Western Producer staff
“When a new sect springs up, that is to say a new religion, the first effort is to destroy the old or existing one and when it happens that the founders of the new religion speak a different language, then the destruction of the old religion is easily affected.”
– Niccolo Machiavelli
It is a political truism as old as the Romans and Machiavelli, as modern as George Orwell and as recent as Ronald Reagan.
To effect a revolution, to change a system, to win a political point, first take possession of the language. Call a killer, war-making missile a “Peacemaker.”
Read Also
Kochia has become a significant problem for Prairie farmers
As you travel through southern Saskatchewan and Alberta, particularly in areas challenged by dry growing conditions, the magnitude of the kochia problem is easy to see.
Package lies as truth.
Change the meaning of words so that average consumers of information don’t know what to believe.
It is a game often played in Canada as politicians have tried to mask politics-as-usual tactics behind benign slogans like “national reconciliation” and “regional fairness.”
As the New Democratic Party marched away from socialism toward special-interest pleading, its partisans began to call themselves “social democrats” rather than “democratic socialists”, insisting it was the same thing. History has revealed the lie.
It is a word game also being played out now in the agriculture debate.
What once was considered the “right wing” has seized the vocabulary, as well as the agenda. Consider just several examples in the current debate over the future of farm policy.
As the Liberals abandon the essence of the supply management system, being the ability to control supply by being able to confidently predict imports, they also have changed the definition. “Orderly marketing” has now replaced “supply management” in heart-felt promises of protection.
Is it really the same thing?
Then there is the process that governments, corporations, grain companies and railways have been engaging in during recent decades – rationalization.
By that, they mean cutbacks, service cuts, job losses and retrenching.
But by commandeering the root word “rational”, it lends the process an aura of thoughtful inevitability. After all, “rational” means reasonable or logical, according to Webster’s Dictionary.
Now comes the perversion of the word “progressive.”
Through Twentieth Century Canadian history, progressive has denoted someone on the Left, farmers who believe in pooling or Canadians who believe in collective responsibility. Increasingly, though, it has come to mean the opposite.
Agricultural economists, bureaucrats and the “market-oriented” right wing in the farm debate have taken to using the word to describe those they see as “innovators”, “risk-takers”, “market entrepreneurs”. It is the opposite of those who believe in averaging through pooling.
The new meaning of “progressive” has yet to win universal acceptance but it likely will.
Since “progressive” has a far more positive ring, the redefinition will herald the beginning of the final victory for the new apostles of market forces.
