Military Industrial Complex 2.0: Cubicle Mercenaries, Subcontracting Warriors, and Other Phenomena of a Privatizing Pentagon.
Is The USA Addicted To War?
Economic Death Spiral at the Pentagon.
Left and Right Against the Military Industrial Complex
Washington Post: The Military-Media Complex
Boston Globe 2008: Propaganda at home
Chalmers Johnson: The Military-Industrial Complex. It's Much Later Than You Think
Pentagon Pundits: Media Facilitate Iraq Propaganda Effort
lørdag den 16. maj 2009
Facebook-gruppe til gavn for irakerne i Vor Frue Kirke
"Vores" regerings og deres kumpaner i DFs flygtninge- og indvandrerpolitik har selvfølgelig været under al kritik. Jeg går ud fra at almindeligt tænkende og omsorgsfulde mennesker er fuldt ud klar over dette, så jeg har ikke tænkt mig at uddybe, men blot, at gøre opmærksom på Facebook-gruppen til støtte for de irakiske asylansøgere der pt. har gemt sig i Vor Frue Kirke. Dette er en mulighed for at gøre noget praktisk for at imødegå den repressive og intolerante flygtningepolitik.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Copenhagen-Denmark/Irakerne-i-Vor-Frue-Kirke/80667532321?ref=nf
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Copenhagen-Denmark/Irakerne-i-Vor-Frue-Kirke/80667532321?ref=nf
Mere om drone-angrebene i Pakistan
60 drone hits kill 14 al-Qaeda men, 687 civilians
Friday, April 10, 2009
By Amir Mir
LAHORE: Of the 60 cross-border predator strikes carried out by the Afghanistan-based American drones in Pakistan between January 14, 2006 and April 8, 2009, only 10 were able to hit their actual targets, killing 14 wanted al-Qaeda leaders, besides perishing 687 innocent Pakistani civilians. The success percentage of the US predator strikes thus comes to not more than six per cent.
Figures compiled by the Pakistani authorities show that a total of 701 people, including 14 al-Qaeda leaders, have been killed since January 2006 in 60 American predator attacks targeting the tribal areas of Pakistan. Two strikes carried out in 2006 had killed 98 civilians while three attacks conducted in 2007 had slain 66 Pakistanis, yet none of the wanted al-Qaeda or Taliban leaders could be hit by the Americans right on target. However, of the 50 drone attacks carried out between January 29, 2008 and April 8, 2009, 10 hit their targets and killed 14 wanted al-Qaeda operatives. Most of these attacks were carried out on the basis of intelligence believed to have been provided by the Pakistani and Afghan tribesmen who had been spying for the US-led allied forces stationed in Afghanistan.
Kilde
Bill Moyers Journal: Professor Juan Cole om Taleban?
BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the Journal.
President Obama was burned in effigy in Pakistan the other day. This photo from the Associated Press depicts a crowd of men with signs saying "Go America Go," meaning go home as an image of the President goes up in flames.
Writing in "The Wall Street Journal," columnist James Taranto said the burning symbolizes, to all Americans who may doubt it, that Obama is a war president.
For sure, Pakistan and Afghanistan are now both battlegrounds in the conflict formerly known as the global war on terror. So entwined are they that the Pentagon has conflated them into one big combat theater known in military speak as "Afpak."
But reducing this current fighting to military shorthand dehumanizes horrific realities on the ground, where innocent men, women and children are dying every day.
Our own children and grandchildren are already fighting there, and more are on the way. Look at this recent headline in London's "Sunday Times," relaying an American threat to the Pakistani government — "Stop the Taliban now, or we will."
Things have gotten worse in the past week. Hundreds of thousands of refugees have fled Pakistan's northwest region to escape fighting between the country's army and the Taliban.
The news is confusing, misleading, fragmented and sometimes, frightening, so we've asked two informed observers of that region, both of whom have lived in Pakistan to try to help us sort it out.
Juan Cole teaches history at the University of Michigan. His "Informed Comment" blog at juancole.com has become a go to destination for anyone interested in the politics of Islam. The author of several books, this is his latest, "Engaging the Muslim World."
Shahan Mufti recently returned from a six month tour covering Pakistan's ongoing political crisis. He reports for globalpost.com, the new international news website. A Pakistani American, Shahan also has written about Pakistan for "The Christian Science Monitor" and "The Boston Globe" as well as many other print and broadcast news outlets.
Welcome, both of you, to the Journal. JUAN COLE: Thank you.
SHAHAN MUFTI: Thank you.
BILL MOYERS: Shahan, what did you think about this photograph?
SHAHAN MUFTI: Well, it tells a story. But, as any photo, it doesn't tell the complete story. There are protests like this all over the country. There have been ever since the war in Afghanistan began and America started getting involved in the region. This is the story that we get through the mass media for the most part. But there are many other currents in the country that aren't being covered as well.
JUAN COLE: The Jamaat-e-Islami represents very few people. It's a cadre organization. It gets, typically, three percent when there's elections. So, yes, they mount these demonstrations. And you can see that's probably a very small one. And so to make so much of this little picture, it shows a lack of appreciation for proportionality for what really is important in the country.
BILL MOYERS: What is important right now? What's missing from the reporting and the analysis we're getting from Pakistan?
SHAHAN MUFTI: One thing that's missing, obviously, that's hard to get into reporting is context. But also hard information. Hard fact. So we're hearing about this military operation going on in the north of Pakistan right now. Yet there are no reporters, no reporters on the ground. They had-
BILL MOYERS: I have heard a couple from NPR. They seem to be right among the refugees who are fleeing there.
SHAHAN MUFTI: The refugees are outside of the war zone now. These are the people who have been internally displaced within the country. And they have been, actually, have been evacuated by the army. So before the army moved into these northern areas they disseminated information through radio, television, to tell the people to get out 'cause they were going to move in.
And we've heard of hundreds of thousands, maybe a million people, moving out of these areas. So, really, all the information that we are relaying as reporters, as the media, as information, really is coming from army press releases, for the most part.
There's very little room to independently confirm a lot of the information. Especially in this most recent offensive. That is a huge thing that, as that reporters in Pakistan I know are dealing with. They're referring to "alleged" military operations.
So they're in a position where they can't even independently confirm that an entire military operation took place. Let alone the figures of the Taliban militants dead, or how many civilian casualties there are, or how many armed forces-- people in the armed forces have died. So that is one thing that's very troubling, as a reporter.
BILL MOYERS: Who are the Taliban and what do they want? What are their goals?
JUAN COLE: What we're calling the Taliban, it's actually a misnomer. There are, like, five different groups that we're swooping up and calling the Taliban. The Taliban, properly speaking, are seminary students. They were those refugee boys, many of them orphans, who went through the seminaries or Madrassas in northern Pakistan back in the nineties. And then who emerged as a fighting force. Then you have the old war lords who had fought with the Soviet Union, and were allied with the United States. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Jalaluddin Haqqani, they have formed insurgent groups to fight the Americans now. Because they had fought the Soviet occupation, they now see an American occupation, so they've turned on the United States. They were former allies.
So we're calling them Taliban. And then you have a lot of probably disorganized villagers whose poppy crops, for instance, were burned. And they're angry. So they'll hit a NATO or American checkpoint. So we're scooping all of this up. And then the groups in northern Pakistan who are yet another group. And we're calling it all Taliban.
BILL MOYERS: How many of them?
JUAN COLE:Well, how many of them is impossible to know. But in Pakistan the estimates for fighters are small. 15 thousand. And the current military operation in the Swat Valley is pitting 15 thousand Pakistani troops against 4 thousand Taliban fighters.
That's what's being said. This is small. And the idea that these 4 thousand Taliban in Swat Valley, you know, can take over the capital of the country, or that they're going to spread into the other provinces, which are ethnic provinces, like the Punjab and Sindh, where they're very, very unpopular.
We have a Gallup Poll now, 60 percent of the Punjabis, who are the majority group in Pakistan, say that it's very negative that there should be Taliban operating in Pakistan. And only ten percent say that it's a positive. So in Pakistan, as a whole, this is a small group. It's not a mainstream, big, mass movement.
BILL MOYERS: But how do you explain this mass exodus of, as you say, maybe a million people on the move out of that northwest region where the fighting is going on?
SHAHAN MUFTI: Well, it's very clear that why that happened is because the Pakistan army asked, or wanted the people, the civilian population, to move out of there because it was- is being fought as a guerilla war. So the militants are embedding themselves into the civilian population, which is their strength.
And so this movement out of these northern regions, where the Taliban had control, is a tactical operation. And moving the people out of there, unfortunately, also, it seems, to be military tactic right now
JUAN COLE: The Pakistani military is a tank, you know, traditional, almost central European kind of military. It was formed to fight India and most of the tanks and the troops are down on the border between India and Pakistan. And they're not trained to do counterinsurgency or counterterrorism.
