Latin Cannabis vs Pejorative Marijuana: Word Subversion 101
A recent article published by High Times (HT) has churned and furthered a very important question in the hearts and minds of cannabis supporters across the U.S.A.. Is there some reason an intelligent person, living in contemporary America, would deem the term marijuana both a pejorative and an ethnophaulism?
This drives home a point we've been repeating since the inception of Canna Clatch - that words have power and words have additional power within specific context and context is everything. Context incorporates history, voice inflection and a host of other variables. Words have power because they carry sound and meaning, and meanings can be layered and have more to do with the subconscious mind than conscious and become complexly impacting due to the history and multi-generational relationships we carry as individuals and as a macro-cultures within our collective subconscious mind.
"Marijuana" due to it's acute historical relationship with bigotry, racism, ethnocentricism, and hatred from being injected in to the mass-consciousness and lexicon of America by the Federal Gov. and the ancillary propaganda arms that deemed themselves journalistic newspaper outlets owned by W. R. Hearst through information distribution that had no basis in fact and served only the special interests of industry and that of the supra-national organizations that federal officials in government were serving and aligning themselves with at the time (League of Nations - later UN) became the new "trigger word" to create a context for control and discrimination for the Federal Gov. and the subordinate agencies that were later created specifically to deal with a natural plant that has never killed or harmed anyone and stands to evaporate several artificial rackets created by American industry including cotton, petrochemicals, timber, and pharmaceutical.
Henry Anslinger was quoted on several occasions, including multiple times on congressional testimony, connecting the term marijuana with narcotic use, ethnicity and race . "Marihuana" with the bastardized "h" was used to alienate Americans from something they already had familiarity with - (H)eroin. When you watch the way words are patterned in countless articles of the day you find that the connection between a non-toxic, perfectly medicinal plant was being made with an extremely menacing and addictive "(D)rug" people were familiar with.
Slang terminology was injected into articles that explained how people of normal life scenarios were being impacted by "reefer", "pot", "marihuana" and implicated violence, racial-aggression, and specific violence-on-females-and-people-of-perceived-vulnerability.
Alternatively, terms were used to indicate that people of good standing were being ravaged by the severely addictive nature of "marihuana" and go on to indicate that children are especially vulnerable due to the fact that pushers/dealers show up in "young people's organizations and circles" - indicating that athletic and religious youth organizations also should intimidate parents with propaganda and false fear alarms. Tobacco use was very prevalent in that day, so implicating a new scary "smokable drug" made a strong ripple effect in the gullible public's common sentiment.
Prior to the 20th century and for the first few decades, cannabis, kanif, and hemp were all standard terms to relate to a plant that was serving many different roles within agricultural, pharmacological, and textile based activity in America and much of the rest of the first world.
Suddenly, with the adaptation of Supra-national policy by our domestic leadership that questionably conflicted with the U.S. Constitution under several areas including the Monroe Doctrine, we found our Government enabling a "Tax" that brought activity related to cannabis under scrutiny and regulation that did not exist on a Federal or State level prior to that time. The "Marijuana Tax Act" in many ways, worked much like the British Tea Tax in the days of colonial America to commoditize and "over-regulate" something that average people felt was a food and staple of life. Tea, being so central to culture in those days, became the central point of contention between the oppressive activity of the British Monarchy and the collective rights of the people self-identifying as "Americans" and thus sovereign.
This is the interesting connection to history for tea and cannabis - people in contemporary America are waking up to the fact that "Cannabis" is an entheogen, natural plant, a food, a medicine, a useable fiber and fuel that humans have an inalienable right to. Within colonial contexts, cannabis was a staple in the lives of people, such as tea was a staple of their culture and habits. Had the British taxed and regulated the importation or trading of cannabis, they would inflicted upon themselves the same or even worse reactions from the colonial leadership and militias. The plant was deemed by several Founders as integral to the success and freedom of colonial people and sufficiently important for them to grow it on their properties and write extensively about the central role it plays in economy and quality of life.
Today, Americans are struggling with a multi-generational brain-washing that has people totally unfamiliar with the term "Cannabis" and fully subverted with regards to the term "marijuana" - which is a spanish term that in it's natural resting place, relates to a wild tobacco that grows in specific desert regions in the Americas.
Context! Latin Spanish has a different context than that of Spanish elsewhere and this is why we try to relate the history of the term to Americans, as things occurred "In the Americas". Many relationships to South Africa and the term "dagga" bring context to the discrimination and subversion that the word "game" perpetuates upon native South Africans at the behest of oppressive caucasian protestant controlled government leadership that dictates "drug policy". Observing South African history and propaganda gives context to Americans (and many others too) around terms that get used within formal contexts within their respective cultures.
Formal vs Casual (informal) contexts can and should be defined because humans have many names for things they endear. The argument that "marijuana" is an ethnophaulism and should be reserved for informal contexts where people can take creative liberty with terms based on their needs. Where formal contexts are identified, the term "marijuana" should be avoided due to it's pejorative nature and subversive affect that it has on people who have not done their own research of history and of the information we're touching on superficially above.
As proponents of human liberty and the inalienable right to nature, many Americans have made the personal choice to strike the term "marijuana" from their personal vocabulary and to gently educate those around them in the perils of using terminology loosely and haven't made distinctions we've outlined above for themselves - including the fundamental observation that words have power and that humans interface with words in complex ways.
NLP - nuero-linguistic programming and areas of hypnotism apply directly to the protocol used in propaganda to create artificial contexts and meaning for something that is already defined within culture and society. "Trigger words" many times are created to deepen the specific controlling nature of language-subversion and serve the purpose of the interests paying for or creating the propaganda. In the specific case of Cannabis and the early 20th century, it's impossible to come up with all of the special interests who wanted to see such a useful resource remain alienated and inaccessible to the populace at large. The implications of racial and ethnic discrimination as it applies to the activity of the federal government as well as social organizations of the time leave the "marijuana" to be one of the most subversive terms that gets most commonly used in contemporary english in the Americas.
Once you start understanding the basics of subliminal control protocols as they apply to language, violence, discrimination/victimization, cultural memory, emotional trauma, staged events, and the industries that corroborate such activity, you start to modify your activity and vocabulary to "tap out" of the perpetuation of the programming on yourself and those around you. This includes informing people that "Cannabis is Safer Than Marijuana" and bring them a little closer to the self-realization that they have a built in receptor system that absorbs the constituent compounds of a plant that has been partnered with us for an extremely long time and put in to mutual service as we evolve together here on earth.
