Transposing Meaning

    In a recent twitter controversy, which as always is but a tempest in a teapot, Candace Owens, @RealCandaceO, in attempting to explain her political ideology as a nationalist in contrast to those labeled globalists.  However, in so doing made an unfortunate reference to Hitler stating that it was not his nationalism which created the problems but his global designs of invading neighboring countries.

Of course numerous people pounced on that ill phrased analogy re-characterizing what she had said into “he had the authority to murder the Jewish Germans because he had the lawful authority as the executive,” which is nowhere near what she actually said.

(Just as a side note, had that been the case, there being only about 300k Jewish Germans and another 200k Jewish Austrians, compared to an estimated 4 million Jewish Poles killed in the Shoah (Holocaust), the horror would have certainly been far less in scope than the actual history, so even their misstatement would not have been entirely false.)

However, the overlooked part of this trivial controversy is the actual mechanics of the typical leftist slander by association exemplified by this quickly forgotten twitter tempest, and that being the transposition of the adjective with the noun.

The globalist left has repeatedly done the same thing with anyone who utters the admission that they are a “nationalist”, making everyone on the left look like idiots to those who pay attention but persuading many of the inattentive moderates in the middle by painting their opponents falsely.

Why?  Because Hitler was leader of the “National Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany”, or National Socialists for short, or Nazi as an even shorter contraction of the German words for National Socialist.

A little background for those unfamiliar: the name “national socialist” was chosen specifically to create a contrast of their party with the “communists” because the communist movement was centered in and being exported by the USSR.  They used the phrase “national socialism” in direct contrast with the politics they labeled “international socialism” rather than calling them “communists.”

Of special note is which word is the noun and which the adjective of this and many other phrases intentionally and willfully conflated in the popular leftist press.  To badly paraphrase the Bard, the noun is the thing in which I shall catch the conscience of the media.

A nouns is a person, place, or thing.  An adjective modifies, or describes, the noun to which it is attached.  An adjective is not a thing in and of itself.  The noun is the thing.

The distinction Hitler made between the fascists and the communists was the nature of their socialism, but they were still socialists.  In his words he was advocating “a socialism for the German people, not subordinate to foreign interests.”  In other words he did not believe the German people would prosper from a political movement directed and controlled by Russia.

Sound familiar?

Those same people who try to conflate the noun “nationalism” with the adjective in “national socialism” are the very people who want to pretend that “national socialism” was not real “socialism”.  Real socialism, they keep telling us, has never been tried.

As “proof” that these words don’t actually mean anything, they say that the Soviet Union was a dictatorship even though it has “republic” in it’s name, the  Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), as opposed to Союз Советских Социалистических Республик (CCCP) in Russian.

Except that a “republic” just means a government which has layered levels of power and control, a central government, and more local state or provincial which have different powers and responsibilities.  The Soviet Union was a republic just like the United States in this respect.  It was just a Socialist Republic.

America has been properly described variously as a “democratic republic”, a “constitutional republic”, a “representative republic”, or a “democratically elected constitutional representative republic”, but that’s a bit long and inconvenient description.

The noun for both is a republic, because it becomes difficult to control a geographically large nation without dividing the authority of that nation into different levels.

In an effort to undermine our national politics, people again improperly raise the adjective above the noun and repeatedly, ignorantly, and annoyingly call our “democratic republic” a “democracy”.

Having dealt with and tutored a number of high school students and graduates, a common problem coming out of our floundering public education system is the inability to identify and understand these parts of speech like the noun and the adjective.  This creates a public susceptible to cynical manipulation by such conflations and deceptions when repeatedly accosted with such in schools, political speeches, and news programs.

Even non-sense phrases like “hate speech” or “civil rights” or “climate change” convince people who have a poor to middling comprehension of grammar that such phrases actually have a real meaning when they don’t.

The use of non-sense phrases is not new.  Karl Marx did the same thing in his books making up meaningless phrases like “the self-valorization of money” and “exploitation of the masses”.  However the concerted juggling of adjectives for nouns is a recent phenomena because it requires both a coordinated propagation and an unhealthily ignorant populace upon which to perpetrate such a nefarious practice.

Now, instead of “national socialism”, you have people advocating for “democratic socialism”.  People who pretend “national socialism” is not socialism because of the adjective “national” imagine that the adjective “democratic” will magically change the true nature of the noun “socialism” itself.

We don’t even need to get into non-sense phrases thrown about by aimless youth like “anarcho-communist”, “anarcho-socialist”, or even “anarcho-capitalist”, the contrived “anarcho” prefix being an attempt to designate an anarchy, or anarchist form of government, or rather non-government.

Anarchy meaning literally the absence of hierarchy, therefore no man having any authority or status over any other man.  Anarchy is a governmental term.  Socialism and capitalism are economic terms derived from the concept of whether the state or individuals own property respectively.

Therein lies the fallacy, the idea that property can be owned is antithetical to the idea of there being no governmental structure, because property is, by definition, a societally recognized and enforced concept.  There can be no “property” in an anarchy, therefore there could exist neither socialism nor capitalism.

Aside from non-sense prefixes, it is the use of nouns as adjectives, and adjectives as nouns in an attempt to intentionally and willfully mis-characterize the words and statements of one’s political or ideological opponents which is one of the most dastardly and underhanded practices in modern parlance.

Unfortunately, there is no clear method of forcing those so ignorant of basic English that they fail to distinguish the basic parts of speech to actually learn grammar and language to the level where such cynical ploys will cease to manipulate the low information public.

The republic may fall to that public through an ignorance that people should be learning at the grade school level.  The most distressing thing is that the perpetration of what is ignorance for a third grader is readily promoted by those with advanced, graduate level degrees, and they are not called out on the carpet for promoting such flagrant ignorance by their intellectual contemporaries.

Every time I hear such conflation of adjectives and nouns, I keep waiting to hear someone else in the room . . . anyone else . . . just ask the simple question: “Are you really that stupid?”