balance’, by the familiar method of shifting the spectrum’s endpoints. Hence the brilliance of the Fox News Channel’s slogan, ‘Fair and Balanced’. This heavily conservative US media outlet, which, as you will remember, hosts Bill O’Reilly’s denunciations of civil libertarians as ‘terrorists’, refuses to call US Marines ‘snipers’ because it sounds too violent, and reported that the 2005 London Undergound bombings were the first ever ‘homicide attacks’ to have taken place in Western Europe, is certainly not ‘balanced’ in the sense of giving equal time to Republican and Democrat viewpoints, for instance. Yet perhaps it thought of its spectrum as merely stretching from one side of the White House to the other. Seeking illumination, I wrote to Fox’s Senior Vice-President in charge of News Editorial, John Moody. Perhaps, my email wondered, Fox considered itself ‘balanced’ in a wider sense, as a corrective to some perceived ‘liberal bias’ in the media? Moody replied thus: ‘Your project sounds interesting. I believe, however, there is no need for me to explain the idea of balance.’18
Indeed there was not. It was obvious that Fox’s claim to ‘balance’ was a glowingly blatant untruth, but one could not help admiring the power of its insistence. When a graphic screaming ‘Fair and Balanced’ interrupts coverage every few minutes, the claim somehow passes beyond the stage where it might be interpreted as protesting too much, and rockets the channel into a realm where the meaning of words like ‘fair’ and ‘balanced’ is entirely obliterated. They become phatic speech: designed to make the viewer feel good, but not to convey any particular idea to the mind. The void of sincerity in the appeal to ‘balance’ was ably demonstrated by another Fox character. In the wake of the attacks on the US of 11 September 2001, conservatives had criticised certain news stations as ‘unpatriotic’ for, among other things, reporting the toll of civilian casualties in the Afghanistan war. Fox anchor Brit Hume expressed the sentiment like this: ‘Look, neutrality as a general principle is an appropriate concept for journalists who are covering institutions of some comparable quality. This is a conflict between the United States and murdering barbarians.’19
Hume was at least right in that, in the version of the English language that most people spoke outside the Fox network, ‘balance’ did imply a studied neutrality, a refusal to criticise one side more than another – even if the existence of one ‘side’ was more or less fictional. When reporting controversies, newspapers often interpret this idea of neutrality by refusing to do any more than simply relay what is said to them by each party. This results in an abrogation of their duty to inform the public, particularly when cynical politicians eagerly exploit this structural feature simply by telling lies.
In the wake of the hurricane that destroyed New Orleans in August 2005, the Washington Post reported that a ‘senior Bush official’ had said that Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco ‘had not declared a state of emergency’ as of 3 September.20 In fact, as would have been easily verifiable had the newspaper checked, the source’s claim was false. Blanco had declared an emergency on 26 August, as the Post’s subsequent correction acknowledged. Such cynical official briefing exemplifies contempt for the ‘reality-based community’. It derives from a tactical low cunning: the idea is simply to buy time, to muddy the waters, in the hope that by the time the falsehood is exposed it will be old news.
A special case of this phenomenon occurs when politicians claim to be ‘clarifying’ what they have previously said. In January 2005, Senator Joe Lieberman, on being asked about ‘social-security reform’, said: ‘If we can figure out a way to help people through private accounts or something else, great.’21 Two months later, the New York Times reported:
Mr. Lieberman this week clarified his position on Social Security, telling his hometown paper, The New Haven Register, that he was ‘totally unconvinced’ by the idea of creating private accounts, calling it ‘a very risky thing to do.’22
It is not clear in this instance even whether Lieberman used the term ‘clarified’ himself; if he had not, the report demonstrated an unseemly eagerness to assist in the rhetorical massage of his volte-face. A more blatant ‘clarification’ taught readers about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s concern for the environment:
Mr. Schwarzenegger has long been a booster of the gas-guzzling Hummer, the S.U.V. that groups like the Sierra Club love to hate. On one campaign stop, he made an offhand remark suggesting that the state should abolish its E.P.A [Environmental Protection Agency]. Mr. Schwarzenegger’s advisers later clarified the remark and said he supported the E.P.A.23
In Unspeak, then, ‘clarification’ means simple denial or lying. Politicians and their spokespeople may claim to ‘clarify’; newspapers that uncritically adopt that weasel word collude in public deception and grant their imprimatur to official dishonesty.
