by iSpit
Transcript: It’s an old trick to couch a painful reality inside of a flowery platitude. We hear it all the time in our daily lives, and for the most part we know how to read between the lines when someone tries to do it to us.
When your doctor tells you that “This will only hurt a bit,” you know enough to brace yourself for a painful procedure. When your boss tells you he has an exciting new project for you to work on, you know you’re about to get saddled with the job that no one else wants to do. When a salesman tells you a used car is a fixer-upper, you know you’re looking at a lemon.
Similarly, when the IMF tells a nation that they need to implement “austerity” in order to get themselves out of a financial crisis, here, too, lies a gaping chasm between the language and the reality.
“Austerity” is one of those Orwellian terms that has been injected into our political discourse precisely because it is a nice-sounding word for a very painful reality. “Austerity” implies discipline, self-restraint, even nobility. “Austerity” is prudent. “Austerity” is modest. “Austerity” is a virtue. It is an end in itself.
If the IMF or the European Central Bank come to the people of a collapsing European nation and tell them to sacrifice their pensions and their savings and their very standard of living all for a debt that their government has fraudulently racked up in their name, no one would go for it, and rightly so.
But tell those same people that they need to implement “austerity measures” in order to “get back on their feet” economically, and many will be willing to live in the harshest of conditions, content to put up with the dismantling of their nation itself in the vain hope that by giving more power to the international financial institutions they can somehow avoid economic collapse.
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