From NATO to TARP: The Modern Power of the Acronym

Acronyms and abbreviations abound in our daily lives. Whether names of institutions and organizations, daily greetings, or states of mind, they litter the public discourses. Just think of FTSE, NYPD, CCP, CDO, HS2, IRS, PFI, ESG, ASBO, and of course the classic WTF. In fact, the popularity of the acronym appears to be going from strength to strength. I grew up hearing of Martin Luther King, now he’s MLK.

The political significance of acronyms, initialisms, and abbreviations in language use has clear precedent throughout history right back to the imperial power of SPQR. However, the 20th Century witnessed an explosion in the prevalence of acronyms, and this did not go unnoticed. Herbert Marcuse has taken a bit of a kicking in recent years from people who blame him for the tiresome wokistas, but the emigré German philosopher did recognize the potency of the acronym back in the 1960s.

NATO, SEATO, UN, AFL-CIO, AEC, but also USSR, DDR, etc. Most of these abbreviations are perfectly reasonable and justified by the length of the unabbreviated designate. However, one might venture to see in some of them a ‘Cunning of Reason’ — the abbreviation may help to repress undesired questions. NATO does not suggest what North Atlantic Treaty Organization says, namely, a treaty among the nations on the North-Atlantic — in which case one might ask questions about the membership of Greece and Turkey.[1]

… or, indeed, Ukraine.

At first glance, acronyms seem to arise from the simple need for brevity in a modern fast-paced world of ‘social acceleration’.[2]

However, one must question why it is that certain phrases are abbreviated and others not. Why is it that institutions saturated with modern bureaucratic or commercial rationality, such as businesses and government departments, demonstrate a greater penchant for acronyms and abbreviations than other more traditional institutions. We rarely hear the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church” thrown out as OHCAAC or Ohcac, even though there is undoubtedly an ecclesiastical bureaucracy lurking in the background of the Church. In contrast, why have some political formations in particular, like the Soviet Union, been positively hoggish for them?

For the philologist Victor Klemperer (1881–1960), there is something essentially modern about them. They are inorganic, technocratic, planned, rational, and they have the power to influence, nudge, and control. They have that inhuman quality that depressed Max Weber so much when he wrote about the ‘iron cage’ of modern rationality. Klemperer certainly recognized this. He also hinted at their unavoidably undemocratic and illiberal nature.

… an abbreviation is an entirely artificial coinage, and as much a product of the people as Esperanto; the people themselves usually only contribute sarcastic imitations.[3]

What is crucial is that abbreviations are not innocent byproducts of communication. There is something in the way they work. They have certain, identifiable effects. There is usually an agenda in play. They are not without purpose, and that purpose is neither random, nor spontaneous, nor incidental. There is something in the very form of the acronym or abbreviation that imbues it with potency like a hammer and a trompe d’oeil picture combined. It is something both crude and subtle, but efficacious.

In a world of hyper-communication, they seem so effective at hiding things in plane sight. If modernity is about the explosion of information, signs, and symbols, then the acronym seems to have arisen as an answer to the problem our modern world poses for social control. Where once there were walls, distances, silences, priests, men with swords, and indices of proscribed literature, now there is the closed space of the abbreviation. Go ahead, spread the word! It’s ok, because no one can read what it really means anyway.

‘Closed space’. What does this mean? Marcuse, again, to clarify the acronym as a word.

It is the word that orders and organizes, that induces people to do, to buy, and to accept. It is transmitted in a style which is a veritable linguistic creation; a syntax in which the structure of the sentence is abridged and condensed in such a way that no tension, no “space” is left between the parts of the sentence.[4]

If you are skeptical about all this speculative intellectualizing, let’s look at a historical example. The Soviet Union.

In The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn explicitly discussed the use of abbreviations in the RFSFR Penal Code (1927),[5]

particularly in the notorious Article 58 that applied to ‘political prisoners’. This was the article that kept the Gulag filled with political dissenters and hapless passersby for over three decades. The use of abbreviation in that infamous code was almost obsessive. In addition to the numbered sub-sections 58(1)–58(14), from Wrecking through Terrorism to Counter-Revolutionary Agitation, there were abbreviated ‘lettered’ sub-articles attached to the Code (e.g. OSO, KRD).[6]

These ‘lettered articles’ were rarely explained to those to whom they were applied, and had a somewhat ad hoc and extra-legal character.

In general, all the lettered articles — which were, in fact, not articles of the Code at all but frightening combinations of capital letters (and we shall encounter more of them in this chapter) — always contained a touch of the enigmatic, always remained incomprehensible, and it wasn’t at all clear whether they were offshoots of Article 58 or independent and extremely dangerous.[7]

In the case of 58(6) — Espionage — it was often the case that

people were sentenced not only for actual espionage but also for: PSh — Suspicion of Espionage — or NSh — Unproven Espionage — for which they gave the whole works. And even SVPSh — Contacts Leading to (!) Suspicion of Espionage.[8]

This little historical example demonstrates the power of the abbreviation in the totalitarian regime. Confronted with the ‘closed’ abbreviated form (NSh), the soviet citizen is merely befuddled, overawed, or intimidated by the official-speak of the criminal code and is struck by a speech act imbued with an illocutionary force equivalent to 9 grams in the back of the head.

However, were the abbreviations to be presented in full form, an immediate objection would be the likely response from all those not enthralled to the rationality of soviet dialectic — “what the hell kind of a crime is Unproven Espionage?!” The abbreviation syntactically closes off the possibility for reflection or critical engagement and instead pushes an opaque semantic package.

