Reading Chomsky, Sontag et al one cannot miss the semiotic pretensions of Liberalism. Not content with having usurped by force the royal right to rule, they charge against authority itself, and then they appoint themselves (let me use capitals here) Most High Interpreters of Reality. Yeah: “Believe not thine own eyes for ye art blind and thy sin remaineth,” they say. The Liberals finally ascend to those heights where the Word resides. In their Genesis the Liberal man does not merely give names to the animals, he pretends to give the entire cosmos its proper meaning.
Yet the new gods when descending among us mortals, get all entangled in a semantic form of Puritan ablutions of language, abounding in euphemisms much like the common American way of calling the loo a “bathroom,” even though acts there performed involve no bathing. Reality is not semiotically de-constructed to find its pure meaning but semantically re-constructed to exorcise it from those elements the Liberal mind abhors.
In their religious system they also have defined blasphemy. It is called hate speech, politically incorrect talk, or worse: failed ideas from the past [1]. “Living in the past” is one of the most despicable sins in their book akin to the sin against the Holy Spirit for Christians.
All that semantic hall of mirrors ends up fooling the very ones who built it. We have reached a point in history where Liberals don’t even deign to argue a point, they simply invoke the Great Liberal Spirit in the Sky to dispel the reasoning of the despised Conservative, Traditionalist, Medieval, Obscurantist by calling it passé, something devoid of meaning or importance because it comes from yesterday.
The flea has climbed Olympus and changed its name to Zeus, but it is still a flea (while the mountain of today is the same one of yesterday, and shall remain Olympus for ages to come).
[1] “All the past was loathsome to them. All their agreeable associations were connected to the future.” Thomas Babington Macaulay’s comment on the Jacobins, [Mirabeau, (1832) in Critical, Historical And Miscellaneous Essays And Poems, 3 vols. (New York: William L Allison, 1880) 1:779].
Carlos Caso-Rosendi 