By Thomas Harrington at Brownstone dot org.

"Women have always been the primary victims of war."

Hillary Clinton

Life is mind-bogglingly complex. And knowing that, and how engaging fully with that complexity every day would quickly exhaust us, we develop cognitive shortcuts for coping with it. One of the more common of these is to invest words, and the arguments we make with them, with a self-sufficiency and an invariability that they seldom possess. Though people often say, "I say what I mean, and I mean what I say," things are never really that simple.

One of the main reasons for this, as Saussure taught us, is that all linguistic meaning is relational in nature; that is, that the operative meaning of a given word is heavily dependent, on one hand, on its interplay with the other words in the sentence or paragraph in which it appears and, on the other, the set of semantic values "assigned to it" through repeated usage by those who fluently write and speak the language in question.

Because most people, especially in the expert class of the US, live and work in a single semantic ecosystem day after day, and thus often have scant access to cultures and subcultures that might imbue the terms they use with a different semantic value, they tend not to think very much about the unstated assumptions embedded in them, or the many arguments that depend on these terms for their salience.

For example, the Cambridge Dictionary defines terrorism as "violent action or threats designed to cause fear among ordinary people, in order to achieve political aims." According to this definition, the US dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US invasion of Iraq, the NATO dismemberment of Libya, the current Israeli destruction of Gaza, and the recent assassinations of Iranian scientists and their families all qualify as acts of terrorism.

And yet, you will seldom if ever hear anyone in the Anglo-American, Western European, or Israeli cultural spaces use the term to describe these actions.

Why?

Because the media and academic allies of those that have planned and carried out these actions have also executed campaigns of media repetition designed to imbue the term terrorism with an unstated but pervasively accepted limitation: that it only really applies to situations where the actions of the type mentioned in the dictionary definition of terrorism are visited upon people in the above-mentioned cultural spaces.

To become aware of the hidden presumptions embedded in words and the arguments that are frequently attached to them is to gain much greater insight into the true, and often similarly obscured, strategic goals of those who most assiduously wield them. It is also to be frequently viewed as an annoyance by the elite-allied culture-planners who would prefer that most of the public remain blissfully unaware of the existence of discursive black boxes such as these.

All of which brings me, believe it or not, to the issue of feminism and the premise that it has "liberated" millions of heretofore oppressed women during the last six or seven decades of our history

Before getting into that, however, I should underscore at the outset that I harbor no desire to tell anyone, never mind any woman, how he or she should live their life. And as part of that, I am, needless to say, against all institutional practices that prevent women from acceding to any job they want to do and are capable of doing. People should always be free to choose the life path they feel most suits their personal needs and desires.

Rather, I am interested in exploring the seldom mentioned cultural presumptions at work in what might be termed the dominant, or perhaps better, "mass media" version of the discourse of feminism.

To liberate someone is to release them from undue or unfair restrictions on their natural rights. It is also to point them implicitly toward situations and social spaces where those restrictions are relatively absent and where they thus live in a sta...