As another example, consider the charge KRTD — Counter-Revolutionary Trotskyite Activity. With Trotsky anathema in Stalin’s USSR, this abbreviation allowed the authorities to prosecute and proscribe certain activity under a label that became drenched with a semantic of repugnant enmity and anti-social criminality, without even having to raise the name of that potential figure of opposition, something which might in fact act as a rallying point for dissent. Out of sight, out of hearing, out of mind. The guillotine is withdrawn behind the prison walls once again.

Of course, GULag itself is an acronym — Glavnoye Upravleniye Ispravitelno-Trudovykh Lagerey (Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps), and it provides us with a place to see more clearly the potential effects of acronyms in a way that we cannot (or will not) in our own contemporary societies of the West. We do not live today in a totalitarian regime, but the acronym is just as prevalent in social discourse, as are the obfuscations that it makes possible.

Just think back to the 2008 financial crisis and the constant reference to the bailout acronym — TARP. At that time, the toxicity around the bailout was such that a ridiculously convoluted name had to be contrived for it by Hank Paulson’s team at the Treasury, so as to misdirect the population away from its rank stench. Sounding more like a wildlife protection charity than a $800bn taxpayer bailout of nefarious banks, the Troubled Asset Relief Program was so politically poisonous that it had to be double wrapped in concrete. First, the pantomime name, and then the acronym to hide both the tragic reality and the pantomime name.

TARP, SNAP, and TANF aren’t just abstract concepts. They are policies that have a direct bearing upon our material lives. As acronyms they are there to be accepted or not, but when fanned out to their full glory, we get a clearer sense of what they are actually about. Suddenly, we are not so sure.

ESG looks harmless and neutral enough, but when pulled out into Environmental, Social, and (Corporate) Governance, one begins to sense a certain political agenda at work through the hidden space of the acronym. Once again, we are presented with the trees, but we cannot see the forest.

What about an HNWI? This refers to a person, normally a rich and powerful one, for whom a princely income is the only right and proper response from society when it comes to bonus time and executive salaries. But when we hear High Net Worth Individual, we would be forgiven for feeling both irked by the insinuation of essential superiority and indignant at the obvious attempt to fool us through use of the acronym. In an age of billionaire oligarchs, there is of course the UHNWI. I shall leave you to work out the U for yourselves, but it is not encouraging.

We wonder why nobody understood what was happening in the financial and banking sectors through the 1990s-2000s, but when we recall hearing of CDO, ABS, MBS, CMO, PAC, REMIC, and the IMF, the impenetrability of these strings seems a little easier to comprehend, even if the opaque abbreviations themselves are not. When unravelled, some of these abbreviated forms sound truly sinister, contradictory, or even perverse. Consider the GSE (Government-Sponsored Enterprise) affectionately referred to as Freddie Mac, the cosy and beloved father figure who looks after our mortgages in the financial jungle, or should I say the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation as it is otherwise known? I suddenly feel rather cold.

Then there are the ‘three letter agencies’ — FBI, CIA, ATF, DEA, DHS, NSA — Why are these agencies of the security state initialized, and initialized in the same three-letter form? Is it because they all have at least one thing in common: secrecy? Maybe I go too far, but it is curious. Hitherto, this abbreviated form was not common when referring to the institutional keystones of the constitution — Congress, the Presidency, and so on. However, the growing popularity of SCOTUS, POTUS, VPOTUS, FLOTUS ought to stimulate some hard thinking about where the Republic is going?

It is not just in government and big business that the acronym does its sneaky work, but in the broader culture too. On The Glenn Show podcast, academics John McWhorter and Glenn Loury amuse themselves from time to time by poking fun at the Three Name People — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ibrahm X. Kendi, Michael Eric Dyson, etc. It is no accident that among their acolytes these luminaries are often referred to via acronym — AOC, IXK. The acronym elevates the person into a personage, transports them from mere mortality onto the plane of historical personae. They are no longer a flesh and blood individual who has a lived life like the rest of us, but a phenomenon to be encountered like an institution, a force to be reckoned with, a Weltanschauung embodied, or a global organization unencumbered by spelled-out names that risk reminding us of their humble humanity. Martin is the guy who does your boiler, MLK is a timeless authority and moral talisman.

Perhaps all this fretting about letters is overly fussy. Perhaps it is overthinking. But I suspect there is something in it. The most effective place to hide and deceive in our information rich society is in plain sight. It might do us good to get out our crowbars occasionally and take more time out of our fast-paced lives to jemmy open some of these acronyms.

Endnotes

1 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 97.

2 Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); see also Zygmund Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000); Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (London: Verso, 1984).

3 Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 83–84.

4 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, pp. 89–90.

5 In the Soviet Union, the acronym RSFSR stood for the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, as distinct from the other republics of the Union, such as the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic or the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic.

6 OSO — Special Council of the NKVD; ASA — Anti-Soviet Agitation; KRD — Counter-Revolutionary Activity; KRTD — Counter-Revolutionary Trotskyite Activity; PSh — Suspicion of Espionage; SVPSh — Contacts Leading to Suspicion of Espionage; KRM — Counter-Revolutionary Thought; VAS — Dissemination of Anti-Soviet Sentiments; SOE — Socially Dangerous Element; SVE — Socially Harmful Element; PD — Criminal Activity; ChS — Member of a Family (of a convicted or suspected person).

7 Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956: Volume One (New York: Harper & Row, 2007). p. 64.

8 Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956, p. 64.