Forward, not back
The idea of a linear spectrum of ideas, and so a virtuous kind of ‘moderation’ in the middle, is hard to get rid of since it is inherent in the ordinary language used to describe political views: ‘right wing’ and ‘left wing’. To use these phrases implies all too easily that there are only ever two sides to every question, and that the Conservative and Labour, or Republican and Democrat, positions on every conceivable issue by themselves exhaust the entire repertoire of possible thought about the subject. Blair and Clinton’s boast, in the late 1990s, of a ‘Third Way’ was a clever propaganda strategy exploiting this very
idea, turning the somewhat tepid position of ‘moderation’ into one of thrusting dynamism. Yet, like ‘moderation’, a Third Way can mean just about anything depending on how you draw the spectrum, which explains why Third Ways had previously been declared by Hitler and Mussolini, as well as by French Communists in the 1970s. By the end of Tony Blair’s second term in government, however, Labour no longer talked of a third way. The newly fashionable mode of rhetoric was a resurrected old favourite: the false dichotomy.
A false dichotomy proposes only two alternatives when there are actually many. This is evident in the simple sloganeering of Labour’s 2005 election campaign, whose catchphrase was ‘Forward, not back’. According to this image, we ride a single axis of history; a groove or rail or world-spirit-teleology points in only one possible direction towards the utopian horizon. Anyone who would prefer another bearing must be a retrograde philosopher, because the only other possible direction is backwards. The only vehicle in which you can go either forward or back, and in no other direction, is a train. But whereas an ordinary train has a destination, where it stops, the train of progress can never stop. It is a perpetual train. Moreover, so as to avoid any disagreeable notion of circularity, of getting back to where you started, we must imagine that this train makes its epic journey on a boundless flat Earth. ‘Forward, not back’ is a quasi-totalitarian view – the leader maps out the only possible future and invites merely our monologic assent – mingled with an Italian-Futurist notion of the erotics of speed and machinery.
Another use of the false dichotomy is to invent a position opposed to your own that is patently absurd, so as to encourage the view that your own opinion is the only reasonable one. Thus, George W. Bush’s chief strategist, Karl Rove, said in 2005: ‘Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.’24 The fact that this was just a fantasy was irrelevant. Simply invoking the absurdity of one imaginary ‘extreme’ worked to bolster the apparent rationality of what ‘conservatives’ did, and buried any debate over what kind of ‘war’ it was appropriate to prepare for, and how it and its sequels should or should not be conducted. One could, if one wished, read Rove’s proposition as an appeal to ‘moderation’ by imagining the symmetrically opposing ‘extreme’: say, a bellicose recommendation to shower all the ‘Axis of Evil’ countries with Peacekeepers – the nuclear, rather than the UN sort. Then one would be led to the happy conclusion that everything the government subsequently did was correct, by virtue simply of falling in the middle of two ridiculous alternatives that no one actually proposed.
Regime change
Zealously offering up false dichotomies already debases thought in political adverts or rabble-rousing speeches; but when they are used to frame arguments over large strategic decisions, they become positively dangerous. This is what happened during the run-up to the 2003 war in Iraq. It can be traced in the use of one phrase of Unspeak: ‘regime change’.
To begin with, ‘regime’ in our time is already a term that connotes disapproval of what it describes. Whereas it used to mean any system of government, a neutral sense that persists in non-political usages such as ‘exercise regime’, to call a government a ‘regime’ nowadays is to say that it is somehow illegitimate, whether it be headed by a genocidal dictator or just not ‘democratic’ in the special sense of being friendly to privatisation by western companies. One hears of the ‘regime’ in Iran, North Korea, and Cuba, but not often of the Bush regime or even the Berlusconi regime. So to call a government a ‘regime’ is already to say that it would be nice to change it. This point was made with ironic force by anti-Bush bumper stickers that appeared in the US when war was rumbling in the distance, saying: ‘Regime change begins at home.’25
According to Bush officials and supporters, ‘regime change’ had already become US policy towards Iraq with the Clinton government’s Iraq Liberation Act of 1998.26 Pro-war commentators often pointed to this in order to ward off the charge that invading Iraq was a specifically neo-conservative scheme. And now stop. Go back. In the two sentences you have just read, the Unspeak sleight of hand has already been accomplished. Because the concept of ‘regime change’ in Iraq was never synonymous with invading that country. In fact the specific phrase does not occur in the Iraq Liberation Act, which instead expresses the policy thus:
It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.27
The legislation says a lot about supporting the ‘Iraqi democratic opposition’, but nothing about invading that country. Even if you then refer to its aim with the shorthand ‘regime change’, that phrase still only expresses a wish as to a result – a new government – but does not name any particular means of attaining that end. Going to war was one such possible means, but there were numerous other ideas about how to get rid of Saddam Hussein. This was confirmed by none other than Paul Wolfowitz, regarded by many as one of the original architects of the war. By 2005, it was clear that the invasion had not been the quick, simple win that its propagandisers had promised, and Wolfowitz now claimed that he had preferred a different plan all along: to arm Iraqis to take back their own country, supporting them from the air if necessary.
