Colin Todhunter: The Lies of Democracy and the Language of Deceit

In an increasingly media driven age, language is everything, and is often used by officialdom to tyrannize meaning. With the deaths of millions on its hands since 1945, the US has become the world's number one terror state. By the 1980's, former CIA man John Stockwell had put the figure at six million. As a recent article has indicated, from mass bombing in Southeast Asia, to employing death squads in South America, the US military and the CIA have been directly and indirectly responsible for an updated figure of an estimated ten million deaths. But its not called mass murder these days. Ironically, the US has hijacked the word terror to justify its brand of tyranny through a war on terror. You can also add to that ten million, countless others, whose lives have been sacrificed on the altar of corporate profit, which did not rely on the military to bomb people and countries into submission, but on a certain policy. It's not browbeating, it's structural adjustment. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Indian farmers have taken their own lives over the past decade and a half, largely as a result of US agribusiness manipulating global commodity prices, courtesy of policies enacted on its behalf by the US government, or due to the corporate monopoly, or frontier technology, of terminator seeds that also landed farmers in debt, which was too much to bear. The plight of Indian farmers is not unique. How many lives have been cut short across the world, because of the inherent structural violence, or silently killing of the everyday seemingly benign functioning of predatory capitalism? The built in inequalities of the system have effectively stolen years from people's lives, the health from their bodies, the livelihoods from their hands, the water from their taps, and food from their plates. From the UK to Africa, the subjugated classes, the now often discarded economic fodder during times of war, or the returning heroes to be thrown overboard by the system on coming home, the people who are to be manipulated and exploited at will, via bogus notions of nationalism or the national interest, have had their lives cut short, or stripped bare of opportunities due to the hardships imposed by the iron fist of capitalism.