Disguised words as a means of manipulating public consciousness- Bourgeois Journalism in Wars - Vietnam War Case

From the section; Semantics of propaganda, linguistic mechanism of propaganda
Journalism in Bourgeois Society

A. D. Kulman

 “Language,” wrote O. Huxley, an English writer, and philosopher, “is one of the means that people resort to hide or distort the truth. Finding the reality of war too unpleasant to contemplate calmly, we create a verbal alternative to this reality, parallel to it, but absolutely different in quality from it.”

Although Huxley wrote about this in 1937, his statement extremely accurately defines the modern official propaganda policy of the US ruling circles. The phraseology used by the American media to report what happened in Vietnam and Southeast Asia from 1961 to 1975 is an example of creating such a distorted view of reality in order to justify what cannot be justified.

In order to hide, disguise, smooth over, distort the true situation, not only a number of special terms were created, but also a whole “sub-language”, which some researchers call “Vietnamese-English” (Vietlish, Vietnam English), so it differs in the meaning of words from ordinary English.

The semantic analysis of a number of its key words and expressions, which was carried out at the denotative level, i.e., the relationship between the meaning of the linguistic sign and the object of reality, made it possible to identify the American official propaganda technique of deliberate distortion of information about real facts and events.

From the point of view of the relationship between the sign and its denotation, words can:

a) contain information about the subject that accurately reflects its properties (true denotation);

b) contain information that does not correspond to the properties of a real object (events, qualities, etc.), i.e. false denotation;

c) highlight one of the main (secondary) features of the subject to designate it as a whole.

From the very beginning of the aggression, from 1961, the purpose of American official propaganda was to hide the very fact of US participation in the Vietnam War. Therefore, when reading newspapers of that period, you will not find the words “troops”, “armed forces” anywhere, instead they wrote “advisors” everywhere, even when their number reached 20 thousand. The category of “advisers” included American pilots who committed regular bombing of North and South Vietnam. The bases from which they carried out bombing raids were called "training bases", and the bombings themselves were called "training flights".

And if the pilot did not return after the bombing, then this was officially reported as an “accident during a training flight” (training mission loss). Everything, therefore, looked as if it was not about the war, but about some kind of training activity that was carried out quite far from America.

In 1965 official US propaganda announced the establishment of a "pacification program" and year after year, month after month, Americans were informed of the success of this program.

The word "pacification" means appeasement, calm, restoration of peace, tranquility, order. One journalist described how this “appeasement” took place: “The Vietnamese woman did not pay attention to the crying baby she held in her arms. She looked with hatred as American soldiers fired machine guns at chickens and ducks. Other soldiers shot a buffalo and a yard dog. Then they took away her husband, father, and eldest son, and set fire to the house where all the family belongings were. The flames consumed everything - including the family tomb."

Consequently, the word "pacification" was used by American propaganda to refer to such actions as killing those who resisted, moving people out of villages, destroying domestic animals, burning entire villages. In one newspaper, even such an absurd report once appeared: "One village resisted appeasement so stubbornly that in the end it had to be destroyed."

This is a striking example of false denotation, namely, the use of a word to denote a phenomenon that is directly opposite to what it denotes.

American propaganda undoubtedly took into account the positive connotations of the word "pacification" to achieve the desired result. It is known that the meaning of an individual sign depends not only on what facts and phenomena of reality it refers to, but also on what other signs it is associated with. The latter can reinforce its positive or negative connotations.

In the Roger's Thesaurus, built on the principle of ideas expressed in key words, which correspond to a whole range of concepts associated with them, next to the key word "appeasement" are reconciliation, an offer of peace, an olive branch, a peace pipe, a truce, a cessation of hostilities, White flag.

All these signs, which are included in the same semantic field with the word "appeasement", undoubtedly enhance its positive connotations.

The extreme cases of false denotation include the use of the word "restraint" by American propaganda. On May 8, 1972, in an address to the American people on radio and television, President Nixon declared: "Throughout the war, the United States displayed a degree of restraint unprecedented in the annals of war." How does this statement compare with reality?

It is known that the United States dropped as many tons of bombs on South Vietnam alone as they dropped during the Second World War in all areas where they fought; that the Vietnam War was the longest in U.S. history and fourth in terms of casualties after the Civil War, World War I, and World War II; that the Americans participated in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and in the destruction of their territory.

