First step to restoring coherent politics: scrap the misleading labels 'Left' and 'Right'
By Gerald Warner UK Last updated: September 10th, 2009
George Orwell, with his satirical invention of “Newspeak”, drew attention more effectively than anybody else to the phenomenon whereby it is possible, by policing language, to control thought. If people lack the vocabulary, because it has been proscribed, to express ideas differing from the prevailing orthodoxy, then the public articulation of arguments critical of the ruling order becomes impossible.
We have seen this totalitarian method in operation recently, by the imposition of the mealy-mouthed euphemisms of political correctness on all public expression, a method of social control pioneered by the Frankfurt School Marxists whose system now controls a society that deludes itself it is “free”. Until the vocabulary of discourse is broadened, that freedom will remain illusory.
So, where to start? How do we begin to peel back the corner of the postage stamp that is franked with our verbal enslavement? The best beginning would be to abolish the moronic use of the misleading terms “Left” and “Right” to describe (more accurately, distort) ideological positions. This terminology is now ubiquitous. It is a straitjacket that prevents rational analysis of political realities – and that is how the “Left” likes it.
The terms first came into existence to describe the seating arrangements in the French National Assembly in 1789, at the beginning of the Revolution. The conservative partisans of the ancien régime, the established order, sat on the right of the president’s chair and became known as the Côté Droit (right side), while the revolutionaries, seated on the president’s left, became known as the Côté Gauche (left side). Thomas Carlyle, with his love of picturesque detail, brought the terms into prominence in the English-speaking world through his history of the Revolution.
Even so, they did not enter common political currency until generations later. Some authorities credit the psychologist William James with first popularising the term “left wing”, in its modern sense, in 1897. Certainly by the 1930s – an era of almost as prevailing charlatanry as our own – the insidious terminology had become universal. As a tool of Marxist propaganda, it was ideal. The aim was to fabricate two conflicting ideological labels and to encompass all political thought within this straitjacket.
A spurious moral identity was then imposed, simplistic as the white hats/black hats, goodies/baddies identities in Western films, so that “Right-wing” would become a derogatory term and “Left-wing” a badge of moral superiority. The fact that the “Left”, during the course of the 20th century, murdered 100 million people was not permitted to destabilise this moral ascendancy: you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs.
From the beginning, it was false. “Left-wing” was not even allowed to describe all socialism: national socialism, in every degree as revolutionary as its imagined antonym international socialism, was arbitrarily labelled “Right-wing”. Then, with the fall of official communism, even as its Frankfurt version triumphed in the West, the labels became downright cretinous. For example, ex-Soviet commanders advancing with armoured columns to overthrow Boris Yeltsin and restore the Marxist Leninist/Stalinist order, were universally described as “Right-wing”.
Recently, critics have complained about the inanity of describing the British National Party, with its socialist agenda, as “Right-wing”. Who ever imagined this terminology was about ideological accuracy? To the progressive establishment “Right-wing” means simply something of which it disapproves. The term “right-wing extremist” is common currency in the media. How often does the BBC employ the term – even of Marxists – “left-wing extremist”?
There are already the first stirrings of a move to brand repudiation of “man-made” climate change fantasies as “right-wing”. It is time we grew up and shook off the shackles of this idiotic and totally misleading terminology.
