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Language and literature make history, for better or for worse
Where would we be without the written word? The evolution of hieroglyphs to cursive script to digitally printed letters has brought us to a point in history where we are so in the ‘now’ that the past (as LP Hartley reminds us) really is a foreign country. Without the written word, would we be better storytellers? Would we be better listeners? Would we have better memories? Yes, they did things differently back then, but their motives were the same as ours. The thread was always language, the language that created and wrote our histories.
As the mechanics of writing, papermaking, and printing made the written word in the shape of ideas, stories, doctrines, beliefs and theories more widely available, that method of providing information to the growing masses of the literate was harnessed by those religious and political groups who were most determined to sell their message. Some famous examples – evil and good - include the anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer published in Germany from 1923 until the end of the Second World War, Mao’s Little Red Book, Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man, Machiavelli’s The Prince, The Art of War by Tsun Zu, Das Kapital by Karl Marx, or Thomas Moore’s Utopia. These encompassed the good, the bad, and the unaccountably evil, and the print runs made them ubiquitous.
Nowadays, you can choose to read the likes of Breitbart, the dangerously far-right American syndicated news, opinion and commentary website, or the online Politico for fairer and more considered reportage. In January 2016, the Institute of Contemporary History, which was founded in Germany in 1949 to study the phenomenon of National Socialism. released the first reprint of Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" since World War II[1]. One year later, the German publisher said the book had sold about 85,000 copies and spent 35 weeks on weekly news magazine Der Spiegel’s non-fiction best-seller list. You will be relieved to learn though that most of the buyers were academics, according to Dr. Magnus Brechtken, deputy director of the Institute of Contemporary History. You see, this edition of “Mein Kamph” is a critically annotated one, a feature that irritates far right groups who prefer the original version where nothing is challenged. Incidentally, it is illegal in Germany to republish or distribute the original version of “Mein Kamph.” Any published editions must be annotated.
Every religion jumped on the in-tray and filled the out-trays with prolific abandon. Once the paper and print thing had been figured out, the race was on; holy books and tracts, racist rants, arguments to maintain the status quo of inequality, slavery and free trade spewed out. Religious righteousness, moral outrage, hatred and misogyny flew hot off the press to an impatient reading public. In our own time, social media has facilitated an alarmingly worrying resurgence of this brand of unbridled ‘free expression.’
As levels of literacy increased, control over reading matter also increased; this of course we know as censorship. But as technology improved, mass dissemination of written matter multiplied exponentially. The day arrived when books could be printed quicker than they could be burned; the international movement of people made censorship a joke in all but the most totalitarian states, and of course, the pervasive World Wide Web has moved censorship activity for example, to blocking WiFi access in North Korea, or curtailing website access in China, Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Ireland, of course, has had its own struggles with religion and censorship. Consider the 1891 papal encyclical Rerum Novarum; a document that ignored the Enlightenment and idealised the organisation of society in the Middle Ages. Highly influenced by the philosophical thinking of Thomas Aquinas – called Thomism, it strongly coloured the role of the Catholic Church in Ireland, most evident in the principal of subsidiarity, whereby responsibility for education and healthcare were handed over to the church; and we all know how that turned out. Not such a good idea then, allowing the writings and thoughts of a monk born in 1225 to have such an impact on the formation of a modern country.
Interestingly, Frank Hugh O’Donnell’s The Ruin of Education in Ireland, published in 1902, interpreted the Catholic Church’s control of education in Ireland as a British conspiracy to keep the Irish intellect stunted. I came across this in chapter 25 of The Books that Define Ireland by Bryan Fanning and Tom Garvin, and it’s a theory that is hard to disagree with when you peruse the works discussed in Fanning and Garvin’s book, for example – Nell McCafferty’s A Woman to Blame: The Kerry Babies Case, Noel Browne’s Against the Tide, [he being most closely associated with the Mother and Child Scheme – a scheme most hated by clerics and medics who wanted to maintain the status quo of control], Fintan O’Toole’s Meanwhile Back at the Ranch: The Politics of Irish Beef, [remember Larry Goodman and his fellow rancheros?] and, most tellingly of all, Suffer the Little Children: The Inside Story of Ireland’s Industrial Schools by Mary Raftery and Eoin O’Sullivan. This combination of memoir, investigative journalism and literature kicks back bravely and unapologetically at an Ireland that needed a good kicking.