So their idea of putting down the Taliban is to invade the Swat Valley. And if you've got 15,000 troops with artillery, helicopter gunships, fighter jets, operating a military operation in a valley with a million people in it, is going to produce massive displacement.
They're not sending in SWAT teams against these 4 thousand fighters, which I think is what they should have been doing. So when the US caused this. They pressured Pakistan's army to launch a conventional military attack on this small group of guerillas. And is going to inconvenience, you know, probably half a million people in a very dire way. And is that really going to settle the Pashtuns down?
SHAHAN MUFTI: I would say the Pakistani army feels strong pressure to show that they are performing. So whether they're using — whether they're being heavy-handed, whether they're using a lot of fireworks, to prove a point to the United States. And the government, as well as the army, do feel — who are recipients of large American aid, and all, but also clients of the American military — they feel, they do feel, I think, an obligation to perform well, at least to put up a show that they are performing, and that they're performing well.
BILL MOYERS: Are you two saying that the Taliban are not as great a threat to Pakistan and the United States as the United States has been claiming?
JUAN COLE: Well I have to be careful here. Because, on the one hand, I don't want to be interpreted as saying this is not a problem. I mean, you've got several thousand militants operating in the North-West Frontier Province. This is a problem. And it wasn't like that, you know, even ten years ago.The idea of Pakistani Taliban is a new idea. The Taliban were always an Afghan phenomenon. So it is a problem. And it needs to be dealt with. But what I'm saying is that let's just have a sense of proportion here.
The North-West Frontier Province is 10 percent of the Pakistan population. That's where this stuff is happening. And most of it is actually happening not in the Province itself, but in the Federally Administrated Tribal Regions. Which are kind of like our Indian reservations. Only 3.5 million people live there. It's the size of, like, New Hampshire. Pakistan is a country as big as California, Oregon and Washington rolled up in one, with a population of 165 million. So to take this threat, which is a threat locally, to the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas, to parts of the North-West Frontier Province, and to magnify it and to say, "Whoa, the Pakistani government is six months from falling, the Taliban is going to get their hands on nuclear weapons." The kinds of things that are being said in Washington, are just fantastical and some kind of science fiction film. How would these guys, with the Kalashnikov machine guns, take over a country that has an army of 550 thousand? Which has tanks and artillery and fighter jets? How would they even know here the nuclear weapons are? In Pakistan, I just quoted you the Gallup Poll. People don't like Taliban, for the most part.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah, we just talked two days ago, to a Pakistan journalist in Lahore, who told us that public tolerance for the Taliban, as you have said, has diminished as the militants have broken their commitments, moved into other regions, and become ever more oppressive, looting and kidnapping. And they don't want them there. They don't want that, right?
SHAHAN MUFTI: And this is a trend. And especially in the last few months this has happened. As the Taliban, after there was the Shariah deal that we heard a lot about, that was the deal to implement Islamic law in some of the northern areas-
BILL MOYERS: This was a deal the government made with the Taliban up there to let them operate that region-
SHAHAN MUFTI: Their version of Islamic law in that region. Exactly. And people- there was hope, until that point at least, that this will somehow settle everything. This will quell, at least quell the violence for a little bit. That didn't happen. And the Taliban started bleeding into the other areas near to Islam. And then that's when we started hearing these alarming things about this Taliban being within-
BILL MOYERS: 90 miles or 60 miles of Islamabad.
SHAHAN MUFTI: Yeah. Islamabad. And at that point I think there was also another huge trend where we,actually, now we hear the Islamist political parties. We hear the nationalists. We hear all, again, all shades of political parties really speaking out against the Taliban.
JUAN COLE: And women. I mean, you should remember that Pakistan has a large middle class. And it's grown enormously in the last ten years. These are urban white-collar people, well educated, hooked in with international media, and half of them are women.
They're lawyers. They're in the judicial system. They're politicians. And they are very threatened by what they call the Talibanization. And they're coming out and speaking against it, and they are extremely influential. You should remember, Pakistan actually has had a woman prime minister. And that social class of middle class and upper class women are very powerful.
BILL MOYERS: Threatened by the Shariah law about the hard-line Islamic attitude toward women? Is that what you mean?
JUAN COLE: That's right. That's right. They don't like the Taliban repression of women at all.
BILL MOYERS: But, listening to you, I have to then wonder what… I mean, the message coming loud and clear, from both Obama in Washington, and Zardari in Pakistan, is that the Taliban are on the rise. And that they represent, as others have said, an existential threat to Pakistan. You're not denying that this is a problem. But you're not seeing it as this life-and-death matter for the state of Pakistan?
SHAHAN MUFTI: That feeling of doom really doesn't…you don't feel it on the ground there. Because, if you're in a city, like Lahore, or if you're in a city of like 16 million, like Karachi, or if you're in a city that looks like southern California, in Islamabad, even if you're in the tribal areas, or in Peshawar, a huge city of its own, which is right in the North-West Frontier, which is Pashtun there is not this sense that the Taliban are coming tomorrow morning, or next week, or the week after.
They are still, I think, Pakistanis, a lot of them, still see the Taliban as a fringe movement, which they are. The numbers say that. And a fringe movement with is able to wreak a lot of havoc. Especially through its suicide bombings. This tool of suicide bombings is very hard to control. And so people are obviously concerned with how their lives are changing. But this threat of the state falling, I think, nobody in that country takes that too seriously.
BILL MOYERS: In whose interest is it that we're getting the story from Washington and the Pakistani government that it's at the brink of chaos that is coming the Taliban are on the rise?
JUAN COLE: I think it's cynical. And I think that it's a way for Washington to put pressure on the Pakistani civilian and military elites to do what Washington wants them to do. And--
BILL MOYERS: Which is?
JUAN COLE: Well, they wanted this big military campaign against the Taliban in the Swat Valley. Washington is alarmed at the spread of the Taliban in the North-West Frontier Province because it has implications for the security of southern Afghanistan, and therefore for US troops and NATO troops in Afghanistan. And so, from their point of view, this is a big crisis.
They don't want more safe havens for the Taliban in Afghanistan who are killing US troops. And they were upset with the Pakistani elite for not taking this problem more seriously. And I think, sort of saying that Pakistan is unstable, or it's about to fall, or the nukes are in danger, all of this sort of thing, is a signal to Islamabad that you had better get serious about this, because it matters to us. So this is Washington strong-arming Pakistan.
SHAHAN MUFTI: I think you're right on. And I think it's problematic because this really harks back to the period right before the Iraq War, as well, where there was this hype that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
We were- we could have been convinced in a second that Iraq was about to use them. And it's unfortunate that the press did play its part in that problem. And the press is, once again I think, playing its unfortunate part where it is relaying all of these opinions that are coming from intelligence sources or whatever, and ruling this as information. And all of a sudden we're seeing the same sort of almost hysteria.
BILL MOYERS: Do you agree with Shahan, that you're seeing a repeat of the-
JUAN COLE: Yes. Yes.
BILL MOYERS: -official propaganda being disseminated as news?
JUAN COLE: Yes. I think that's exactly what's going on. I mean, especially with regard to the nuclear issue. There is no way on God's green earth that these scruffy tribal fundamentalists, in the North-West Frontier Province, are having anything to do with Pakistan's nuclear weapons. Which, by the way, are stored in secret places, and they're not assembled. And assembling them is a complicated process which requires various high-level military and civilian authorizations. And to put that nuclear issue front and forward is just a way of scaring the American public and putting pressure on Pakistan to do something they didn't want to do.
BILL MOYERS: Why isn't Pakistan doing more to control the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan and up in that northwest region? Why isn't it more effective?
JUAN COLE: You know, I get very nervous when I hear people talking about controlling that region. It's not controllable. And nobody has ever controlled it. Winston Churchill was down there when he was a young man trying to control it.
30 percent of these areas are considered administratively inaccessible by the Pakistani government. And they're the people who would know this area and say, "Well, what does it mean?" This is administratively inaccessible. It means no bureaucrat has been out there. So I don't- I don't think the you- I've also heard President Obama talking about, you know, Pakistan needs to control this area, and so forth. I don't think they understand the scale of what you're talking about here. This is just a very vast, rugged, arid region which--thinly populated. Local people know the ground much better. The best you can do is, I think, make deals with the tribal chieftains to calm things down.
SHAHAN MUFTI: This is real-estate, Afghanistan in this tribal area, this frontier region of Pakistan that nobody, from Alexander to the British, to the Russians, have- the Russians shared a border with this, and they couldn't keep their hands on it. It was a tinderbox. And now the United States is in there. We're in there. And we're having- we're learning, and it's difficult.
