On your enemy's terms

It is, in ultimate origin, but it has crept into American usage via Chinese, replacing the perfectly acceptable "predominance" when referring to political power. The Chinese got it from the Russians, who got it from German, in which language no one used it but Karl Marx, when he ranted about die Hagemonie des Proletariats.

Verification (for "inspection"), running dogs, and dozens of other phrases have crept into English through ideological channels, not necessarily via Chinese. If someone suggested today that as is well known is such a phrase, he would be considered paranoic; yet as late as 1950 the New York Herald Tribune exposed the fraudulence of a statement by US PoWs in Korea by pointing to the repeated use of that phrase, then frequent only in Soviet usage. (To this day as is well known covers for the absence of evidence or inference.)

But these are merely words, words, words, and they are symptomatic of deeper disorders. Along with the words that the brainwashers force on the unwary, they also determine the "issues" that are to be "discussed" in a "debate" of their own making. The damage they have inflicted on science by wasting vast amounts of scientific effort on their meritless roadblocks is immeasurable.

Imagine the tragedy: a Nobel Prize winner like Rosalyn Yallow has to refute the radiation scares concocted by charlatans like Sternglass and Ehrlich before a committee of congressmen who gained power by kissing babies, and hold on to it by promising each interest group advantages at the expense of the others. To no avail, of course: it is easier to get re-elected by fear than by scientific measurement.

But if this happens in a field where things are measurable and well measured, it does not bode well for a scary-tale like the "nuclear winter" in which things are far less certain and predictable.

The Department of Defense has already started "research" on this "issue." So has Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and reportedly several other institutions which get taxpayers' money for defense, not speculation on subjects chosen by the media monkeys.

What are they going to prove? That war is horrible? If so, it will be devastating news for all who had hitherto thought it a blissful pastime.

What gets lost in this irrelevance is the real issue: how war can be prevented. By a defense to the utmost limits of the possible, or by a treaty with those who signed the Helsinki Agreement? By the shield of a high frontier or by the imperative of peaceful coexistence?