But the kind of books that played a major role in shaping history were foundational texts. Martin Puchner in The Written World: How Literature Shapes History, describes foundational texts as binding people to them by demanding service and obedience. “They told a story of origin; they set their readers apart from their neighbours…” Religious foundational texts include the New Testament, the Hebrew Bible, the Qur’an, Buddhist sutras, and the Hindu Vedas. And now remember that one of the most volatile flash points for unrest, Jerusalem, is where three sacred scriptures – the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Qur’an, are concentrated in a single location.
And then there are the myths and legends from around the world that turn out to be quite similar. Take our own Táin Bó Cuailnge, the story of a long war between Connacht and Ulster. It started when Queen Maeve of Connacht deserted her husband, Conor mac Nessa, King of Ulster to marry, Eochaid Dala. But somewhere along the way she fell in love with her grand-nephew Aillil. Aillil killed Eochaid Dala and replaced him as Queen Maeve’s consort.
The sequel would rival anything from Marvel Comics. Maeve invaded Ulster to steal the Brown Bull of Cooley so she would be equal in wealth with her husband, Aillil, who owned the White-horned Bull. She succeeded in her mission because all of the Ulster warriors were afflicted by the Curse of Macha and poor old Cúchulainn had to defend Ulster single-handed.
It ended badly though. Maeve brought the Brown Bull back to Connacht. When the White-horned Bull saw the Brown Bull, they fought and killed each other. But the interesting thing is that this template of epic story is reflected in many ancient warring cultures, not only Celtic warriors, but Homeric warriors in the Iliad and warriors in the Sanskrit epic poem, the Mahābhārata. Many people totally unfamiliar with Celtic mythology could relate to and appreciate the plot.
But let’s park the mythology and get back to the more serious, real life stuff. Texts that set you apart are not a great idea then. Look at the persecution of Rohingya Muslims by Buddhists in Myanmar and the genocide of the ancient religious minority of Yazidis by ISIS in Iraq; Mynamar’s military even flooded Facebook with hundreds of fake accounts sending out incendiary comments about Rohingyas. A more recent story that has emerged is the ‘re-education’ of Uighur Muslims by the authorities in China. How many fewer flashpoints of violence there would be if religious foundational texts did not drive the non-reflective angry mobs to commit despicable acts in the name of archaic jiggery pokery.
What many of these texts have in common is the perpetration of dubious origin myths and pseudo-histories; a dangerous mix for readers who have never been given the opportunity to develop their critical faculties or engage in rigorous analysis. These texts are perfect for the binary audience; 1 is good; 0 is bad; there are no grey areas. We can see it happening right now in the United States with the Trump administration hijacking the Bible as some kind of rubric that makes America great – perfect for gun toting, non-reflective supporters. Satire, they would not get; constructive criticism would mortally offend them. They would reject Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal, George Orwell’s Animal Farm or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and take grave offence at Monty Python’s The Life of Brian. Prescient literature then is not for the feeble minded. Religious foundational texts and ammunition have too often gone hand in hand. Most recently, we can see this trend in the United States.
Secular foundational texts would include The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels, the United States Constitution, and the 1916 Proclamation. Again, many secular texts have been hijacked by fanatics. I am guessing that neither Marx nor Engels would have enjoyed living under Stalin. Look at all those gun toting fundamentalists in the United States who constantly recite the archaic Second Amendment of the United States Constitution. That bit about ‘cherishing all of the children of the nation equally’ in the 1916 Proclamation, has yet to come to pass in Ireland. Our own Irish constitution, penned in 1937 by a right wing, conservative Fianna Fáil government who kowtowed to the Catholic Church, has seen some important amendments in recent years, reflecting a more modern, diverse and tolerant society.