BILL MOYERS: Is our presence there giving the Taliban a unity they wouldn't have had without presence?
SHAHAN MUFTI: On the Pakistani side, for sure. I mean, that is their rallying call now. That as well as their religious call. But definitely American presence in the region is what is really giving them a rallying call among youth of the tribal areas who are caught in poverty and cycles of poverty. And it is their rallying call of the foreign invader.
PRESIDENT OBAMA:I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future. That's the goal that must be achieved. That is a cause that could not be more just. And to the terrorists who oppose us, my message is the same: We will defeat you.
BILL MOYERS: Is that an achievable goal?
JUAN COLE: Oh, I think it's an achievable goal. But not this way. First of all, the Taliban are not the same as Al Qaeda, and not necessarily connected to them. They're a regional movement. They're about a local kind of religious nationalism. I think Al Qaeda, in the North-West Frontier Province, and in the tribal areas of Pakistan, is a problem. It's a policing problem
SHAHAN MUFTI: This is all about, I think you're right, this is all about the war in Afghanistan. It has to be. We do know that the Taliban in Pakistan grew out of the campaign in Afghanistan. They bled across the border and then they started carrying out their own personal campaign in Pakistan. What it seems like, what the trajectory has been, it seems like the more Pakistan is pushed to do that project, of eliminating the Taliban as a way of winning the war in Afghanistan, the Pakistani government, the state, is putting itself under all sorts of pressures. And when you have a country that is at the frontline of a glob- well, an American war right now — is under extreme pressures from many sides. It shares the border with China, India, Iran, Afghanistan, and then has a 700 mile Arabian Sea coastline.
That's quite a cast of characters to be caught in the middle of. So Pakistan is under extreme pressures to fit in that geographical location. For the Pakistani security establishment, and my conversation with a lot of people in this security establishment, the Taliban, and the situation in Afghanistan, is about India. They're one and the same conversation. Because influence in Afghanistan, ever since the American-- ever since President Karzai's government in Afghanistan, India has had a greater influence in Afghanistan, which it was missing during the Taliban.
BILL MOYERS: Karzai has made India his most important trading partner, right?
SHAHAN MUFTI: It is the most important trading partner. Is one of the—
BILL MOYERS: And this has to bother Pakistanis, right?
SHAHAN MUFTI: Immensely. It does bother the Pakistani security establishment. Especially because they view the region as a chess board. As most, as China and…
BILL MOYERS: That's an old story, right?
SHAHAN MUFTI: Yeah. So, for them, this is a huge loss. That Afghanistan, that for ten years was our little satellite state. That Paki-- that Afghanistan was under, for the first time, in Pakistan's history at least, Afghanistan, under the Taliban, was friendly towards Pakistan.
There had never been a government that was so friendly with Pakistan. And then, all of a sudden, one day, who moves in to help Afghanistan rebuild? It's India.
So what I'm talking about is that, to deal with the issue in Afghanistan, and President Obama was talking about this, in, as late as November last year, a few months before his inauguration, he had started talking about, I don't know if you recall, but I think it was an interview with "Time Magazine," in which he started talking about the Kashmir issue being the key to solving the war in Afghanistan. And that was a very interesting thought.
BILL MOYERS: The disputed land between India and Pakistan. Both of them are fighting over Kashmir.
SHAHAN MUFTI: Have been for 60 years. It's the main issue between India and Pakistan-
BILL MOYERS: You're saying that's the key to the Pakistani war? That--
SHAHAN MUFTI: I'm not saying that. President Obama said that, in November. And, for, all of a sudden, for the new President-Elect to come out and point out this piece of land between India and Pakistan as the key to solving the Afghanistan issue, was something that made one think about the issue. But whatever thought he had, which is a very interesting and complicated thought, there was some recognition in that period right before the inauguration, that this was somehow a regional issue. That Afghanistan is going to be solved eventually by bringing all the players involved in the region on the table.
BILL MOYERS: But India has told the United States that if Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who is the intermediary over there, dares to raise the issue of Kashmir, he will not be welcome in New Delhi.
SHAHAN MUFTI: Hard diplomacy. That, and this is not going to be easy. To bring Kashmir issue back onto the table. To bring China, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, in some grand diplomatic gesture, to try to solve this issue. This is not going to be easy. But it's the kind of diplomacy that America is capable of. And has been capable of in the past.
JUAN COLE: You look at the way that the Northern Ireland issue was ultimately resolved was, in some ways, it was a British government acknowledgment of an Irish interest in Northern Ireland. Well, if you could get an Indian government acknowledgement of a Pakistani interest in Kashmir, without that meaning that Kashmir is detached from India, just as Northern Ireland is still part of the UK-- it seems to me, actually, a fairly good model for resolving this.
BILL MOYERS: So what does the United States do?
JUAN COLE: Well, the important thing to underline is the Pakistani public doesn't like some US policies, like the war in Afghanistan. But opinion polling shows, and I quote this in my book, that they like the United States. And if you ask them, "Well, what would you, what would make better relations with the United States?" They say, "Well, give us civilian development aid. We don't need any more weapons from you." If we can do things for the Pakistan public that they need done for them, they say in opinion polls that that's going to really raise their view of the United States. And we've seen this happen elsewhere, in Indonesia and so forth. So that's got-- has to be an important part of it. I think the Obama administration is right about that.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: I am calling upon Congress to pass a bipartisan bill that authorizes $1.5 billion in direct support to the Pakistani people every year over the next five years — resources that will build schools and roads and hospitals, and strengthen Pakistan's democracy.
BILL MOYERS: You have to ask the question, how does the money get to the people? Because we all know, everybody knows, how corrupt the Pakistani government is. The President, the present President, is known as Mr. Ten Percent. How does that--
JUAN COLE: It is an underestimate.
BILL MOYERS: It's a serious question though.
SHAHAN MUFTI: I think, Bill, that winning the hearts and minds part of the Pakistanis is not going to be a tough-- it's not a tough job at the end of the day. Like you were saying, a lot of these people, especially the urban population that we talked about, these large cities are already sold.
They will-- they wouldn't mind a few of the freedoms that are enjoyed here. And if, and especially if, development aid that's going in-- I think that is really not going to be that hard once the strategic planning, once the strategic planners in Pakistan have been convinced to really come on our side.
JUAN COLE: With regard to the civilian aid, you know, if USAID and the US government does its job, and has accountability, you know, because we don't just give the money to the Pakistan government and say, "Spend it." The problem in the last eight years was that we really just did hand the money over to the Pakistani military. The US government wasn't doing its job with regard to accountability.
BILL MOYERS: Both of you seem much more optimistic about Pakistan than I've heard many people talk about it in a long time.
JUAN COLE: That's because we lived there. It doesn't look like what it looks like on the outside. Americans think that Pakistanis are fundamentalists. And almost none of them are. You know, there are religious people, they're like Mexican Catholics. They go to shrines and pray for things. And the Taliban hate that. In fact, they attacked a shrine recently. And then there's this big urban middle class which is just growing like crazy. And they're all watching Indian movies, and dreaming about being in Bollywood. And so and then the economy has been doing good the last few years. You know, five, six, seven percent growth. I think it was the second largest growth in Asia. Of course, it's a low starting point. But I can't understand why there isn't more appreciation for the good news that's come out.
You know, in the past two years, the Pakistani public has demanded an end to a military dictatorship. On the grounds that it was violating the rule of law. They demanded free and fair parliamentary elections. They accomplished them. They voted the largest party they put in is the left of center or centrist secular party. They then went to the streets to demand the reinstatement of the secular civil Supreme Court. And you've had, really, hundreds of thousands of people involved in this movement for the restoration of democracy and the restoration of the rule of law. If this had happened any other place in the world, it would be reported in Washington as a good news story. Here, we've been told that it's a crisis. That it's a sign of instability and nuclear armed nation. I don't understand that.
SHAHAN MUFTI: That was one of the biggest moments in Pakistan in the last-- from my latest tour in the last six months. You were talking about the-- how anywhere else in the world this would have been celebrated. And, most definitely, this moment of the Chief Justice getting reinstated was the democratic moment for Pakistan, at least in the last 60 years, ever since its creation.
Because for the longest time, for decades the problem with Pakistan is that the army keeps disrupting the power balance and here the Pakistani people deliver a moment, the night that the Chief Justice got reinstated it was around 3:00 AM. And there were people gathered out, thousands of people gathered outside his house. And, in one corner, there were young students playing the guitar and singing nationalist songs.
