We Should Live - Ben Bateman

Cox and Forkum put up a Mugabe cartoon from a year ago. If you don’t know about Mugabe, he’s a Marxist dictator who has ruled Zimbabwe since 1980. He made news a few years ago when he ordered all the country’s white farmers to give their land to his cronies. Most fled; a few stayed behind and were killed. Mugabe was warned that this would lead to mass starvation—not only in Zimbabwe, but in neighboring countries, too.

He seized the land anyway, in the name of anti-colonialism and virulent anti-white racism. Unsurprisingly, his political buddies didn’t know much about farming, and the country’s economy has collapsed. He responded in 2005 in typical Marxist fashion, by throwing hundreds of thousands of people out of their homes as part of Operation Clean Up the Filth. Some people were herded into re-education camps, some were left homeless on the street to starve, and others were dumped in the countryside to starve. About 3 million Zimbabweans have left the country, and about half of those who remain are on the brink of starvation. It got bad enough in 2005 that one of Mugabe’s ministers floated the idea of trying to lure back some of the white farmers whom the government had driven away. Unsurprisingly, few were interested.

That was a year ago. Now things are worse. The starvation continues, and the currency has become nearly worthless. The official inflation rate is 782%, though private sources put it at over 1000%.

The word of the day is ‘controversial’. Properly used, it describes something as being the subject of a dispute, as in: “The committed approved agenda items one and two on unanimous voice votes, but item three was controversial.”

But ‘controversial’ has also become a code word that the MSM uses to describe anything that it hates: Democrats introduce bold proposals, while Republicans introduce controversial proposals. It’s accurate in a grammar-school sense, but completely redundant. If a newscaster is telling you about a proposal, then you can safely assume that it’s controversial in the sense that somebody somewhere in the country disagrees with it. It’s like talking about a violent war or a short midget. Wasting words by stating the obvious is poor usage.

This misuse of ‘controversial’ probably comes from the MSM’s once-awesome ability to define a debate’s legitimate participants. Consider the ubiquitous MSM sentence: “But critics are concerned,” where you can be sure that the critics come from fringe liberal groups like NOW, NARAL, or Greenpeace. In the reporter’s mind, those fringe liberals are respectable people who should be heard, while fringe conservatives are not. And since fringe liberals hate all conservative proposals, every conservative proposal is controversial. Liberal proposals are rarely controversial because they’re mostly opposed by conservatives, who are dangerous ignoramuses who don’t deserve a place in any civilized discussion. I think that’s where it started 20 or 30 years ago, and over the years it lost all ties with its original meaning. Today it’s just a tepid and safe way for journalists to safely describe anything that they don’t like.

I hadn’t realized how deep this twisted usage had become in the minds of journalists until I read this story: Mugabe is angry that international aid agencies are monitoring Zimbabwe’s crops. (Good news: The new crop is almost twice as big as the previous one, which means that it’ll feed nearly half the country.) That’s not surprising news if you know anything about Zimbabwe. What surprised me was this sentence:

“Critics also point to Mugabe’s controversial seizures of white-owned farms for blacks, which analysts say has seen commercial agricultural output plunge more than 60 percent.” (emphasis added)

Could there be anything less controversial than a racist Marxist thug seizing property at gunpoint and plunging millions of people into starvation? Are there two sides to that? If this reporter could go back in time and report on WWII, would he write a story about Hitler’s controversial plan to exterminate the Jews? Is there no idea so evil that a modern journalist won’t implicitly legitimize it by calling it controversial?

Edit: Tweaked the wording on the last sentence.