Of course, the Catholic church preferred catechisms to bibles because they standardised doctrine instead of allowing people to interpret the bible for themselves. Some of us are old enough to remember the fear of going to school having not learned our catechism questions for homework – back then, it was called ‘education.’ Another considerable chunk of the school day was taken up with learning Irish, a complete waste of time for yours truly. My fascination with and undisguised love of the English language was inconsequential in an education system devised by fanatical Gaeilgeoirs. Knowing Irish grammar was deemed more important than knowing just about anything else; well it was probably on a par with the contents of the green catechism and just a notch up from mental arithmetic and a completely biased version of Ireland’s fight for freedom. Education indeed. This was the biggest educational fopaux, or should I say botún (thank you Google) made by Eamon De Valera. He compounded the centuries of damage done by the British to our native language, by making it elitist and the only pathway to many careers. He ruined an entire educational system for the sake of Irish, force feeding it to generations of reluctant scholars in the hope of turning them into some unpalatable Celtic foie gras. It worked; most of us have the cúpla focail which, translated into English means, being able to say random phrases like ‘Tá Mamaí Sa Chistin’ – now there’s a well outdated one. I wonder how you’d say the following in Irish – the whole family is working from home in the kitchen because that’s were the best WiFi reception is?
But consider this; maybe it’s better to commit nothing to print and commit everything to memory instead. Remarkably, Martin Puchner explains how Socrates regarded writing as having some patent disadvantages. “You couldn’t ask a piece of writing follow-up questions; words would be taken out of context in which they were spoken, which would make them bound to be misunderstood, beyond the control of their author; words would survive the speaker’s death, so that he would be unable to refute false interpretations that might arise later.” We can thank Plato and his clever idea of dialogues as a way of preserving Socrates’ legacy, recording in writing, as he did, set-up conversations with Socrates demonstrate his wisdom – otherwise, all of Socrates’ thoughts would have been lost for ever. So, thank you, Mr. Plato, for your Dialogues!
Interestingly, in his book, Assault on Reason, Al Gore faces up to the problems of the diversity of media platforms in a very Socratic way, by questioning the passivity of the listeners and viewers when it comes to the one-way street of radio and television. He fears we have all become too used to receiving and not giving, hearing and not responding, consuming, and not questioning. Oddly enough though, Al Gore sees the one-way communication being replaced with a good old-fashioned two-way conversation again with social media. He believes social media has brought back the conversation; no longer two-way but rather multi-way. Twitter and Facebook are the most obvious examples, with blogs coming a close third. But on the downside, it is an unedited, free for all, ideal for an audience who consume without questioning. This became frighteningly apparent in 2016 with the passing of Brexit and the election of US President Donald Trump. Trump knew how to manipulate social media; he cut out the middle manager and the editor and spoke directly to his audience.
Now it’s one big Spaghetti Junction of conversations and information exchange – the official term is narrative texts – mediums for telling a story or providing information. You can read newspapers, magazines, journals, and books online or in hard copy. You can converse over Skype, WhatsApp, mobile phone, land line, and Facebook. French philosopher, Roland Barthes (1915-1980) emphasised that narrative texts were not one thing, but a weaving together of different things (in our case – radio, television, World Wide Web, social media, YouTube, Netflix, written word). He did this in his book called Mythologies (1957 / 1972) and he called it intertextuality – meaning that nothing is unique or distinct. Barthes was certainly ahead of his time when it came to understanding media.
