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9 |
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Extending the Equations as a Total Program |
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This primitive assumption-set has, in the world of global market ideology many elaboration of substitution and reversal which together generate an entire omnibus ideological program. In place of �Freedom,� the basic syntax of the doctrine also substitutes for the prime term �Democracy,� �Prosperity,� and �Development.� One can discern the locks of linkage here by trying to find where any of these declared master values is anywhere publicly distinguished, or conceived as in opposition. Each of these concepts, that is, is substituted for any other in the primitive set of equations as the convenience of ideological defense or aggression triggers the program. |
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At the same time, the mind set inverts, at will, the order of equations so that the following structure of equations simultaneously becomes the automatic and overriding program of �free world� discourse: Global Corporate System = Free Market = Freedom = Democracy = Prosperity = Development. Accordingly in converse, opponents of the global corporate system become the Enemy of each and all of these goods as invalidation requires, so that the original equation becomes by negation: Opponents of the Global Corporate System = Opponents of the Free Market = Opponents of Freedom = Opponents of Democracy = Opponents of Prosperity = Opponents of Development. |
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Internalization of the Program by its Opposition |
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Interestingly, these ever more deeply worn pathways of automaticized equation and conversion come to be accepted at the most primary level by even the most vigorous opponents of the global corporate system. They too astonishingly assume (as even the heroic Maude Barlow does) that the global corporate system is equivalent to �the free market� and �free trade,� and they do this as a matter of preconscious mind-set operation regulating their speech-acts. In particular, they presuppose even in Corporate System = Free Trade = Globalization. |
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Although opponents may not accept the rest of the chain of equivalencies assumed by the dominant doctrine, they have internalized these particular variations on the semantic syntax of the ideology. In consequence, they assume that what they oppose is, in fact, �fire trade� or �globalization when, in truth, what they oppose is neither free trade nor globalization, but corporate oligopoly engineering through investment treaties a totalized regulatory control of domestic economies across the word The Orwellian slogans of the corporate globalizers who are dismantling rights to freedom across the world are in this way made the opposition�s own descriptive terms of what they are opposing. |
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This pre-conscious assumption of the doctrine�s most basic principles of ideological inversion has fatal .consequences. The opposition fails to target what it opposes in public, and so the remainder of the chain of false equations which the public has been conditioned to assume recoils on their criticism. Because they say they are opposed to �free trade� and �globalization,� they are assumed by conditioned minds to be opposing freedom and international interconnectedness, an impossible position to defend. It is as if the opponents of human slavery were to assert in compliance with the slave-owner�s language game that claim they opposed �the rights of private property.� |
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These confusions at the base of the mental frameworks of both the absolutist global corporate ideology and its ever increasing opponents are not permanent. Yet they remain a still-standing fifth column within the new resistance, an unseen scaffolding of thought that collapses opposed meanings and thereby ambiguates the value war which will determine the future of planetary life. This life-and-death war is not clearly understood at even the most foundational level until these false equivalencies are laid bare for what they are. Until exposed, those who put their lives on the line for freedom, democracy and human development in the non-Orwellian senses of these terms will continue to be made to look as if they opposed these very ideals. |
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Delegitimating the Illegitimate |
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From Paris to Seattle to Washington, Prague and Quebec, the ever more pervasively instituted violence and aggression of the global corporate system against its own citizens depends for every step of its public legitimacy on public acceptance of these contradictions of meaning. In the face of the mass public opposition on the streets, the system�s ideologues are driven to ever wilder distortions of meaning and fact to sustain the equation of their overthrow of the public interest as a campaign for �freedom� and �the free market.� |
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In this way, the emerging crisis of legitimacy of the system and its contradictions with factual reality and human life are abolished from view. The growing resistance cannot permit this corporate babble to be reproduced any longer in any public space, any more than consenting to the equation of slavery to one�s freedom of property. Conditioned speech habits which carry the Trojan horse within our concept structures themselves are the collaborators within upon which the occupation depends. |
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John McMurtry |