The Hijacking of Language as a Tool of Propaganda

A lie, repeated often enough, (never) becomes the 'truth'...

Marilyn Munroe died 63 years ago this month. Propaganda has evolved beyond all imagination over that time. It’s worthwhile reviewing her tragic story. Today, strangely, that famous Kennedy name is still in the headlines, along with fears of nuclear war, Russian ‘disinformation’ and media lies sold as ‘facts’. Some things never change! Let’s look at how New Zealand’s Government PR campaign during covid, hijacked a word originally used in the context of Marilyn’s life.

1953 Los Angeles Times, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A shout out to diligent Erika at Number 8 Workers’ Union, who has brought to our attention recently a problematic word in this important Official Information Act (OIA) response from NZ Government/Ministry of Health. This response provided context to the Ardern-era Covid Campaign to coerce citizens to get the jab, called “It’s our shot":

Part of the NZ ‘vaccine’ marketing campaign

This clever, $multimillion marketing campaign contained all kinds of unethical, psychological behavioural science/economics techniques, which I’ve written about extensively here, here and here. Including the use of the famous UK Nudge Unit’s MINDSPACE report included in my own Covid Inquiry Submission.

With my teacher’s-hat on and my rather large collection of diverse dictionaries dusted off…

…I want to draw your attention, dear reader, to a particular word within this OIA, not necessarily because of the word itself, but to the grammatical group of words it belongs to: Contronyms. Here’s an example to explain why this is useful knowledge:

"Because of the Ministry’s oversight, the contractor’s payment was sanctioned."

Does that mean, 'Because the Ministry oversaw the company's behaviour, they imposed a penalty for some kind of wrongdoing'?

or, perhaps you interpret it to mean:

'Because the Ministry wasn’t paying attention, it didn’t notice any wrongdoing and gave it approval by mistake'?

The answer could be both.

Contronyms (like ‘oversight’ and ‘sanction’) - also called contranyms or autoantonyms - are words with two meanings that are also, confusingly, the opposite of each other. Frustratingly, there are many such interesting anomalies in the English Language.

One of my past (law) lecturers told me he ‘collected’ contronyms. Maybe because such words of manipulation are undoubtedly extremely useful in lawfare. Especially in New Zealand Courts of law as our general population’s knowledge of vocabulary is depressingly low.

The contronym in Erika’s OIA response was ‘factoid’. Which according to one of my many dictionaries, means both fact and fib:

As I hinted at in the beginning of this article, apparently this particular contronym’s origin has a surprising source: Marilyn Munroe. As Wikipedia claims:

The term was coined by American writer Norman Mailer in his 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe. Mailer described factoids as "facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper" […]. The Washington Times described Mailer's new word as referring to "something that looks like a fact, could be a fact, but in fact is not a fact".

Indeed a factoid is a useful tool for all kinds of celebrity pro- or de/motion.

For those lovers of language amongst you (and I know there are a few), there is an interesting flow of etymology and ideas throughout this word ‘factoid’. For instance, the word ‘fact’ comes from the Latin ‘factum’ meaning a done deed.

But the Latin ‘facticious’ which has lent itself to many English words such as ‘factitiously’ means ‘produced by art as distinct from nature, i.e. synthetic, artificial or a sham (false)’:

from Odhams Dictionary of English Language (Illustrated)...(1946?)

Then there’s the word ‘facture’ which means to make something (like fake factcheckers). Fascinating to ponder.

Why does any of this matter?

Let’s look at a group of the population who are particularly vulnerable to mis/interpretations of words, those with disabilities. Here we can see that in August 2021, at the height of the BigPharma-sponsored propaganda (and 2 months before healthcare and education sector’s ‘no-jab, no-job’ policy began), there was a specific covid-era marketing campaign, assigned to the NZ Government’s contracted agency, directed at those with disabilities:

Later in this OIA response, this ‘Agency Brief’ for the One Shot campaign appears:

We can see in the above extract, how the NZ Ministry of Health wanted to ‘amp up’ the persuasive (coercive) ‘layer’ of the jab campaign, to include some harder-hitting (fake) messages. Hit them hard (with fear), whilst dangling the enticing carrot of ‘freedom’ if you get jabbed. The ethical implications of exploitation in this campaign seemingly didn’t even need a mention? Yet this Brief sets out the extent of this ‘Target’ population who suffer a disability:

The Speed of Science™ from this campaign rolled out to Kiwis in just TWO WEEKS; no time for any inconvenient delays like boring Ethics Committees (or even a budgeting control), as we see in this extract from the same OIA response:

We know now that these Factoids were Lies, not Facts. For instance, in

Where are the numbers? by Norman Fenton and Martin Neil

the ‘Fully Vaccinated’ that Governments all over the world claimed NOT to be in the hospitals, were actually deliberately misclassified as ‘unjabbed’ because they had only one dose and/or it was within the designated two weeks ‘before the benefits kick in’ (!) The trickery of our hijacked language seems endless. Navigating this mess is impossible for many.

For interest, other contranyms include ‘Bound’, ‘Finished’, ‘Clip’ or ‘Bolt’…[feel free to add more in the comments]

There will be more to follow on this OIAs Factoids, as we research not only what these ‘Factoids’ were exactly, but the names of those who created and presented them, what university they were affiliated with, what funding was involved and where those people are today.

Stay tuned, keep smiling! There will be accountability. Thank you to those of you who support my work in a multitude of ways. You can Buy Me A Coffee here, so I can Pay it Forward to those who need my skills. Thank you!