We are all familiar with the language used by Nazis to describe Jews. Imagine if they could have harnessed social media? Robert Bowers, who murdered eleven people at the at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, was an avid user of Gab, an alternative version of Twitter popular with white supremacists, white nationalists and likeminded nefarious types who have been removed from mainstream social media sites. The type of posts he made would sit uncomfortably well beside the Nuremberg Laws or Nazi Race Classification that ranked ethnic groups on a scale of one to five – one being Aryans or Ubermensch - the most superior and advanced group who needed a lot of room or ‘lebensraum’ to live, while Jewish people were classed as lower than the lowest Untermensch, who should, in the opinion of Nazis, be exterminated. Minority Tutsis would be turned on in a similar manner by the Hutu majority in the Rwandan civil war in 1994. Gradually, many of the German Aryans began to believe in Hitler's racial hierarchy. But isn't it astounding though that one of the earliest papermaking facilities in Northern Europe, was established in Nuremburg in 1390? Nuremburg, the scene of so many book burnings by Nazi fanatics in the 1930’s.
Language and literature can be kidnapped or hijacked by any powerful group who need a tool to spread their message or create their ideal. Cleverly misleading phrases like ‘axis of evil’ and ‘fake news’ have entered the lexicon. Putin defended his annexation of Crimea by saying that most of its inhabitants were Russian speakers; Hitler used the same excuse when he took the Sudetenland, a part of Czechoslovakia inhabited by German speakers. Apartheid South Africa only provided education through Afrikaans for black schoolchildren, a language that was not going to open many career opportunities. In 2018 a law was passed in Israel that removed Arabic as an official language, downgrading it from being co-official with Hebrew to being an auxiliary language. Currently, there are very dangerous tensions between English-speaking Cameroonians and French-speaking Cameroonians; a problem directly created by colonialism.
Throughout history, writers have fled their countries to escape imprisonment or death, journalists who criticise regimes have been murdered (Saudi Arabian, Jamal Khashoggi being the most recent), online hatred has spawned even more hatred, books have been banned in non-democracies, bookshop owners (in some countries) have mysteriously disappeared, and propaganda is alive and well. Twisting language and literature to promote the unforgivable, the downright stupid, or to reclaim some ridiculous romantic past (Stalin hijacked Gorky; Hitler hijacked Nietzsche) may work in the short term, but in the long run it will never prevail, and yet it is a mistake that is constantly repeated.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2017/01/04/europe/hitler-mein-kampf-reprint-germany/index.html
© Berni Dwan 2018
Language and literature make history, for better or for worse
Where would we be without the written word? The evolution of hieroglyphs to cursive script to digitally printed letters has brought us to a point in history where we are so in the ‘now’ that the past (as LP Hartley reminds us) really is a foreign country. Without the written word, would we be better storytellers? Would we be better listeners? Would we have better memories? Yes, they did things differently back then, but their motives were the same as ours. The thread was always language, the language that created and wrote our histories.
As the mechanics of writing, papermaking, and printing made the written word in the shape of ideas, stories, doctrines, beliefs and theories more widely available, that method of providing information to the growing masses of the literate was harnessed by those religious and political groups who were most determined to sell their message. Some famous examples – evil and good - include the anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer published in Germany from 1923 until the end of the Second World War, Mao’s Little Red Book, Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man, Machiavelli’s The Prince, The Art of War by Tsun Zu, Das Kapital by Karl Marx, or Thomas Moore’s Utopia. These encompassed the good, the bad, and the unaccountably evil, and the print runs made them ubiquitous.
Nowadays, you can choose to read the likes of Breitbart, the dangerously far-right American syndicated news, opinion and commentary website, or the online Politico for fairer and more considered reportage. In January 2016, the Institute of Contemporary History, which was founded in Germany in 1949 to study the phenomenon of National Socialism. released the first reprint of Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" since World War II[1]. One year later, the German publisher said the book had sold about 85,000 copies and spent 35 weeks on weekly news magazine Der Spiegel’s non-fiction best-seller list. You will be relieved to learn though that most of the buyers were academics, according to Dr. Magnus Brechtken, deputy director of the Institute of Contemporary History. You see, this edition of “Mein Kamph” is a critically annotated one, a feature that irritates far right groups who prefer the original version where nothing is challenged. Incidentally, it is illegal in Germany to republish or distribute the original version of “Mein Kamph.” Any published editions must be annotated.