I changed my view after 9/11 […] Contrary to the myth that I have been waiting all along for an excuse to invade Iraq, before then I really didn’t want to even think about sending in U.S. ground forces. I had always thought the idea of occupying Baghdad was both unnecessary and a mistake. What was needed was to arm and train the Iraqis to do the job themselves – the way, in effect, the Afghans did, by taking advantage of the fact that a third of the country was already liberated. I advocated supporting them with air power if necessary. I remember congressional testimony where I think I may have used the phrase – maybe someone else did – ‘reducing Saddam to the mayor of Baghdad,’ at which point he would collapse. It was sometimes called the enclave strategy, disparagingly, although I still don’t know what was wrong with it.’28
Here Wolfowitz has it pleasantly both ways. He describes the mode of ‘regime change’ that he preferred before 11 September 2001, and says that after that he ‘changed his view’. Yet in what respect he changed it is not clear, because he ends up saying that he still doesn’t know what was wrong with the old, non-invasion plan.
In any case, the idea, confirmed by Wolfowitz, that there was at least one way to accomplish ‘regime change’ without actually invading the country was suppressed in the arguments for war. Instead, a false dichotomy was painted. Either we invade Iraq, or we do nothing, thus encouraging Saddam in his plans. As presented to the public, the case thus boiled down to: invade or capitulate. Watch how Tony Blair expressed the idea: ‘Now I had a decision to make as to whether to leave Saddam there, in breach of UN resolutions, and end up in a situation with the international community humiliated and him emboldened, or to remove him. I decided to remove him. […] There was no middle way, there was no fence to sit on.’29 Blair’s self-dramatisation as a lone decision-maker at a critical point in history was somewhat unconvincing to those aware that he had already secretly agreed back in 2002 to help in any US invasion.30 And, though there was much discussion in US and UK media on the question of whether governments had lied about yellowcake uranium in Niger, or ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that could be fired in forty-five minutes, the controversy over these issues of detail distracted from the one really big lie. That was the false dichotomy that said the only options were war or appeasement.
No matter what
So much, then, for Third Ways. The old fallacy of positing bogus alternatives for political expediency, it seemed, was too useful to throw away permanently. It was ‘Forward, not back’. It was, as George W. Bush said, ‘You’re either with us or against us in the fight against terror.’31 Fa
lse dichotomies propose one solution along with an obviously undesirable alternative; they deny the existence of other reasonable plans of action. Speak war, and unspeak any serious alternatives.
Before you have even engineered a special Unspeak phrase, then, you may commit an act of structural Unspeak by drawing a biased map of the terrain on which your argument will sit. Denunciations of what is ‘extreme’, appeals to ‘moderation’ or ‘balance’, and the exploitation of false dichotomies all help to prepare the ground in which a little verbal seed such as ‘regime change’, or ‘anti-social behaviour’, or ‘war on terror’ will germinate and grow into a mighty tree. Many types of Unspeak are themselves false dichotomies, too: ‘pro-life’ sets up a false choice between being for life and against it; ‘ethnic cleansing’ encourages you to think that the choice is between hygiene and filth.
Topographical metaphors that draw an arbitrary spectrum of ideas, and false dichotomies that deny the existence of real alternatives, then, are Unspeak in their very structure: Unspeak writ large. What might we call the people who indulge in such misdirection? On the basis that no one can be wrong all the time, let us consult Bill O’Reilly. ‘An extremist is someone who rejects facts and holds on to opinions no matter what,’ he said one night on Fox. ‘Extremists have a neurosis. They really don’t want to hear anything other than the conclusion they’ve arrived at, no matter what the evidence suggests.’32 Well, quite. Perhaps this called for a global struggle after all.