And then the Islamists came with their flags and they were chanting, "Allah is great." And then the Justice Party people came and they were singing-- they were doing a cappella versions of nationalist songs.
And to see that all of these people had somehow come around, the absolutely secular to the very staunch Islamists, had come around this movement because they somehow, to them, it meant a step towards a stronger democracy. But only if, I think, that if the United States could find ways to engage that aspect of Pakistan.
BILL MOYERS: That aspect being the aspiration of the people?
JUAN COLE: Pakistani civil society and its aspirations, yes. And not just to dismiss them as fundamentalists, or to assume that you have to work the elites, which has been the way the US has typically done things.
BILL MOYERS: Juan Cole and Shahan Mufti, this has been an interesting discussion of a very complicated situation. And I appreciate your being here with me on the Journal.
SHAHAN MUFTI: Thank you.
JUAN COLE: Thank you.
kilde: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/05152009/watch.html
President Obama was burned in effigy in Pakistan the other day. This photo from the Associated Press depicts a crowd of men with signs saying "Go America Go," meaning go home as an image of the President goes up in flames.
Writing in "The Wall Street Journal," columnist James Taranto said the burning symbolizes, to all Americans who may doubt it, that Obama is a war president.
For sure, Pakistan and Afghanistan are now both battlegrounds in the conflict formerly known as the global war on terror. So entwined are they that the Pentagon has conflated them into one big combat theater known in military speak as "Afpak."
But reducing this current fighting to military shorthand dehumanizes horrific realities on the ground, where innocent men, women and children are dying every day.
Our own children and grandchildren are already fighting there, and more are on the way. Look at this recent headline in London's "Sunday Times," relaying an American threat to the Pakistani government — "Stop the Taliban now, or we will."
Things have gotten worse in the past week. Hundreds of thousands of refugees have fled Pakistan's northwest region to escape fighting between the country's army and the Taliban.
The news is confusing, misleading, fragmented and sometimes, frightening, so we've asked two informed observers of that region, both of whom have lived in Pakistan to try to help us sort it out.
Juan Cole teaches history at the University of Michigan. His "Informed Comment" blog at juancole.com has become a go to destination for anyone interested in the politics of Islam. The author of several books, this is his latest, "Engaging the Muslim World."
Shahan Mufti recently returned from a six month tour covering Pakistan's ongoing political crisis. He reports for globalpost.com, the new international news website. A Pakistani American, Shahan also has written about Pakistan for "The Christian Science Monitor" and "The Boston Globe" as well as many other print and broadcast news outlets.
Welcome, both of you, to the Journal. JUAN COLE: Thank you.
SHAHAN MUFTI: Thank you.
BILL MOYERS: Shahan, what did you think about this photograph?
SHAHAN MUFTI: Well, it tells a story. But, as any photo, it doesn't tell the complete story. There are protests like this all over the country. There have been ever since the war in Afghanistan began and America started getting involved in the region. This is the story that we get through the mass media for the most part. But there are many other currents in the country that aren't being covered as well.
JUAN COLE: The Jamaat-e-Islami represents very few people. It's a cadre organization. It gets, typically, three percent when there's elections. So, yes, they mount these demonstrations. And you can see that's probably a very small one. And so to make so much of this little picture, it shows a lack of appreciation for proportionality for what really is important in the country.
BILL MOYERS: What is important right now? What's missing from the reporting and the analysis we're getting from Pakistan?
SHAHAN MUFTI: One thing that's missing, obviously, that's hard to get into reporting is context. But also hard information. Hard fact. So we're hearing about this military operation going on in the north of Pakistan right now. Yet there are no reporters, no reporters on the ground. They had-
BILL MOYERS: I have heard a couple from NPR. They seem to be right among the refugees who are fleeing there.
SHAHAN MUFTI: The refugees are outside of the war zone now. These are the people who have been internally displaced within the country. And they have been, actually, have been evacuated by the army. So before the army moved into these northern areas they disseminated information through radio, television, to tell the people to get out 'cause they were going to move in.
And we've heard of hundreds of thousands, maybe a million people, moving out of these areas. So, really, all the information that we are relaying as reporters, as the media, as information, really is coming from army press releases, for the most part.
There's very little room to independently confirm a lot of the information. Especially in this most recent offensive. That is a huge thing that, as that reporters in Pakistan I know are dealing with. They're referring to "alleged" military operations.
So they're in a position where they can't even independently confirm that an entire military operation took place. Let alone the figures of the Taliban militants dead, or how many civilian casualties there are, or how many armed forces-- people in the armed forces have died. So that is one thing that's very troubling, as a reporter.
BILL MOYERS: Who are the Taliban and what do they want? What are their goals?
JUAN COLE: What we're calling the Taliban, it's actually a misnomer. There are, like, five different groups that we're swooping up and calling the Taliban. The Taliban, properly speaking, are seminary students. They were those refugee boys, many of them orphans, who went through the seminaries or Madrassas in northern Pakistan back in the nineties. And then who emerged as a fighting force. Then you have the old war lords who had fought with the Soviet Union, and were allied with the United States. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Jalaluddin Haqqani, they have formed insurgent groups to fight the Americans now. Because they had fought the Soviet occupation, they now see an American occupation, so they've turned on the United States. They were former allies.
So we're calling them Taliban. And then you have a lot of probably disorganized villagers whose poppy crops, for instance, were burned. And they're angry. So they'll hit a NATO or American checkpoint. So we're scooping all of this up. And then the groups in northern Pakistan who are yet another group. And we're calling it all Taliban.
BILL MOYERS: How many of them?
JUAN COLE:Well, how many of them is impossible to know. But in Pakistan the estimates for fighters are small. 15 thousand. And the current military operation in the Swat Valley is pitting 15 thousand Pakistani troops against 4 thousand Taliban fighters.
That's what's being said. This is small. And the idea that these 4 thousand Taliban in Swat Valley, you know, can take over the capital of the country, or that they're going to spread into the other provinces, which are ethnic provinces, like the Punjab and Sindh, where they're very, very unpopular.
We have a Gallup Poll now, 60 percent of the Punjabis, who are the majority group in Pakistan, say that it's very negative that there should be Taliban operating in Pakistan. And only ten percent say that it's a positive. So in Pakistan, as a whole, this is a small group. It's not a mainstream, big, mass movement.
BILL MOYERS: But how do you explain this mass exodus of, as you say, maybe a million people on the move out of that northwest region where the fighting is going on?
SHAHAN MUFTI: Well, it's very clear that why that happened is because the Pakistan army asked, or wanted the people, the civilian population, to move out of there because it was- is being fought as a guerilla war. So the militants are embedding themselves into the civilian population, which is their strength.
And so this movement out of these northern regions, where the Taliban had control, is a tactical operation. And moving the people out of there, unfortunately, also, it seems, to be military tactic right now
JUAN COLE: The Pakistani military is a tank, you know, traditional, almost central European kind of military. It was formed to fight India and most of the tanks and the troops are down on the border between India and Pakistan. And they're not trained to do counterinsurgency or counterterrorism.
So their idea of putting down the Taliban is to invade the Swat Valley. And if you've got 15,000 troops with artillery, helicopter gunships, fighter jets, operating a military operation in a valley with a million people in it, is going to produce massive displacement.
They're not sending in SWAT teams against these 4 thousand fighters, which I think is what they should have been doing. So when the US caused this. They pressured Pakistan's army to launch a conventional military attack on this small group of guerillas. And is going to inconvenience, you know, probably half a million people in a very dire way. And is that really going to settle the Pashtuns down?
SHAHAN MUFTI: I would say the Pakistani army feels strong pressure to show that they are performing. So whether they're using — whether they're being heavy-handed, whether they're using a lot of fireworks, to prove a point to the United States. And the government, as well as the army, do feel — who are recipients of large American aid, and all, but also clients of the American military — they feel, they do feel, I think, an obligation to perform well, at least to put up a show that they are performing, and that they're performing well.
BILL MOYERS: Are you two saying that the Taliban are not as great a threat to Pakistan and the United States as the United States has been claiming?
JUAN COLE: Well I have to be careful here. Because, on the one hand, I don't want to be interpreted as saying this is not a problem. I mean, you've got several thousand militants operating in the North-West Frontier Province. This is a problem. And it wasn't like that, you know, even ten years ago.The idea of Pakistani Taliban is a new idea. The Taliban were always an Afghan phenomenon. So it is a problem. And it needs to be dealt with. But what I'm saying is that let's just have a sense of proportion here.
