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| Tensions in the South China Sea |
[This article was originally written on May 27 making it slightly
out date. As of today (June 11) the number of WSWS articles with
"tensions" in the headline is 568 while the total number of articles
containing the word "tensions" also went up. There were no less than
5 such articles on June 2.]
I did a search of
all WSWS (World Socialist Web Site) articles with the word "tensions" in the heading. I came up
with 564 such articles. They go back to 1998 when the WSWS first started
online publication to the present. Here is the earliest article that came
up:
And here are the
two most recent from May 27
Of course there are
many other articles that use that word - a total of 8,437 according to the WSWS
search engine. Multiple uses of the same keyword in the same article are not
counted by the WSWS search engine so the use of the word is actually much
higher than the figure of 8,437 would indicate. That's an awful lot of tension registered by
WSWS authors since 1998.
The WSWS authors
and editors are very creative in coming up with adjectives to qualify these
tensions. While I could not find a single instance where tensions were
stabilizing or diminishing, I found numerous descriptions of how they are
getting worse and worse.
Besides the ever
popular "rising" you will also find that tensions are
"mounting", "growing", "heightening",
"escalating", "dominating", "intensifying",
"destabilizing", "deepening", "continuing",
"exacerbating", "seething", "erupting",
"fueling", "ramping up", "surging",
"sharpening", "at the breaking point",
"surfacing", "inflaming", "flaring",
"stoking", and many other creative uses of the English language.
(Could some of adjectives - "erupting", "surging",
"flaring" be indicative of male sexual fantasies?) Occasionally the
metaphor of rising tensions is described in negative terms such as the
impossibility of "papering over" these tensions or some international
conference that produces a statement of common goals and solidarity "fails
to cover up" rising tensions seething beneath the
surface.
This is not to say
that every one of those 8,437 articles is wrong to point to rising tensions in
the global arena. I expect that, clichés aside, many of them are probably
correct though perhaps somewhat exaggerated. But certainly all 8,437
cannot be correct and it is hardly credible that not a single instance of
stabilizing or diminishing tensions, however temporary and evanescent, cannot
be reported on in the past 20 years.
I have no doubt
that if I did a similar search on keywords such "threat of war",
"class conflict", I would find similar results. For the WSWS
events always only go in one direction and if something indicates the contrary
it is only because the true situation is being "papered over" or
"covered up". Again, I
am not saying there is no truth to this; just that it cannot be true 100% of
the time.
One further note:
not only are tensions always rising, but their upward trend is
accelerating. A sample of statistics for
every year since the WSWS was launched in 1998 shows a steady and sometimes
dramatic increase in the rate of "tension" usage each year of
publication.
First let us look
at a sample of the total number of articles per year.
There were 139
instances of "tensions" in 1998,
231 in 1999,
256 in 2001,
305 in 2005,
413 in 2008,
535 in 2010,
555 in 2012,
740 in 2014,
702 in 2015,
and 834 in 2016,
the last full year of publication.
Even with the
statistical anomaly of 2015, the trend is very clear: usage of the
"tension" metaphor is not only rising and appears to be an ever more
dominant theme in WSWS articles. Further insight can be gained by checking the
percentage of articles using that term per year against the total number of
articles written. Is it rising, staying the same or going down? A graphical
representation of the yearly percentage of WSWS articles using
"tensions" compared to the total number of WSWS articles shows a line
going upwards, with some fluctuations, from a low of 8% in 1998 to a high of
15.8% in 2016. There is a rise from 2014 till the present when the percentage
hovers between 13% and 16% as compared to the relatively stable years between
2005 and 2013 when it stood between 11% and 13%. And prior to 2004 it was lower
still, mostly between 10 % and 11% with a couple of anomalous years where it
went to 13%.
Here are the year
by year statistics rounded up to the nearest tenth of a percent:
1998= 8.0%
1999= 10.0%
2000= 10.7%
2001= 13.0%
2002= 12.9%
2003= 10.4%
2004= 11.3%
2005 = 12.8%
2006= 12.5%
2007= 12.6%
2008 = 12.8%
2009 = 12.3%
2010 = 12.2%
2011 = 11.6%
2012 = 11.4%
2013 = 12.0 %
2014 = 14.2%
2015 = 13.4%
2016 = 15.8%
2017 = 15.2%
The percentage of
articles referencing “rising tensions” of various sorts has almost doubled
since the WSWS was launched in 1998.
