Speak no Evil

Image from gracefyt.blogspot.com

It is important - if you wish to defeat fascism - to be sensitive to the use and misuse of language: to understand how the terms we use, the metaphors we subscribe to, the empty clichés and elevated banalities of idealism that we fall back on, essentially determine the world we inhabit and the kind of people we become. And it's important to remember that whilst sticks and stones may break bones, only words are really murderous.

Victor Klemperer, a professor of French Literature at Dresden University until the Nuremberg Laws obliged him, as a Jew, to resign his post in 1935, knew this when he bravely documented the role of certain key words and phrases within Nazi Germany. In The Language of the Third Reich, he demonstrated how language, culture, and history are intimately related and how a violent rhetoric demanding racial purity and Lebensraum resulted in obscene bloodshed and the digging of mass graves.

Klemperer rightly understood that it isn't only actions that need to be examined and combated, but also what he calls the Nazi cast of mind and its way of thinking rooted in the language of hate. He writes: "Nazism permeated the flesh and blood of people through single words, idioms and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions ... taken on board mechanically and unconsciously." [14]

Denazification, if it is ever to be accomplished, is thus a procedure that must be carried out at the level of micro-politics; a fact recognized by Michel Foucault, who, writing in a preface to Anti-Oedipus, argued that the major and strategic adversary remained fascism: "And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini ... but also the fascism in us all, in our heads, and in our everyday behaviour ..." The key task is therefore to learn how to "rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism" [xiii].

But this is no small task. For it involves the revaluation of everyday language; exposing seemingly innocent and innocuous words commonly used by all on the one hand, whilst giving formerly pejorative terms positive virtue on the other hand. It perhaps also obliges us to coin neologisms and find ways to speak with sensitivity and a certain softness of tone - unlike the Nazis, who endlessly shouted the same things and spoke with one voice that was as loud, monotonous, and threatening as the barking of an Alsatian dog.

In saying this, am I promoting a form of what reactionary idiots like to characterize sneeringly as political correctness? Perhaps.

I am certainly saying we all need to mind our language and be a wise monkey like Iwazaru. For although those who peddle hate speech often like to do so in the name of free speech, the latter is rarely contrary to propriety and good manners.

- Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich, trans. Martin Brady, (Continuum, 2006).
- Michel Foucault, 'Preface' to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley et al, (The Athlone Press, 1984).