Every religion jumped on the in-tray and filled the out-trays with prolific abandon. Once the paper and print thing had been figured out, the race was on; holy books and tracts, racist rants, arguments to maintain the status quo of inequality, slavery and free trade spewed out. Religious righteousness, moral outrage, hatred and misogyny flew hot off the press to an impatient reading public. In our own time, social media has facilitated an alarmingly worrying resurgence of this brand of unbridled ‘free expression.’
As levels of literacy increased, control over reading matter also increased; this of course we know as censorship. But as technology improved, mass dissemination of written matter multiplied exponentially. The day arrived when books could be printed quicker than they could be burned; the international movement of people made censorship a joke in all but the most totalitarian states, and of course, the pervasive World Wide Web has moved censorship activity for example, to blocking WiFi access in North Korea, or curtailing website access in China, Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Ireland, of course, has had its own struggles with religion and censorship. Consider the 1891 papal encyclical Rerum Novarum; a document that ignored the Enlightenment and idealised the organisation of society in the Middle Ages. Highly influenced by the philosophical thinking of Thomas Aquinas – called Thomism, it strongly coloured the role of the Catholic Church in Ireland, most evident in the principal of subsidiarity, whereby responsibility for education and healthcare were handed over to the church; and we all know how that turned out. Not such a good idea then, allowing the writings and thoughts of a monk born in 1225 to have such an impact on the formation of a modern country.
Interestingly, Frank Hugh O’Donnell’s The Ruin of Education in Ireland, published in 1902, interpreted the Catholic Church’s control of education in Ireland as a British conspiracy to keep the Irish intellect stunted. I came across this in chapter 25 of The Books that Define Ireland by Bryan Fanning and Tom Garvin, and it’s a theory that is hard to disagree with when you peruse the works discussed in Fanning and Garvin’s book, for example – Nell McCafferty’s A Woman to Blame: The Kerry Babies Case, Noel Browne’s Against the Tide, [he being most closely associated with the Mother and Child Scheme – a scheme most hated by clerics and medics who wanted to maintain the status quo of control], Fintan O’Toole’s Meanwhile Back at the Ranch: The Politics of Irish Beef, [remember Larry Goodman and his fellow rancheros?] and, most tellingly of all, Suffer the Little Children: The Inside Story of Ireland’s Industrial Schools by Mary Raftery and Eoin O’Sullivan. This combination of memoir, investigative journalism and literature kicks back bravely and unapologetically at an Ireland that needed a good kicking.
But the kind of books that played a major role in shaping history were foundational texts. Martin Puchner in The Written World: How Literature Shapes History, describes foundational texts as binding people to them by demanding service and obedience. “They told a story of origin; they set their readers apart from their neighbours…” Religious foundational texts include the New Testament, the Hebrew Bible, the Qur’an, Buddhist sutras, and the Hindu Vedas. And now remember that one of the most volatile flash points for unrest, Jerusalem, is where three sacred scriptures – the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Qur’an, are concentrated in a single location.
And then there are the myths and legends from around the world that turn out to be quite similar. Take our own Táin Bó Cuailnge, the story of a long war between Connacht and Ulster. It started when Queen Maeve of Connacht deserted her husband, Conor mac Nessa, King of Ulster to marry, Eochaid Dala. But somewhere along the way she fell in love with her grand-nephew Aillil. Aillil killed Eochaid Dala and replaced him as Queen Maeve’s consort.
The sequel would rival anything from Marvel Comics. Maeve invaded Ulster to steal the Brown Bull of Cooley so she would be equal in wealth with her husband, Aillil, who owned the White-horned Bull. She succeeded in her mission because all of the Ulster warriors were afflicted by the Curse of Macha and poor old Cúchulainn had to defend Ulster single-handed.
It ended badly though. Maeve brought the Brown Bull back to Connacht. When the White-horned Bull saw the Brown Bull, they fought and killed each other. But the interesting thing is that this template of epic story is reflected in many ancient warring cultures, not only Celtic warriors, but Homeric warriors in the Iliad and warriors in the Sanskrit epic poem, the Mahābhārata. Many people totally unfamiliar with Celtic mythology could relate to and appreciate the plot.
