New Word Order
hannan, daniel
"New Word Order" There are two possible sources of such a transformation. One is the arrival of semiconductor foundries, third-party vendors of chipmaking services. A foundry, such as Taiwan's TSMC, does not design...
...It is something we practice every time we decide between alternatives...
...If you see an expensively dressed man, your prejudice tells you that he is likely to be well off...
...Never mind that the Iranians in question want to confiscate private property and nationalize the means of production...
...He, too, found the rules of the game rigged against him...
...0 A N JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 31...
...A possible solution is to learn from George W Bush...
...It was, I am told,Thucydides who first pointed out the importance of language in winning ideological battles...
...Chip design, the essential core of the industry's value added, will become much more widely spread among a large number of competitors...
...unfairness" means an individual's right to better himself...
...Intel, which makes microprocessors and therefore does not compete in the market for commodity memory chips, is always likely to operate as an integrated entity...
...The very words Conservatives use condemn them as heartless blimps before they've even started setting out their arguments...
...But if they want to recapture their countrymen's attention, they must first reclaim the English language...
...The truth, as Matt Ridley has put it, is that privatization is not a dogma but a pragrna...
...Looking back, it was an uncannily prescient example...
...The NEW WORD ORDER PLEASE, CAN WE HAVE OUR LANGUAGE BACK...
...Thus in Britain today, for instance, it is difficult for the "Conservative" Parry, which is "right-wing," and which favors "tax cuts" and the rest of it, to make its case...
...Greed" now means low taxes...
...Prejudice: Hating other people...
...IftBY DANIEL HANNAN ecently I heard a BBC correspondent refer to "right-wing elements" in Iran who were sympathetic to the Taliban...
...If a politician rings your doorbell, your prejudice tells you that he is probably after your vote...
...In fact, free enterprise is utterly counterintuitive:You'd think that a planned economy would be much more efficient than one where everyone was left to do their own thing higgledy-piggledy...
...But he was going to use the word to mean private virtue, not higher taxes, and he was going to harp on about it until people started to take him at his word...
...Thus, the concept of political freedom disappeared, because no one could put it into words...
...When discussing trains, however, it means homicidal tendencies, and is thus used as an antonym to safety-which, of course, means more regulation...
...When talking about a supermarket, it simply means greed and exploitation (as in "excessive profits...
...To Orwell, writing in 1948, "freedom" still had its traditional meaning of a guarantee against coercion: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly or whatever...
...t "Is the Golden Age of the Semiconductor Industry Coming to an End...
...But its political undertones have spilled over into every usage of the word, so that discrimination, in any context, becomes discreditable...
...The redefinition of words doesn't always have to happen in a leftward direction...
...They are not especially familiar with works by Gramsci and Derrida...
...You can still make the case for greater liberty, but not without sounding rather nasty...
...Literally, of course, discrimination simply means discernment...
...So "time to market" with new technology, the industry's current obsession, will become less important.This will slow down the arms race of new plants and new production processes...
...The very grammar and vocabulary of the English language is beginning to militate against them...
...it's just that the phrase "tax cuts" automatically conjures up a series of images in our minds: leaky school roofs, bodies lying on trolleys in hospital corridors, and pin-striped Tory spivs selling off the playing fields to their friends in the City (see Profit...
...But it was George Orwell who brought the concept to a wider audience...
...What, then, should they do...
...IRA "conservatives" don't want to disarm, while "conservative elements within Unionism" don't want to share power with Catholics...
...And if the Washington media wouldn't cooperate, he would find other ways to get the message across: independent radio stations, small local newspapers, the Internet...
...Professor Donald Hicks of the University ofTexas at Dallas believes the impact of the foundry model is underestimated.t "It's a tectonic event in the development of the industry," he says...
...The past two decades m 0 0 Daniel Hannan is a Conservative Member of the European Parliament, representing South East England.A version of this article appeared in The Spectator of London...
...As Edmund Burke argued in Reflections on the French Revolution, life would become intolerable if we had to think everything through from first principles...
...But the anathematization of the word also touches its original meaning...
...Donald A. Hicks, presentation at Albany Symposium on Global Semiconductor Issues, www.albanysymposium.com...
...In newspeak, free could be used only in the sense of "this field is free from weeds," "this dog is free from lice...
...30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002 beauty of the word, from the Left's point of view, is its flexibility...
...Just as important, in his view, is another change likely to overtake the business...
...During the 1980s Tories managed to traduce the word "socialism" to the extent that almost no serious politician today will accept the label...