Now it is certainly
true in general that inter-imperialist rivalries have intensified in the
past 20 years and war has become an increasingly common option of the American
bourgeoisie in its efforts to maintain its economic dominance in the face of
its deteriorating international position. This was in contrast to the
decade from 1991 to 2001 when tensions actually subsided as a result of Russia
being turned into a semi-protectorate of the United States. That ended with the
rise of Putin and the emergence of Russia and China as new imperialist powers
as well as the events of 9/11.
But that does not mean there have been no fluctuations or lulls or attempts to return
to workable agreements in the last 20 years either. None of that is captured in
the ever rising tensions clichés of the WSWS authors. Which I suppose is the
point of using this cliché in the first place.
I also do not mean
to suggest that the WSWS is alone guilty of substituting reasoned analysis with
worn out clichés. The great majority of organizations calling themselves
"Marxist" do the same thing,
sometimes with more, sometimes with less subtlety. I select the WSWS as a
prime exemplar of this methodology because their 5,000 articles per year and
their search engine make it relatively easy to provide some statistical
analysis of their work. And their sectarianism and isolation from the real
struggles of the working class is a balm that reinforces the worst aspects of
left political analysis.
Other left wing
organizations publish far less and what they do publish consists of little more
than slogans. Their analysis of events is largely confined to manifestos and
resolutions that are published once a year or so. A nice example of the
abuse of language, where clichés are interspersed with insults, is this gem
from a manifesto of the Spartacist League,
"Unlike the
erstwhile Stalinists and other revisionists, joined today by numerous
dilettantes and political bandits ensconced in the virtual reality of
cyberspace, who rotate through contradictory programmatic positions and even
alleged principles in order to conform to changing opportunist appetites,
authentic Marxists prize revolutionary continuity and programmatic
consistency."
Nor do I mean to
suggest that this butchery of language and meaning is confined to the left.
Right wing publications and web sites are if anything far worse than those of
the left in this regard.
Mainstream
publications like the New York Times and Washington Post are of course far more
sophisticated and circumspect, but they too employ their fair share of trite
phrases. But that being said, an analysis of right wing and mainstream
publications is best left for another occasion.
All this reminds me
of a famous essay by George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, written at the end of
World War II. Orwell's point was that political writing had become hackneyed
and stale due to the increasing tendency of political writers to substitute clichés
for genuine analysis. Orwell provided several examples of this trend, from
all spheres of the political spectrum, but perhaps the best one is the
following that he copied from a publication of the Stalinist Communist Party of
Great Britain,
"All the best
people from the gentlemen's clubs and all the frantic fascist captains, united
in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising tide of the mass
revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to found
incendiaries, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own
destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated
petty-bourgeoisie to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the
revolutionary way out of the crisis"
Orwell comments
about this and other examples of political writings,
"The writer
either has a meaning and cannot express it or he inadvertently says something
else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not.
This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked
characteristic of modern English prose, especially of any kind of political
writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the
abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not
hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their
meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a
pre-fabricated hen house."
Later Orwell gives
a striking example of the kind of rhetoric frequently found in left wing
political writing:
"The sole aim
of a metaphor [for example, the metaphor of 'rising tensions' with its
numerous permutations as in WSWS writing, or 'rising tide' as in the Stalinist
publication] is to call up a visual image. When these images clash- as in the The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is
thrown into the melting pot - it can be taken as certain that the
writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming, in other words
he is not really thinking."
(George Orwell, All Art is Propaganda, "Politics
and the English Language", p. 270. First Mariner Books, 2009.)
I am not suggesting
that left political analysis has no basis in objective reality, whether one is
talking about the "rising tensions" metaphor of the WSWS or the
"rising tide" metaphor cited by Orwell. Indeed the writers of these
tropes are reacting to real events, but "without thinking", ie.
impressionistically and shorn of any serious investigation. In the final
analysis the butchery of language is a symptom of the butchery of thought.
In the case of the
WSWS the writer is "not really thinking" because he or she already
has a worked out scenario in advance regardless of the ups and downs of a
dynamically changing situation. It's the product of a sectarian mindset that
wishes to see everything as a confirmation of a dogma that they call a
"science of perspectives"; one that always and everywhere sees
tensions rising. So when events such as 9/11 happen, or a retired military
leader warns of the danger of nuclear war, this is just grist for their
journalistic mill - if I may borrow another worn out metaphor. Other events,
that qualify or add nuance or even question their basic assumptions are simply
ignored or explained away. Such schematic formalism and cherry picking of ones
focus is the very opposite of a dialectical understanding of the forces that
shape our world today.
Alex Steiner