The North-West Frontier Province is 10 percent of the Pakistan population. That's where this stuff is happening. And most of it is actually happening not in the Province itself, but in the Federally Administrated Tribal Regions. Which are kind of like our Indian reservations. Only 3.5 million people live there. It's the size of, like, New Hampshire. Pakistan is a country as big as California, Oregon and Washington rolled up in one, with a population of 165 million. So to take this threat, which is a threat locally, to the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas, to parts of the North-West Frontier Province, and to magnify it and to say, "Whoa, the Pakistani government is six months from falling, the Taliban is going to get their hands on nuclear weapons." The kinds of things that are being said in Washington, are just fantastical and some kind of science fiction film. How would these guys, with the Kalashnikov machine guns, take over a country that has an army of 550 thousand? Which has tanks and artillery and fighter jets? How would they even know here the nuclear weapons are? In Pakistan, I just quoted you the Gallup Poll. People don't like Taliban, for the most part.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah, we just talked two days ago, to a Pakistan journalist in Lahore, who told us that public tolerance for the Taliban, as you have said, has diminished as the militants have broken their commitments, moved into other regions, and become ever more oppressive, looting and kidnapping. And they don't want them there. They don't want that, right?
SHAHAN MUFTI: And this is a trend. And especially in the last few months this has happened. As the Taliban, after there was the Shariah deal that we heard a lot about, that was the deal to implement Islamic law in some of the northern areas-
BILL MOYERS: This was a deal the government made with the Taliban up there to let them operate that region-
SHAHAN MUFTI: Their version of Islamic law in that region. Exactly. And people- there was hope, until that point at least, that this will somehow settle everything. This will quell, at least quell the violence for a little bit. That didn't happen. And the Taliban started bleeding into the other areas near to Islam. And then that's when we started hearing these alarming things about this Taliban being within-
BILL MOYERS: 90 miles or 60 miles of Islamabad.
SHAHAN MUFTI: Yeah. Islamabad. And at that point I think there was also another huge trend where we,actually, now we hear the Islamist political parties. We hear the nationalists. We hear all, again, all shades of political parties really speaking out against the Taliban.
JUAN COLE: And women. I mean, you should remember that Pakistan has a large middle class. And it's grown enormously in the last ten years. These are urban white-collar people, well educated, hooked in with international media, and half of them are women.
They're lawyers. They're in the judicial system. They're politicians. And they are very threatened by what they call the Talibanization. And they're coming out and speaking against it, and they are extremely influential. You should remember, Pakistan actually has had a woman prime minister. And that social class of middle class and upper class women are very powerful.
BILL MOYERS: Threatened by the Shariah law about the hard-line Islamic attitude toward women? Is that what you mean?
JUAN COLE: That's right. That's right. They don't like the Taliban repression of women at all.
BILL MOYERS: But, listening to you, I have to then wonder what… I mean, the message coming loud and clear, from both Obama in Washington, and Zardari in Pakistan, is that the Taliban are on the rise. And that they represent, as others have said, an existential threat to Pakistan. You're not denying that this is a problem. But you're not seeing it as this life-and-death matter for the state of Pakistan?
SHAHAN MUFTI: That feeling of doom really doesn't…you don't feel it on the ground there. Because, if you're in a city, like Lahore, or if you're in a city of like 16 million, like Karachi, or if you're in a city that looks like southern California, in Islamabad, even if you're in the tribal areas, or in Peshawar, a huge city of its own, which is right in the North-West Frontier, which is Pashtun there is not this sense that the Taliban are coming tomorrow morning, or next week, or the week after.
They are still, I think, Pakistanis, a lot of them, still see the Taliban as a fringe movement, which they are. The numbers say that. And a fringe movement with is able to wreak a lot of havoc. Especially through its suicide bombings. This tool of suicide bombings is very hard to control. And so people are obviously concerned with how their lives are changing. But this threat of the state falling, I think, nobody in that country takes that too seriously.
BILL MOYERS: In whose interest is it that we're getting the story from Washington and the Pakistani government that it's at the brink of chaos that is coming the Taliban are on the rise?
JUAN COLE: I think it's cynical. And I think that it's a way for Washington to put pressure on the Pakistani civilian and military elites to do what Washington wants them to do. And--
BILL MOYERS: Which is?
JUAN COLE: Well, they wanted this big military campaign against the Taliban in the Swat Valley. Washington is alarmed at the spread of the Taliban in the North-West Frontier Province because it has implications for the security of southern Afghanistan, and therefore for US troops and NATO troops in Afghanistan. And so, from their point of view, this is a big crisis.
They don't want more safe havens for the Taliban in Afghanistan who are killing US troops. And they were upset with the Pakistani elite for not taking this problem more seriously. And I think, sort of saying that Pakistan is unstable, or it's about to fall, or the nukes are in danger, all of this sort of thing, is a signal to Islamabad that you had better get serious about this, because it matters to us. So this is Washington strong-arming Pakistan.
SHAHAN MUFTI: I think you're right on. And I think it's problematic because this really harks back to the period right before the Iraq War, as well, where there was this hype that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
We were- we could have been convinced in a second that Iraq was about to use them. And it's unfortunate that the press did play its part in that problem. And the press is, once again I think, playing its unfortunate part where it is relaying all of these opinions that are coming from intelligence sources or whatever, and ruling this as information. And all of a sudden we're seeing the same sort of almost hysteria.
BILL MOYERS: Do you agree with Shahan, that you're seeing a repeat of the-
JUAN COLE: Yes. Yes.
BILL MOYERS: -official propaganda being disseminated as news?
JUAN COLE: Yes. I think that's exactly what's going on. I mean, especially with regard to the nuclear issue. There is no way on God's green earth that these scruffy tribal fundamentalists, in the North-West Frontier Province, are having anything to do with Pakistan's nuclear weapons. Which, by the way, are stored in secret places, and they're not assembled. And assembling them is a complicated process which requires various high-level military and civilian authorizations. And to put that nuclear issue front and forward is just a way of scaring the American public and putting pressure on Pakistan to do something they didn't want to do.
BILL MOYERS: Why isn't Pakistan doing more to control the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan and up in that northwest region? Why isn't it more effective?
JUAN COLE: You know, I get very nervous when I hear people talking about controlling that region. It's not controllable. And nobody has ever controlled it. Winston Churchill was down there when he was a young man trying to control it.
30 percent of these areas are considered administratively inaccessible by the Pakistani government. And they're the people who would know this area and say, "Well, what does it mean?" This is administratively inaccessible. It means no bureaucrat has been out there. So I don't- I don't think the you- I've also heard President Obama talking about, you know, Pakistan needs to control this area, and so forth. I don't think they understand the scale of what you're talking about here. This is just a very vast, rugged, arid region which--thinly populated. Local people know the ground much better. The best you can do is, I think, make deals with the tribal chieftains to calm things down.
SHAHAN MUFTI: This is real-estate, Afghanistan in this tribal area, this frontier region of Pakistan that nobody, from Alexander to the British, to the Russians, have- the Russians shared a border with this, and they couldn't keep their hands on it. It was a tinderbox. And now the United States is in there. We're in there. And we're having- we're learning, and it's difficult.
BILL MOYERS: Is our presence there giving the Taliban a unity they wouldn't have had without presence?
SHAHAN MUFTI: On the Pakistani side, for sure. I mean, that is their rallying call now. That as well as their religious call. But definitely American presence in the region is what is really giving them a rallying call among youth of the tribal areas who are caught in poverty and cycles of poverty. And it is their rallying call of the foreign invader.
PRESIDENT OBAMA:I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future. That's the goal that must be achieved. That is a cause that could not be more just. And to the terrorists who oppose us, my message is the same: We will defeat you.
BILL MOYERS: Is that an achievable goal?
JUAN COLE: Oh, I think it's an achievable goal. But not this way. First of all, the Taliban are not the same as Al Qaeda, and not necessarily connected to them. They're a regional movement. They're about a local kind of religious nationalism. I think Al Qaeda, in the North-West Frontier Province, and in the tribal areas of Pakistan, is a problem. It's a policing problem
SHAHAN MUFTI: This is all about, I think you're right, this is all about the war in Afghanistan. It has to be. We do know that the Taliban in Pakistan grew out of the campaign in Afghanistan. They bled across the border and then they started carrying out their own personal campaign in Pakistan. What it seems like, what the trajectory has been, it seems like the more Pakistan is pushed to do that project, of eliminating the Taliban as a way of winning the war in Afghanistan, the Pakistani government, the state, is putting itself under all sorts of pressures. And when you have a country that is at the frontline of a glob- well, an American war right now — is under extreme pressures from many sides. It shares the border with China, India, Iran, Afghanistan, and then has a 700 mile Arabian Sea coastline.