...Any lingering trace of the original meaning-that is, of assets producing some kind of return-was obliterated during the 1990s...
...In its literal sense, prejudice simply means prejudging a new situation on the basis of past experience...
...If your common sense tells you that we should be a selfgoverning country, or that longer sentences would cut crime, or that we seem to be treating the IRA very gently, that is because you are prejudiced...
...And why not...
...A firm that discriminates in favor of properly qualified applicants, or a university that insists on good test scores, cannot wholly escape the sense that it is doing something dirty Community: The state-or, more precisely, the state's bureaucracy...
...But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the market works in practice...
...In an appendix to 1984, Orwell discussed how an idea could be made literally unthinkable if there were no proper words to express it...
...Profit: Always a bad thing, but the severity of the term varies according to context...
...This is not natural terrain for Conservatives...
...Arguing for the first automatically opens you to the accusation of supporting the second...
...Tax cuts: Squalid public services It's not so much that we believe that there is a direct link between spending and performance...
...A similar recalibration of meaning has been at work throughout our political debate...
...The original sense of "open to the public" has been almost entirely lost...
...Since then, however, "freedom" has come to mean "entitlement": "freedom to work," "freedom from discrimination" and so on...
...Any discussion of the relationship between government and citizen is perforce conducted in loaded terms...
...If he had to call himself "compassionate," fine...
...So he simply kicked the board over and insisted on playing a different game...
...Public schools were originally so called to distinguish them from private tutors.Yet that sense has become so archaic that they are now often referred to in print as "public (i.e., private) schools...
...Fairness" means state-enforced equality...
...Thus, the notion that the state ought not to boss us around becomes harder to convey, and the politician who supports that notion is disadvantaged...
...If so, this particular game of musical chairs will end with more than one survivor...
...Chips and the products that embody them are becoming more powerful than customers actually need, as the slowdown in personal computer sales indicates...
...The illustration he gave was the word "free...
...Almost any financial settlement can be described as "under-investment," in the sense of being a smaller settlement than someone, somewhere would have liked...
...Reclaiming the vocabulary will require a sustained and grueling campaign, in which political parties will play just one part...
...Ditto "public health" and "public education...
...Discrimination: Being unpleasant to women or black people...
...At the same time, the yield gains from experience will be collectively shared by joint use of chip foundries, helping to limit some of the disastrous pressure for price wars...
...have seen a semantic shift that makes it almost impossible to express right-wing ideas without sounding faintly disreputable...
...People's ears are simply not primed to appreciate the cadences of the Tory message...
...But much of the rest of the chip industry is likely to migrate to a foundry model...
...The one thing it emphatically doesn't mean is a voluntary association of individuals.When people talk of "involving the community," they invariably want more legislation...
...The fact that they have lined up with Mullah Omar means that they can be neatly bracketed with Israeli hard-liners, Stalinist nostalgics, Timothy McVeigh, Eugene Terre Blanche, George W. Bush, the Tory party and any other "right-wing elements" that threaten the BBC's worldview...
...A foundry, such as Taiwan's TSMC, does not design its own chips-instead it acts as the back end for any number of independent design houses.This breaks the traditional integrated model of a semiconductor company, which both designs and manufactures its own chips...
...A brief glossary will give some indication of what I mean: Investment: Public spending...
...Dogmatic: Believing in free markets, as in "the Tories have a dogmatic attachment to the private sector...
...If you think that I exaggerate, cast your mind back to the case of the pensioner in Liverpool who was charged with "racially aggravated criminal damage" after scrawling "Free speech for England" on a condemned wall...
...The idea that "public transport" should be operated by private contractors naturally strikes people as anomalous...
...For in recent years this is more or less what has happened to the word "free...
...Rightwing elements," after all, has simply become a handy term meaning "baddies...
...Free speech: Support for racists.We have been told so often that "free speech can never be used as an excuse for racism" that the two things have become conflated in our minds...
...Being dogmatic used to mean believing in something against the evidence...
...The gradual elision from the older meaning into the newer has huge political implications...
...But these things do not happen by accident...
...An even more useful term than "right-wing elements," since it can be applied to both sides in the same conflict...
...The shift to the foundry model and the diminished significance of time to market may mean that the current consolidation wave is succeeded - as in steel - by a more flexible, varied and disaggregated industry...
...When you hear such terminology, you realize the extent of the task facing conservatives...
...Curiously enough, this is almost precisely the opposite of the old sense...
...Public: Owned by the state...
...Conservative: Neanderthal...
...compassion" means high taxes...
Vol. 35 • January 2002 • No. 1