But let’s park the mythology and get back to the more serious, real life stuff. Texts that set you apart are not a great idea then. Look at the persecution of Rohingya Muslims by Buddhists in Myanmar and the genocide of the ancient religious minority of Yazidis by ISIS in Iraq; Mynamar’s military even flooded Facebook with hundreds of fake accounts sending out incendiary comments about Rohingyas. A more recent story that has emerged is the ‘re-education’ of Uighur Muslims by the authorities in China. How many fewer flashpoints of violence there would be if religious foundational texts did not drive the non-reflective angry mobs to commit despicable acts in the name of archaic jiggery pokery.
What many of these texts have in common is the perpetration of dubious origin myths and pseudo-histories; a dangerous mix for readers who have never been given the opportunity to develop their critical faculties or engage in rigorous analysis. These texts are perfect for the binary audience; 1 is good; 0 is bad; there are no grey areas. We can see it happening right now in the United States with the Trump administration hijacking the Bible as some kind of rubric that makes America great – perfect for gun toting, non-reflective supporters. Satire, they would not get; constructive criticism would mortally offend them. They would reject Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal, George Orwell’s Animal Farm or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and take grave offence at Monty Python’s The Life of Brian. Prescient literature then is not for the feeble minded. Religious foundational texts and ammunition have too often gone hand in hand. Most recently, we can see this trend in the United States.
Secular foundational texts would include The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels, the United States Constitution, and the 1916 Proclamation. Again, many secular texts have been hijacked by fanatics. I am guessing that neither Marx nor Engels would have enjoyed living under Stalin. Look at all those gun toting fundamentalists in the United States who constantly recite the archaic Second Amendment of the United States Constitution. That bit about ‘cherishing all of the children of the nation equally’ in the 1916 Proclamation, has yet to come to pass in Ireland. Our own Irish constitution, penned in 1937 by a right wing, conservative Fianna Fáil government who kowtowed to the Catholic Church, has seen some important amendments in recent years, reflecting a more modern, diverse and tolerant society.
Of course, the Catholic church preferred catechisms to bibles because they standardised doctrine instead of allowing people to interpret the bible for themselves. Some of us are old enough to remember the fear of going to school having not learned our catechism questions for homework – back then, it was called ‘education.’ Another considerable chunk of the school day was taken up with learning Irish, a complete waste of time for yours truly. My fascination with and undisguised love of the English language was inconsequential in an education system devised by fanatical Gaeilgeoirs. Knowing Irish grammar was deemed more important than knowing just about anything else; well it was probably on a par with the contents of the green catechism and just a notch up from mental arithmetic and a completely biased version of Ireland’s fight for freedom. Education indeed. This was the biggest educational fopaux, or should I say botún (thank you Google) made by Eamon De Valera. He compounded the centuries of damage done by the British to our native language, by making it elitist and the only pathway to many careers. He ruined an entire educational system for the sake of Irish, force feeding it to generations of reluctant scholars in the hope of turning them into some unpalatable Celtic foie gras. It worked; most of us have the cúpla focail which, translated into English means, being able to say random phrases like ‘Tá Mamaí Sa Chistin’ – now there’s a well outdated one. I wonder how you’d say the following in Irish – the whole family is working from home in the kitchen because that’s were the best WiFi reception is?
But consider this; maybe it’s better to commit nothing to print and commit everything to memory instead. Remarkably, Martin Puchner explains how Socrates regarded writing as having some patent disadvantages. “You couldn’t ask a piece of writing follow-up questions; words would be taken out of context in which they were spoken, which would make them bound to be misunderstood, beyond the control of their author; words would survive the speaker’s death, so that he would be unable to refute false interpretations that might arise later.” We can thank Plato and his clever idea of dialogues as a way of preserving Socrates’ legacy, recording in writing, as he did, set-up conversations with Socrates demonstrate his wisdom – otherwise, all of Socrates’ thoughts would have been lost for ever. So, thank you, Mr. Plato, for your Dialogues!