Journalist R. Chris wrote in the Saturday Review:
“Restraint? Unfortunately, we have become accustomed to the misuse, abuse, and disuse of words. But this was an extraordinary case, even for a politician. I believe the President had in. mind that if we did not support the idea of ​​invading North Vietnam, if we did not destroy the dams on the Red River, if we did not resort to nuclear weapons, if, in short, we completely devastated the country, we can congratulate ourselves on an unprecedentedly civilized behavior."

The false denotation of such terms could not always be kept secret, and then questions of semantics became the subject of discussion at the highest level.

This happened with the phrase "protective reaction". The term was originally coined in 1969 to refer to ground forces who were supposed to seek out and attack North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front formations in order to ostensibly prevent a possible attack.

Even then, he had nothing to do with defense, but meant a direct attack. However, this phrase reached its apogee after 1970, when it began to be used to describe the air war waged by the US Air Force in Vietnam. In 1971, according to Pentagon reports, aircraft made 129 "defensive reaction" sorties. In 1972, when Nixon officially announced that the United States, wishing to contribute to the success of the Paris talks, was refusing active bombing of North Vietnam, all sorties were carried out under the guise of a "defensive response."

In March 1972, the government of the DRV issued a statement stating that in February American troops carried out 139 bombing raids on North Vietnam, dropped more than 2,100 bombs, and fired about two hundred rockets and shells. However, in the reports of the American press, these actions were called "protective reaction" or "routine limited duration protective reaction" (usual, time-limited, protective reaction). So, air raids were presented to the Americans as a tactical defensive technique.

The term "defensive reaction" completely lacks the aggressive nature of the action - attack, the destructive effect - bombardment, and the military nature of the actions is generally removed; on the contrary, there are purely peaceful, ordinary connotations.

When the nature of such atrocious bombings became impossible to hide, a kind of "scapegoat" was chosen - Aviation General D. Lavel, who was demoted and removed from his post for carrying out the bombing allegedly without the sanction of the command. However, during the Senate commission's investigation into the case of General Lavel in July 1972, he stated that he had reported the bombings to the command as officially sanctioned "protective reactions" (defensive reactions). The general believed that the instructions he had received regarding the "protective reaction" implied this nature of the bombing and the command in Saigon knew about it, but nevertheless took his reports of a "protective reaction" for granted. 

The general was removed for "poor knowledge of semantics", but the nature of the bombings did not change, and the term "protective reaction" continued to serve as a cover for them. An employee of one of the airfields, who saw all the reports of the pilots of the 7th Air Army flying to Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam, said that "after such flights, the pilots always wrote in their reports -" protective reaction ".

The practice of American official propaganda shows what a huge power the media owners have over the minds of people. It is they who determine how millions of people will see the world and what their reaction will be. The hero of L. Carroll's book "Through the Looking Glass" Humpty Dumpty said to Alice: "When I use a word, it means exactly what I want it to mean - no more, no less." “The question is,” said Alice, “can you make a word mean so many different things?” - "The question is," replied Humpty Dumpty, - who is the boss - that's all."

Judging by American propaganda, Humpty Dumpty is right: the "master" determines what exactly this or that word should mean. That is why a peaceful fishing schooner, after it was bombed, is listed in official reports as a “waterborne logistic craft” (surface transport vessel), and dead domestic pigs or goats are “pack animals”, that is, supposedly those that were used Vietnamese patriots for strategic purposes.

False denotation is the simplest linguistic tool for manipulating public consciousness, but not very reliable, since a lie in its “pure” form is a dangerous thing, because exposure entails the possibility of losing confidence in the source of information, which in turn drastically reduces the effectiveness of propaganda.

That is why bourgeois journalists make extensive use of more subtle methods, using various specific qualities of linguistic signs, which make it extremely difficult to expose lies.

One of such widespread methods of misinformation was the use of words related to a whole class of objects and phenomena. Their use has huge advantages over southern denotation, because there is no direct distortion of objective reality, therefore, there is no danger of exposure, and at the same time they do not make it possible to form a clear idea of ​​a fact, event, or phenomenon, i.e., the effect of semantic fascination occurs. For example, the word "dishes" is much broader in meaning than the word "kettle". And if we call the teapot "dishes", it will be correct, however, a person who does not see what is at stake will not be able to imagine a specific object - a teapot, although he will get some idea about it. The same applies to abstract concepts. In the English language, words of broad meaning are extremely common, and American propaganda has successfully exploited precisely this quality for its purposes.

