The Myth of Moral Equivalence Jeane J. Kirkpatrick
"The Soviets have made extraordinarily great progress in extending their own influence and projecting their own semantic rules upon the rest of the world.
Another major dimension of the Soviet assault on our values takes place through the systematic redefinition of the terms of political discourse. George Orwell, as usual, has said it very well in his Epilogue to 1984. He said the purpose of "Newspeak" was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to devotees of "Ingsoc," but to make all other modes of thought impossible.
Terrorist groups do not violate human rights in the current vernacular; only governments violate human rights.
The semantics of human rights and national liberation movements are extraordinary. It is necessary only to look at the sober discussions of human rights in such places as the Amnesty International Reports or the Helsinki Watch discussions to see that those organizations and most of the people who discuss the subject today are using skewed vocabulary which guarantees the outcome of the investigation by definition. The "newspeak" of human rights morally invalidates the governments by definition and morally exculpates the guerillas by definition. The theft of words like genocide and the language which appears in documents like the United Nations Charter and the Geneva Convention are other examples of systematic comprehensive effort at semantic rectification."
Now Iraq democracy is being attacked by similar tactics both in Iraq and by "peace loving people of the world", the "perfect peace" of dictatorship, not the imperfect peace of democracy.
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