His own people!

My pal Jim Esch threw this up on his weblog at 
http://www.turksheadreview.com/ - it's a brief and interesting 
exploration of some of the rhetoric of the push for war in Iraq. -pef

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=%22his+own+people%22

A few months back, we observed the semantic abuse of the phrase "there's 
no doubt" in the government and mass media, in reference to Saddam 
Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction -- an ominiscient, 
panoptic knowledge revealed before UN inspectors returned to Iraqi soil 
to see for themselves. Now the semantic building block making the rounds 
is the catchy "his own people." Usually you hear this in reference to 
Saddam "gassing his own people," but if you do a Google news search on 
the truncated "his own people," you will find more structuralist magic 
at work (over 1500 news articles at last count). The verbs conjoined to 
"his own people" are varied: he murders his own people, starves his own 
people, is cruel to his own people, treats his own people badly, has 
diabolical plans against his own people, tortures his own people. 
Apparently, "his own people" has rhetorical utility. Why? The people are 
Saddam's possession -- his property. We can relate to that -- people 
treated as objects, as cogs, chattel, commodities. Saddam "the evildoer" 
is more than a simple tyrant. He violates unwritten codes of conduct 
towards private property, doesn't reinvest in his human capital. I mean, 
it's OK to lay off workers, raid their pension funds and 401K plans, 
strip them of health insurance, borrow against their childrens' future 
wealth, and scare the butt juice out of them with hysterical news 
stories, but we wouldn't go so far as gassing our own people or 
torturing them (unless they're enemy combatants). Saddam apparently 
hasn't been reading Fast Company or Business 2.0 in the past decade. 
"His own people" also conflates the many fragments of Iraqi society 
(ethnic groups, political factions) into one homogeneous, simple to 
understand group -- the people, "his people." The Iraqi people are like 
a lump of clay -- Saddam pounds them at will, and we will bomb them and 
tear a few pieces away as we grind them through our American cutting 
machines and hand them a new regime. When you can tell the people (our 
people) a simple story in terms of private ownership, you can really 
communicate something. All this rhetoric, by the way, plays midwife to a 
war being born, a war that will undoubtedly kill many more of "his own 
people"...in the name of saving them.
(Google.com ) 20-Feb-2003