For example, the word "involvement", which American propaganda called its aggression in Vietnam, has a very broad meaning: implication, involvement, complicity, participation.

It covers a significant range of phenomena and is used to refer to the most diverse forms of participation in something. Since there is no similar word in Russian, its translation depends on the context in each specific case. In order to demonstrate the breadth of the meanings of this word, here are a few examples. (…)

Thus, verbal "packaging" reliably protects the content from all unpleasant associations, and at the same time there is no risk of exposure, because, undoubtedly, any bomb and other complex weapon is a device, a mechanism, an adaptation.

American military propaganda tried in every possible way to present the actions of American troops in Vietnam not as offensive, but exclusively as defensive (the term "defensive reaction" has already been mentioned above).

Therefore, instead of the words "offensive" and "attack", the words of broad meaning - "operation" and "action" were used. In addition to the fact that the words "operation" and "action" are generic in relation to the words "attack" and "offensive", they have another feature that makes them vaguer and indefinite, namely the lack of strong control.

Such a phrase: “We begin an attack on the enemy” sounds completely different than “We begin an operation in Vietnam”. The words "operation" and "program" also served as a cover for a number of the most brutal actions of the American military, for example, Operation Cedar Falls. Cedar Falls is the name of the genus in America). It involved 30 thousand American troops. The task is to destroy all the villages in the area of ​​"iron triangle" in an area of ​​40 square miles. Troops entered the villages, the population was evacuated, houses and fields were burned.

Operation Phoenix” is a program for the systematic organization of assassination attempts on progressive figures in South Vietnam. On July 19, 1971, I. Colby, the head of this operation, stated that 20,587 suspects had been killed in the course of it and that the program of action was being expanded. "Operation Ranch Hand" (Operation "Agricultural Worker"), "Operation Sunrise" - they were all aimed at the brutal destruction of green areas in Vietnam so that the trees could not give green shoots for tens or even hundreds of years.

Thousands of Vietnamese civilians during the war were forcibly transferred to concentration camps.

These inhuman actions were called "Rural Construction Program", "Revolutionary Development Program", "Rural Development Program".

The word "program" in these contexts allowed it to play another important role - to create the impression that the Americans were not so much fighting in Vietnam as participating in its development in every possible way and helping in various aspects of civilian life. Thus, the use of words of broad meaning and generic instead of specific ones in propaganda is an extremely effective means of masking reality. The facts are reported, but the amount of information transmitted when using such words is practically reduced to zero, because instead of the concrete, causing certain images and associations, the undivided general appears.

Unlimited possibilities in the manipulation of public consciousness are given by the choice of one or another language symbol to designate a fact or phenomenon of reality (nomination), because most of the phenomena are multifaceted and allow for different interpretations.

Revealing the essence of the nomination, V. I. Lenin gives its definition given by L. Feuerbach: he says: the name is "a distinctive sign, some conspicuous sign that I make the representative of the object, characterizing the object in order to imagine it in its totality" .

When choosing this differential feature, there is a certain pragmatic attitude, which does not manifest itself in the act of nomination.

The social pragmatic aim of official US propaganda in covering the Vietnam War was to impose a distorted and tendentious view of American aggression in this part of the globe.

Bourgeois propaganda also successfully uses another method - the choice of a secondary, insignificant differential feature in order to "represent an object in its totality" (inaccurately orienting nomination).

When American bombers dropped bombs on civilians in South Vietnam, this was reported not as "bombing errors", but as "guidance errors" (navigation errors), "misdirection" and "technical errors". Undoubtedly, the inaccuracy of guidance, and errors in the course of the aircraft, and technical problems are different aspects of the same phenomenon. But the main, defining sign in this case is that the bombing was carried out and the bombs killed civilians. But the word "bombardment" (bombing) in the official lexicon of the Pentagon propagandists was banned, instead they used a number of euphemisms: "protective reaction" (defensive reaction), "limited air strike" (limited air strike), "armed reconnaissance" (armed intelligence), etc. Speaking to reporters, Colonel D. Opfer, the US Air Force Attaché in Phnom Penh, said: “You write all the time - bombing, bombing, bombing. This is not a bombing. This is air support."