That's quite a cast of characters to be caught in the middle of. So Pakistan is under extreme pressures to fit in that geographical location. For the Pakistani security establishment, and my conversation with a lot of people in this security establishment, the Taliban, and the situation in Afghanistan, is about India. They're one and the same conversation. Because influence in Afghanistan, ever since the American-- ever since President Karzai's government in Afghanistan, India has had a greater influence in Afghanistan, which it was missing during the Taliban.
BILL MOYERS: Karzai has made India his most important trading partner, right?
SHAHAN MUFTI: It is the most important trading partner. Is one of the—
BILL MOYERS: And this has to bother Pakistanis, right?
SHAHAN MUFTI: Immensely. It does bother the Pakistani security establishment. Especially because they view the region as a chess board. As most, as China and…
BILL MOYERS: That's an old story, right?
SHAHAN MUFTI: Yeah. So, for them, this is a huge loss. That Afghanistan, that for ten years was our little satellite state. That Paki-- that Afghanistan was under, for the first time, in Pakistan's history at least, Afghanistan, under the Taliban, was friendly towards Pakistan.
There had never been a government that was so friendly with Pakistan. And then, all of a sudden, one day, who moves in to help Afghanistan rebuild? It's India.
So what I'm talking about is that, to deal with the issue in Afghanistan, and President Obama was talking about this, in, as late as November last year, a few months before his inauguration, he had started talking about, I don't know if you recall, but I think it was an interview with "Time Magazine," in which he started talking about the Kashmir issue being the key to solving the war in Afghanistan. And that was a very interesting thought.
BILL MOYERS: The disputed land between India and Pakistan. Both of them are fighting over Kashmir.
SHAHAN MUFTI: Have been for 60 years. It's the main issue between India and Pakistan-
BILL MOYERS: You're saying that's the key to the Pakistani war? That--
SHAHAN MUFTI: I'm not saying that. President Obama said that, in November. And, for, all of a sudden, for the new President-Elect to come out and point out this piece of land between India and Pakistan as the key to solving the Afghanistan issue, was something that made one think about the issue. But whatever thought he had, which is a very interesting and complicated thought, there was some recognition in that period right before the inauguration, that this was somehow a regional issue. That Afghanistan is going to be solved eventually by bringing all the players involved in the region on the table.
BILL MOYERS: But India has told the United States that if Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who is the intermediary over there, dares to raise the issue of Kashmir, he will not be welcome in New Delhi.
SHAHAN MUFTI: Hard diplomacy. That, and this is not going to be easy. To bring Kashmir issue back onto the table. To bring China, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, in some grand diplomatic gesture, to try to solve this issue. This is not going to be easy. But it's the kind of diplomacy that America is capable of. And has been capable of in the past.
JUAN COLE: You look at the way that the Northern Ireland issue was ultimately resolved was, in some ways, it was a British government acknowledgment of an Irish interest in Northern Ireland. Well, if you could get an Indian government acknowledgement of a Pakistani interest in Kashmir, without that meaning that Kashmir is detached from India, just as Northern Ireland is still part of the UK-- it seems to me, actually, a fairly good model for resolving this.
BILL MOYERS: So what does the United States do?
JUAN COLE: Well, the important thing to underline is the Pakistani public doesn't like some US policies, like the war in Afghanistan. But opinion polling shows, and I quote this in my book, that they like the United States. And if you ask them, "Well, what would you, what would make better relations with the United States?" They say, "Well, give us civilian development aid. We don't need any more weapons from you." If we can do things for the Pakistan public that they need done for them, they say in opinion polls that that's going to really raise their view of the United States. And we've seen this happen elsewhere, in Indonesia and so forth. So that's got-- has to be an important part of it. I think the Obama administration is right about that.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: I am calling upon Congress to pass a bipartisan bill that authorizes $1.5 billion in direct support to the Pakistani people every year over the next five years — resources that will build schools and roads and hospitals, and strengthen Pakistan's democracy.
BILL MOYERS: You have to ask the question, how does the money get to the people? Because we all know, everybody knows, how corrupt the Pakistani government is. The President, the present President, is known as Mr. Ten Percent. How does that--
JUAN COLE: It is an underestimate.
BILL MOYERS: It's a serious question though.
SHAHAN MUFTI: I think, Bill, that winning the hearts and minds part of the Pakistanis is not going to be a tough-- it's not a tough job at the end of the day. Like you were saying, a lot of these people, especially the urban population that we talked about, these large cities are already sold.
They will-- they wouldn't mind a few of the freedoms that are enjoyed here. And if, and especially if, development aid that's going in-- I think that is really not going to be that hard once the strategic planning, once the strategic planners in Pakistan have been convinced to really come on our side.
JUAN COLE: With regard to the civilian aid, you know, if USAID and the US government does its job, and has accountability, you know, because we don't just give the money to the Pakistan government and say, "Spend it." The problem in the last eight years was that we really just did hand the money over to the Pakistani military. The US government wasn't doing its job with regard to accountability.
BILL MOYERS: Both of you seem much more optimistic about Pakistan than I've heard many people talk about it in a long time.
JUAN COLE: That's because we lived there. It doesn't look like what it looks like on the outside. Americans think that Pakistanis are fundamentalists. And almost none of them are. You know, there are religious people, they're like Mexican Catholics. They go to shrines and pray for things. And the Taliban hate that. In fact, they attacked a shrine recently. And then there's this big urban middle class which is just growing like crazy. And they're all watching Indian movies, and dreaming about being in Bollywood. And so and then the economy has been doing good the last few years. You know, five, six, seven percent growth. I think it was the second largest growth in Asia. Of course, it's a low starting point. But I can't understand why there isn't more appreciation for the good news that's come out.
You know, in the past two years, the Pakistani public has demanded an end to a military dictatorship. On the grounds that it was violating the rule of law. They demanded free and fair parliamentary elections. They accomplished them. They voted the largest party they put in is the left of center or centrist secular party. They then went to the streets to demand the reinstatement of the secular civil Supreme Court. And you've had, really, hundreds of thousands of people involved in this movement for the restoration of democracy and the restoration of the rule of law. If this had happened any other place in the world, it would be reported in Washington as a good news story. Here, we've been told that it's a crisis. That it's a sign of instability and nuclear armed nation. I don't understand that.
SHAHAN MUFTI: That was one of the biggest moments in Pakistan in the last-- from my latest tour in the last six months. You were talking about the-- how anywhere else in the world this would have been celebrated. And, most definitely, this moment of the Chief Justice getting reinstated was the democratic moment for Pakistan, at least in the last 60 years, ever since its creation.
Because for the longest time, for decades the problem with Pakistan is that the army keeps disrupting the power balance and here the Pakistani people deliver a moment, the night that the Chief Justice got reinstated it was around 3:00 AM. And there were people gathered out, thousands of people gathered outside his house. And, in one corner, there were young students playing the guitar and singing nationalist songs.
And then the Islamists came with their flags and they were chanting, "Allah is great." And then the Justice Party people came and they were singing-- they were doing a cappella versions of nationalist songs.
And to see that all of these people had somehow come around, the absolutely secular to the very staunch Islamists, had come around this movement because they somehow, to them, it meant a step towards a stronger democracy. But only if, I think, that if the United States could find ways to engage that aspect of Pakistan.
BILL MOYERS: That aspect being the aspiration of the people?
JUAN COLE: Pakistani civil society and its aspirations, yes. And not just to dismiss them as fundamentalists, or to assume that you have to work the elites, which has been the way the US has typically done things.
BILL MOYERS: Juan Cole and Shahan Mufti, this has been an interesting discussion of a very complicated situation. And I appreciate your being here with me on the Journal.
SHAHAN MUFTI: Thank you.
JUAN COLE: Thank you.
kilde: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/05152009/watch.html
tirsdag den 12. maj 2009
EU kritiske artikler.
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Edith Cresson sagen.
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Nyere artikler.
EU gives US access to its citizens' financial data.
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Information: EU støtter våbensmuglere i Afrika.
Reuters: Nu Skåler Kapitalfondene i Champagne.
Politiken: Rapport: Industrien styrer EUs lovgivning.
IPS News: Corruption: EU Fails to bring transparancy.
NYTimes: Voters Dulled to European Parliament Election.
Gamle Artikler.
Independent 1994: EU 'dumping food' on East Europe.
Guardian 2002: EU safeguards worse than Enron's, accountant says
Times Online 2004: Europe's secular zealots
BBC 2007: EU accounts failed for 13th year
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Edith Cresson sagen.
RTÈ News: European holds emergency meeting after damning report.
Independent: Cresson corruption charges are dropped
Telling Details in Report that Felled European Group.
søndag den 3. maj 2009
Right to the Very End in Iraq, Our Masters Denied Us the Truth
'We acknowledge," the letter says, "that violence has claimed the lives of many thousands of Iraqi civilians over the last five years, either through terrorism or sectarian violence. Any loss of innocent lives is tragic and the Government is committed to ensuring that civilian casualties are avoided. Insurgents and terrorists are not, I regret to say, so scrupulous."