Interestingly, in his book, Assault on Reason, Al Gore faces up to the problems of the diversity of media platforms in a very Socratic way, by questioning the passivity of the listeners and viewers when it comes to the one-way street of radio and television. He fears we have all become too used to receiving and not giving, hearing and not responding, consuming, and not questioning. Oddly enough though, Al Gore sees the one-way communication being replaced with a good old-fashioned two-way conversation again with social media. He believes social media has brought back the conversation; no longer two-way but rather multi-way. Twitter and Facebook are the most obvious examples, with blogs coming a close third. But on the downside, it is an unedited, free for all, ideal for an audience who consume without questioning. This became frighteningly apparent in 2016 with the passing of Brexit and the election of US President Donald Trump. Trump knew how to manipulate social media; he cut out the middle manager and the editor and spoke directly to his audience.
Now it’s one big Spaghetti Junction of conversations and information exchange – the official term is narrative texts – mediums for telling a story or providing information. You can read newspapers, magazines, journals, and books online or in hard copy. You can converse over Skype, WhatsApp, mobile phone, land line, and Facebook. French philosopher, Roland Barthes (1915-1980) emphasised that narrative texts were not one thing, but a weaving together of different things (in our case – radio, television, World Wide Web, social media, YouTube, Netflix, written word). He did this in his book called Mythologies (1957 / 1972) and he called it intertextuality – meaning that nothing is unique or distinct. Barthes was certainly ahead of his time when it came to understanding media.
We are all familiar with the language used by Nazis to describe Jews. Imagine if they could have harnessed social media? Robert Bowers, who murdered eleven people at the at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, was an avid user of Gab, an alternative version of Twitter popular with white supremacists, white nationalists and likeminded nefarious types who have been removed from mainstream social media sites. The type of posts he made would sit uncomfortably well beside the Nuremberg Laws or Nazi Race Classification that ranked ethnic groups on a scale of one to five – one being Aryans or Ubermensch - the most superior and advanced group who needed a lot of room or ‘lebensraum’ to live, while Jewish people were classed as lower than the lowest Untermensch, who should, in the opinion of Nazis, be exterminated. Minority Tutsis would be turned on in a similar manner by the Hutu majority in the Rwandan civil war in 1994. Gradually, many of the German Aryans began to believe in Hitler's racial hierarchy. But isn't it astounding though that one of the earliest papermaking facilities in Northern Europe, was established in Nuremburg in 1390? Nuremburg, the scene of so many book burnings by Nazi fanatics in the 1930’s.
Language and literature can be kidnapped or hijacked by any powerful group who need a tool to spread their message or create their ideal. Cleverly misleading phrases like ‘axis of evil’ and ‘fake news’ have entered the lexicon. Putin defended his annexation of Crimea by saying that most of its inhabitants were Russian speakers; Hitler used the same excuse when he took the Sudetenland, a part of Czechoslovakia inhabited by German speakers. Apartheid South Africa only provided education through Afrikaans for black schoolchildren, a language that was not going to open many career opportunities. In 2018 a law was passed in Israel that removed Arabic as an official language, downgrading it from being co-official with Hebrew to being an auxiliary language. Currently, there are very dangerous tensions between English-speaking Cameroonians and French-speaking Cameroonians; a problem directly created by colonialism.
Throughout history, writers have fled their countries to escape imprisonment or death, journalists who criticise regimes have been murdered (Saudi Arabian, Jamal Khashoggi being the most recent), online hatred has spawned even more hatred, books have been banned in non-democracies, bookshop owners (in some countries) have mysteriously disappeared, and propaganda is alive and well. Twisting language and literature to promote the unforgivable, the downright stupid, or to reclaim some ridiculous romantic past (Stalin hijacked Gorky; Hitler hijacked Nietzsche) may work in the short term, but in the long run it will never prevail, and yet it is a mistake that is constantly repeated.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2017/01/04/europe/hitler-mein-kampf-reprint-germany/index.html
© Berni Dwan 2018