Another example of a falsely orienting nomination is the use of the expression "sanitized belt". It is known that in 1967, during a meeting between the presidents of the United States and South Vietnam, an agreement was reached on the creation of the so-called “sanitized belt” (“health belt”, sanitized area). The verb "sanitize" means to destroy dirt and pathogenic microbes, to provide or improve sanitary conditions, to ride. During the creation of such a “belt”, the population was forcibly evicted, all the trees were cut down, the land was cultivated with bulldozers, defensive positions were built with machine guns, cannons, and mines. 

In fact, it was the creation of a "dead zone" to fight the Vietnamese patriots. And again, to represent the whole phenomenon, a false sign is chosen, moreover, it has positive connotations. As in the case of “technical errors”, here the attribute “sanitized” carries the main misleading load, while the defined word “belt” is the true denotation.

Exactly on the same principle, the names of the camps for the civilian population forcibly evicted from different villages were invented: “strategic hamlets (strategic villages), “resettlement centers (settlement centers), “New Life hamlets (villages of new life), “pacification center (peace centers). A journalist from The New York Times described the creation of these villages as follows: “People are rounded up, they are surrounded by barbed wire, and a “strategic village is ready.

In fact, it was the creation of a "dead zone" to fight the Vietnamese patriots. And again, to represent the whole phenomenon, a false sign is chosen, moreover, it has positive connotations.

As in the case of “technical errors”, here the attribute “sanitized” carries the main misleading load, while the defined word “belt” is the true denotation. Exactly on the same principle, the names of the camps for the civilian population forcibly evicted from different villages were invented: “strategic hamlets (strategic villages), “resettlement centers (settlement centers), “New Life hamlets (villages of new life), “pacification center (peace centers). A journalist from The New York Times described the creation of these villages as follows: “People are rounded up, they are surrounded by barbed wire, and a “strategic village is ready. That is, in fact, these were typical “concentration camps.

But they were not called that, because then the question would arise why the fight against the civilian population is being waged; in addition, the phrase "concentration camp" has too strong negative connotations.

The phrases “resettlement centers “strategic hamlets”, “New Life hamlets”, “pacification center” are devoid of such connotations and generally do not evoke any associations with war, disasters, violence, rather, on the contrary, testify to the “creative” role that the United States, according to American official propaganda, they played in Vietnam. It should also be noted here that in the combinations "resettlement center", "pacification center" the word "center" of a broad meaning, largely semantically emptied, plays an important role in reducing the amount of information carried by phrases. The combination of a falsely orienting nomination with the use of words of broad meaning undoubtedly increases the propaganda effect of these phrases.

The invasion of American and South Vietnamese troops into Laos in February 1971 was one of the hardest nuts for the semantics of American propaganda. The troops entered the territory of a sovereign state - this is an indisputable invasion. But Washington called it an "incursion" and officially objected to journalists regarding this action as an "invasion".

"Invasion" and "incursion" are words of the same synonymous series. Why was the obvious preference given to the second word? This noun is derived from the verb "invade", which means "to enter the country with armed forces in order to attack" (A. Hornby's dictionary); "invasion" - "the entry of the army into the country for conquest" (M. Webster's dictionary). From the verb "invade" you can form "invader" - "agent of action", or otherwise "aggressor".

The word "incursion" is interpreted as a surprise attack or invasion (not always for the purpose of permanent occupation). A. Hornby gives an example of its typical use: "The Danish incursions op our coasts in early times" (Dane raids on our coast in antiquity). The noun "incursion" has no corresponding verb and no agent of action.

In addition, it is related to the word "excursion" - which suggests that "incursion" is just a somewhat impolite form of "excursion", which does not sound as scary as "invasion".

Consequently, "invasion" and "incursion" are words that are close in meaning, but have a subtle semantic difference, on which American propaganda played, using the technique of an inaccurately orienting nomination. In addition, the absence of negative political connotations from the word "incursion" also helped to camouflage the aggressive nature of US policy in Southeast Asia.

The desire to reduce everything to everyday details, to remove the extraordinary nature of the situation can also be traced in the names that were given to various types of weapons.

For example, the chemical defoliants that the troops used to destroy green areas in jungles were called “weed-killers” by military propaganda, that is, the same as those that Americans buy in their hardware stores were called, although the first could destroy the vegetation at a distance of 15 miles from the place where they were dropped.

In addition to full-fledged lexemes, American propaganda also makes extensive use of word-terms. Terms are inherently unambiguous and therefore carry the clearest and most specific information.