This quotation comes from the Ministry of Defence's "Iraq Operations Team, Directorate of Operations" and is signed by someone whose initials may be "SM" or "SW" or even "SWe". Unusually (but understandably), it does not carry a typed version of the author's name. Its obvious anonymity – given the fact that not a single reference is made to the civilians slaughtered by the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq – is no surprise. I, too, would not want to be personally associated with such Blair-like mendacity. What is astonishing, however, is that this outrageous letter should have been written this year.
I should say at once that I owe this revelatory text (actually dated 20 January) to a very un-anonymous Independent reader, Tom Geddes, who thought I would find its "economy with the truth" interesting. I certainly do. We are now, are we not, supposed to be in the age of Brown-like truth, as we finally haul down the flag in Basra, of near-certainty of an official inquiry into the whole Iraq catastrophe, a time of reckoning for the men who sent us off to war under false pretences. I suspect that this – like the Obama pretensions to change – is a falsehood. Well, we shall see.
Mr Geddes, I hasten to add, is a retired librarian who worked for 21 years at the British Library as head of Germanic collections and is also a translator of Swedish – it turns out that we share the same love of the Finnish-Swedish poet Edith Sodergrund's work – and he wrote to the Ministry of Defence at the age of 64 because, like me (aged 62), he was struck that John Hutton, the Secretary of State for Defence, described those who jeered at British troops returning home as "cretins".
"Such jeering is clearly not meant to denigrate individual bravery and sacrifice," Geddes wrote to Hutton on 28 October – readers will notice it took the Ministry of Defence's "SM" (or "SW" or "SWe") three months to reply – "(but) is a political comment on the general dubious legality and morality of recent military actions."
I'm not so sure the jeering was that innocent, but Geddes's concluding remark – that "unless you or the Government can explain and justify Britain's war activities, you cannot expect to have the country on your side" – is unimpeachable.
Not so "SM's" reply. Here is another quotation from his execrable letter. "It is important to remember that our decision to take action (sic) in Iraq was driven by Saddam Hussein's refusal to co-operate with the UN-sponsored weapons inspections... The former Prime Minister has expressed his regret for any information, given in good faith, concerning weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which has subsequently proven to be incorrect."
I am left breathless by this lie. Saddam Hussein did not "refuse to co-operate" with the UN weapons inspectors. The whole problem was that – to the horror of Blair and Bush – the ghastly Saddam did co-operate with them, and the UN weapons team under Hans Blix was about to prove that these "weapons of mass destruction" were non-existent; hence the Americans forced Blix and his men and women to leave Iraq so that they and Blair could stage their illegal invasion. I saw Blix's aircraft still on the ground at Baghdad airport just two days before the attack. Note, too, the weasel words. Blair did not give his information "in good faith", as SM claims. He knew – and the Ministry of Defence knew (and I suppose SM knew) – they were untrue. Or "incorrect" as "SM" coyly writes.
Then again: "We can assure you that the Government would not have engaged in military action if it were not satisfied that such a decision was justified and lawful. The former Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, confirmed on 17 March 2003 that authority to use force against Iraq existed from the combined effect of UN Security Council Resolutions 678, 687 and 1441."
But as an outraged Tom Geddes points out in his reply to this remark, "You must be aware that the decision to wage war on Iraq was neither justified nor lawful. The Attorney General's advice has been widely described as 'flawed'. Given that his previous advice was that an attack would be unlawful, we all know what 'flawed' means. I suspect the MoD (Ministry of Defence) also knows." So do I.
I'm also sure that this is a standard "reply sheet", sent out to all dissenting English people. The sentence "millions of Iraqis now live free of Saddam's oppression and have control of their own destiny" is pure public relations – not least because it fails to mention that up to a million Iraqis have not been able to control their own destiny since 2003 because they happen to be dead as a result of our invasion.
There's a lovely bit at the end of "SM'S" 's letter where he (or I suppose it could be a she) says that "our brave servicemen and women ... are ... preparing Basra airport for transfer to Iraqi control..." Well of course they are, because – since their own retreat from Basra city -- Basra airport is the only square mile of Iraq in which the British are still in occupation.
The letter ends with "SM'S" 's surely sublime hope that this "letter goes some way to addressing your concerns" and I can only repeat Tom Geddes' reply: "I am grateful for the length of your response, but shocked by its contents." So am I. No doubt, when the Brown Government – or the Cameron government – holds its inquiry into this illegal war, "SM" will re-emerge as a witness or at least a spokesperson. By then, I suppose the "Iraqi Operations Team" will have been closed down – even, perhaps, by then transmogrified into the "Afghanistan Operations Team" with a parallel set of historical lies – but I trust there will be a retired librarian on hand to point this out.
Copyright 2009 Independent News and Media Limited
Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent for The Independent newspaper. He is the author of many books on the region, including The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East.
This quotation comes from the Ministry of Defence's "Iraq Operations Team, Directorate of Operations" and is signed by someone whose initials may be "SM" or "SW" or even "SWe". Unusually (but understandably), it does not carry a typed version of the author's name. Its obvious anonymity – given the fact that not a single reference is made to the civilians slaughtered by the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq – is no surprise. I, too, would not want to be personally associated with such Blair-like mendacity. What is astonishing, however, is that this outrageous letter should have been written this year.
I should say at once that I owe this revelatory text (actually dated 20 January) to a very un-anonymous Independent reader, Tom Geddes, who thought I would find its "economy with the truth" interesting. I certainly do. We are now, are we not, supposed to be in the age of Brown-like truth, as we finally haul down the flag in Basra, of near-certainty of an official inquiry into the whole Iraq catastrophe, a time of reckoning for the men who sent us off to war under false pretences. I suspect that this – like the Obama pretensions to change – is a falsehood. Well, we shall see.
Mr Geddes, I hasten to add, is a retired librarian who worked for 21 years at the British Library as head of Germanic collections and is also a translator of Swedish – it turns out that we share the same love of the Finnish-Swedish poet Edith Sodergrund's work – and he wrote to the Ministry of Defence at the age of 64 because, like me (aged 62), he was struck that John Hutton, the Secretary of State for Defence, described those who jeered at British troops returning home as "cretins".
"Such jeering is clearly not meant to denigrate individual bravery and sacrifice," Geddes wrote to Hutton on 28 October – readers will notice it took the Ministry of Defence's "SM" (or "SW" or "SWe") three months to reply – "(but) is a political comment on the general dubious legality and morality of recent military actions."
I'm not so sure the jeering was that innocent, but Geddes's concluding remark – that "unless you or the Government can explain and justify Britain's war activities, you cannot expect to have the country on your side" – is unimpeachable.
Not so "SM's" reply. Here is another quotation from his execrable letter. "It is important to remember that our decision to take action (sic) in Iraq was driven by Saddam Hussein's refusal to co-operate with the UN-sponsored weapons inspections... The former Prime Minister has expressed his regret for any information, given in good faith, concerning weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which has subsequently proven to be incorrect."
I am left breathless by this lie. Saddam Hussein did not "refuse to co-operate" with the UN weapons inspectors. The whole problem was that – to the horror of Blair and Bush – the ghastly Saddam did co-operate with them, and the UN weapons team under Hans Blix was about to prove that these "weapons of mass destruction" were non-existent; hence the Americans forced Blix and his men and women to leave Iraq so that they and Blair could stage their illegal invasion. I saw Blix's aircraft still on the ground at Baghdad airport just two days before the attack. Note, too, the weasel words. Blair did not give his information "in good faith", as SM claims. He knew – and the Ministry of Defence knew (and I suppose SM knew) – they were untrue. Or "incorrect" as "SM" coyly writes.
Then again: "We can assure you that the Government would not have engaged in military action if it were not satisfied that such a decision was justified and lawful. The former Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, confirmed on 17 March 2003 that authority to use force against Iraq existed from the combined effect of UN Security Council Resolutions 678, 687 and 1441."
But as an outraged Tom Geddes points out in his reply to this remark, "You must be aware that the decision to wage war on Iraq was neither justified nor lawful. The Attorney General's advice has been widely described as 'flawed'. Given that his previous advice was that an attack would be unlawful, we all know what 'flawed' means. I suspect the MoD (Ministry of Defence) also knows." So do I.
I'm also sure that this is a standard "reply sheet", sent out to all dissenting English people. The sentence "millions of Iraqis now live free of Saddam's oppression and have control of their own destiny" is pure public relations – not least because it fails to mention that up to a million Iraqis have not been able to control their own destiny since 2003 because they happen to be dead as a result of our invasion.
