Anonymous Comrade writes:

"Bushspeak: Dark and Garbled Words"

John Chuckman

The following quotes are from Bush's speech about the War on Terror, as given October 6, 2005, and largely repeated October 28. It was a speech especially dense with Bushspeak, a dialect which never means what it seems to say. Perspective and the occasional translation follow the quotes.

"All these separate images of destruction and suffering that we see on the news can seem like random and isolated acts of madness; innocent men and women and children have died simply because they boarded the wrong train, or worked in the wrong building, or checked into the wrong hotel. Yet while the killers choose their victims indiscriminately, their attacks serve a clear and focused ideology, a set of beliefs and goals that are evil, but not insane. "

You might ask how is it possible to choose victims more indiscriminately than by
bombing cities? The Pentagon doesn't even attempt to count Iraq's dead, civilian or military. Two serious efforts have been made to count the civilian toll of the barbarism called "Shock and Awe." One, an effort to count bodies all over the country in morgues, hospitals, and other likely places, came up with more than 25,000 killed. Another scientific study of Iraq's national mortality tables, published in the British medical journal Lancet, came up with about a 100,000.

Makhno writes:

Fetishizing Process

Mark Lance

If one were forced to explain consensus process in five minutes, one might begin with a

brief pitch about the kind of discussion that should precede the group taking a decision.

Such a pitch would be fairly vague, and would deal with such things as listening, including

all points of view, critical discussion and argument, and creativity in the formulation of

possible compromises and syntheses. But one would quickly switch from the topic of

discussion to the specific procedure that is used to take a formal decision. Here the

account is not at all vague, as precise as any sort of voting procedure. One would explain

how a position is proposed, how people have the choice of supporting, standing aside, or

blocking, how a position can only be adopted by the group if no one blocks, etc. (It is

likely, and relevant, that the majority of people who have been part of decision making

under the banner of "consensus process" have little more than such a five minute

understanding of what is involved.)

If one had much more than five minutes to explain consensus process, one would say little

more about the formal procedure for taking decisions. This part really can be defined in a

few minutes. One would, however, go into far more detail on the complex, less precise, more

deeply contextual business that precedes actually taking a decision. That is, one would

focus on the process of discussion, option formulation, argument, etc.

In what follows, let us call the complex process of discussion — a process about which much

can be said, but the proper functioning of which is unlikely to be definable via a set of

precise rules — "practice". The set of formal rules that define a method of taking a

decision will be referred to as "procedure". This distinction, in itself, is nothing

surprising or new, but I want to argue that it is of great import to the debate between

majority voting and consensus. Such debates are central to anarchist theory as they concern

the form and content of democratic inclusion. Indeed, if anything is essential to

anarchism, it is the idea that social decisions are to be taken by everyone affected, and

that this inclusion must involve substantive participation of each in deliberation and

decsion-making. Thus a dispute on the nature of such participation is a dispute about the

very essence of anarchism.