They contribute to communication between specialists in a particular field of knowledge, as they provide the best way to transfer information accurately and adequately. However, the terms have another side: knowing their meaning gives one hundred percent information, ignorance - zero. That is why, when technical terms are used in politics, they hide the true nature of what is happening. At the same time, in propaganda, terms perform another important function - the mystical function of special words, which has been used by shamans, sorcerers and clergy since ancient times. The presence of special words in speech gives an aura of respectability and higher knowledge to people who use them andinspires respect and trust in the source of information.

For a number of years, as already mentioned, American troops destroyed the nature of Vietnam, using a variety of means, from defoliants to napalm. However, their actions were called a very vague, but scientific-sounding phrase "Routine improvement of visibility in jungle areas" or "resources control".

S. Schanber, a New York Times journalist, wrote that officials in Saigon used a language that had nothing to do with ordinary English when they told reporters about the war. So, planes do not drop bombs and do not hit with missiles - they “deliver charges to the target” (deliver ordnance); napalm is referred to as "soft ordnance" (soft charge).

 In addition, there have been attempts to replace the word "napalm" with other, unfamiliar, pseudoscientific terms, such as "naphtagel" and "incendagel".

Metaphors are also a specific form of nomination that is used to create images. Words have a certain expressive coloring.

We define the expressive component of meaning as “information about the emotional attitude (usually positive or negative) of the speaker to the property of the denotation, which the expressive word reports (information about this property constitutes its content).

For example, American soldiers called the Vietnamese "gooks", "dinks”, and "slopes" (different words for "cross-eyed"), which indicated not only a certain property of denotation (slanting eyes), but also that the soldiers were Vietnamese with contempt, considered them racially inferior to themselves.

Like the Nazis, who called their victims “parasites”, “lice”, etc., American military propaganda used metaphors with a negative expressive coloring to describe the fighters of the National Liberation Front and with a positive one to show the “exploits” of their soldiers: “. .. Our tigers jumped from the helicopters into the VC hornet's nest.

Such methods of manipulating public consciousness had an impact not only on the external audience, but also on people who directly took part in the war.

 The pilots who bombed the settlements of Vietnam did not talk about their actions as acts of murder, they called it a "job". So, one of the pilots of the B-52 bomber admitted: “You don’t think that you are flying to kill someone. You say, “We got a job to do and let's go out and do it”. Another pilot said he often thought of his job as a long-distance truck driver.

The use of various euphemisms when describing the actions of American troops in Vietnam actually led to the creation of a number of taboo words in the lexicon of American military propaganda. These include “war”, “aggression”, “bombing”, “offensive”, “concentration camp”, “defoliants”, “napalm”, etc. President of the American Linguistic Society D. Bolinger wrote:

“America is the first society that has achieved a real taboo on everything unpleasant”, The study of the mechanism of manipulating public consciousness at the linguistic level allows us to conclude that the main means of this is a complex political euphemism, which is based on:

1. The use of broad words and generic words. Due to the fact that their semantics are greatly weakened, they represent extremely insignificant, general, vague information about the described phenomena, depriving them of specific, characteristic, differential features: involvement, conflict, device, action, operation, program, center, reaction.

2. Using positively connoted words to create false information about events: pacification, New Life hamlets, sanitized belt, protective reaction.

3. Using a layer of everyday vocabulary to remove the extraordinary nature of the situation and reduce all phenomena to everyday, familiar: baby-nuke, weedkiller, pineapple bomb, spider bomb, guava bomblet.

4. Metaphors as words with an expressive meaning for expressing a personal attitude to phenomena: gooks, dinks, slopes, tigers, VC hornet's nest.

5. The use of specific terms not for more accurate, unambiguous information, but for its complete concealment: routine improvement of visibility in jungle areas, resources control, soft ordnance, civilian infrastructure, protective reaction.

The study of various types of political euphemisms shows how skillfully bourgeois propagandists act in their activities to manipulate public consciousness, presenting the audience with a distorted picture of the world. The “Crooked Mirror” is created not only from big lies, but also from an abundant amount of untruths, half-truths, common words, incomprehensible terms, pompous phrases.

Such a language creates a psychologically impenetrable barrier that separates people from real objects and phenomena. “I contend,” wrote Congressman R. Drinan, “that if any statement by the US Department of Defense was made in some ancient language incomprehensible to anyone, we would know a little less about the true military policy and intentions of our government than we know now. As can be seen from this statement, such a propaganda technique justifies itself - it does not provide objective information.