There's a lovely bit at the end of "SM'S" 's letter where he (or I suppose it could be a she) says that "our brave servicemen and women ... are ... preparing Basra airport for transfer to Iraqi control..." Well of course they are, because – since their own retreat from Basra city -- Basra airport is the only square mile of Iraq in which the British are still in occupation.
The letter ends with "SM'S" 's surely sublime hope that this "letter goes some way to addressing your concerns" and I can only repeat Tom Geddes' reply: "I am grateful for the length of your response, but shocked by its contents." So am I. No doubt, when the Brown Government – or the Cameron government – holds its inquiry into this illegal war, "SM" will re-emerge as a witness or at least a spokesperson. By then, I suppose the "Iraqi Operations Team" will have been closed down – even, perhaps, by then transmogrified into the "Afghanistan Operations Team" with a parallel set of historical lies – but I trust there will be a retired librarian on hand to point this out.
Copyright 2009 Independent News and Media Limited
Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent for The Independent newspaper. He is the author of many books on the region, including The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East.
torsdag den 30. april 2009
Olbermann: Rice's Tortured Excuse
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onsdag den 29. april 2009
Althusser - Den Stalin-apologetiske svindler.
Tony Judt, som jeg personligt kun kender fra hans særdeles hårde men retfærdige kritik af Israels undertrykkelsesdoktrin, har skrevet en artikel om Louis Althusser, som åbenbart fortsat tages seriøst i akademia, til trods for at manden selv har indrømmet at han var en svindler.
Louis Althusser, The Paris Strangler
by Tony Judt
I was brought up a Marxist. Nowadays that is not much of a boast, but it had its advantages. Parents and grandparents were imbued with all of the assumptions and some of the faith that shaped the European Socialist movement in its heyday. Coming from that branch of East European Jewry that had embraced Social Democracy and the Bund (the Jewish Labor organization of early twentieth- century Russia and Poland), my own family was viscerally anti-Communist. In its eyes, Bolshevism was not only a dictatorship, it was also--and this, too, was a serious charge--a travesty of Marxism. By the time I went to university, I had been thoroughly inoculated with all the classical nineteenth-century texts; and as a result I was immune to the wide-eyed enthusiasm with which Marxist revelations were greeted by those of my freshmen peers who were discovering them for the first time.
Thus, when I arrived in Paris as a graduate student in the late '60s, I was skeptically curious to see and to hear Louis Althusser. In charge of the teaching of philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure, the French elite academy for future teachers and leaders, Althusser was touted by everyone I met as a man of extraordinary gifts, who was transforming our understanding of Marx and reshaping revolutionary theory. His name, his ideas, his books were everywhere. Sitting in on his crowded and sycophantic seminar, I was utterly bemused. For Althusser's account of Marxism, to the extent that I could make any sense of it, bore no relation to anything I had ever heard. It chopped Marx into little bits, selected those texts or parts of texts that suited the master's interpretation and then proceeded to construct the most astonishingly abstruse, self-regarding and ahistorical version of Marxist philosophy imaginable. The exercise bore no discernible relationship to Marxism, to philosophy or to pedagogy. After a couple of painful attempts to adapt myself to the experience and to derive some benefit from it, I abandoned the seminar and never went back.
Returning to the subject many years later, and constrained for professional reasons to read Althusser's mercifully few published works, I understood a little better what had been going on, intellectually and sociologically. Althusser was engaged in what he and his acolytes called a " symptomatic reading" of Marx, which is to say that they took from him what they needed and ignored the rest. Where they wished Marx to have said or meant something that they could not find in his writings, they interpreted the " silences," thereby constructing an entity of their own imagination. This thing they called a science, one that Marx was said to have invented and that could be applied, gridlike, to all social phenomena.
Why invent a Marxist "science" when so much was already at hand, the Marxist "theory of history," "historical materialism," "dialectical materialism" and the rest? The answer is that Althusser, like so many others in the '60s, was trying to save Marxism from the two major threats to its credibility: the grim record of Stalinism and the failure of Marx's revolutionary forecasts. Althusser's special contribution was to remove Marxism altogether from the realm of history, politics and experience, and thereby to render it invulnerable to any criticism of the empirical sort.
In Althusser-speak, Marxism was a theory of structural practices: economic, ideological, political, theoretical. It had nothing to do with human volition or agency, and thus it was unaffected by human frailty or inadequacy. These "practices" determined history. Their respective importance, and their relationship to one another, varied with circumstances; the "dominant structure" was sometimes "economic practice" and sometimes "political practice," and so on. Of particular significance was the notion of "theoretical practice." This oxymoronic phrase, which came to be chanted, mantralike, all over Europe in those years, had the special charm of placing intellectuals and intellectual activity on the same plane as the economic organizations and the political strategies that had preoccupied earlier generations of Marxists.
This subjectless theory of everything had a further virtue. By emphasizing the importance of theory, it diverted attention from the embarrassing defects of recent practice. In such an account, Stalin's crime was not that he had murdered millions of human beings, it was that he had perverted the self- understanding of Marxism. Stalinism, in short, was just another mistake in theory, albeit an especially egregious one, whose major sin consisted of its refusal to acknowledge its own errors. This was important to Althusser, who was a member of the French Communist Party and who sought to admit the embarrassing history of that organization without undermining whatever remained of its claim to revolutionary omniscience. The Party's leadership itself had responded to this conundrum by belatedly treating Stalin as an unfortunate but parenthetical episode in the otherwise unblemished record of communism. His crimes were a mere deviation born of the cult of personality. But Althusser went one better by showing that "Stalin" and his works constituted only a collective analytical error. This performed the double service of keeping personalities out of the matter and reiterating the centrality of concepts.
It is hard, now, to recapture the mood of the '60s in which this absurd dialectical joust seemed appealing. But Althusser unquestionably filled a crucial niche. He gave young Maoists an impressively high-flown language in which to be "anti-humanist" Communists, dismissive of the "Italian road" to socialism. At the time this was a matter of some importance: the early works of Marx, notably the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, had only recently entered the canon, having for many years languished unknown and untranslated. Placed alongside his other youthful writings, they suggested a rather different Marx from the conventional image passed down from Engels via the popularizers of the early European Socialist movements; a man more interested in Romantic- era philosophy than in classical economics, an idealist whose agenda was not simply social revolution but the moral transformation of mankind. The interest in this "humanist" Marx had been aroused both by the recent French rediscovery of Hegel and by a new generation of radical intellectuals seeking to locate Marx in something other than the lineage imposed upon the European left by the doctrinaire positivism of Leninism.
Taking his cue from the growing fashion for "structuralism" (initially confined to linguistics and anthropology, but by the early '60s seeping into sociology and philosophy), Althusser worked hard to excommunicate this humanist and understandably more appealing Marx as "unscientific." In his view, to emphasize the moral condition and responsibilities of individual men was to detract from an appreciation of the larger, impersonal forces at work in history, and thus to delude the workers, or anyone else, into believing they could act on their own behalf, instead of accepting the authority of those who spoke and thought for them. In his words, "only theoretical anti-humanism justifies general practical humanism."
To flesh out his structuralist account, Althusser invented something that he and his followers called "Ideological State Apparatuses." In his heyday these were confined to the public and political world. In his memoirs, however, his attention was diverted to more personal matters. Althusser informs us that " it is an irrefutable fact that the Family is the most powerful State Ideological Apparatus" (obligatory capitals), and in reflecting upon his experience in the mental hospital he wonders "what can now be done to free the mentally ill from the Hell created for them by the combined operations of all the Ideological State Apparatuses." In Althusserian dogma the presence of these repressive and all-embracing ogres was held particularly responsible for the inconvenient stability and durability of liberal democracy. Of special note was the announcement that the university was, of all of these, the dominant one for our era. "Theoretical practice" in the academic arena was thus the site of ideological battle; and philosophy was absolutely vital as the "class struggle in theory." Scholars in their seminars were on the front line, and need feel guilty no more.
Althusser borrowed a term from the philosopher Gaston Bachelard and announced that an "epistemological break" in Marx's writings had occurred somewhere in the mid-1840s. Everything he wrote before the break was neo- Hegelian humanist flannel and could be ignored. Henceforth left-wing students and lecturers were free to jettison those bits of (the early) Marx that seemed to speak of alienation, reconciliation, human agency and moral judgment. This was hard for many people in the '60s to swallow. In Italy and in the English- speaking world, most young left-wingers were more attracted to the idea of a gentler, kinder Marx. In France, however, where the sordid political compromises of the Socialists and Communists during the battle over decolonization had left a sour taste among some of their younger supporters, this static, structuralist Marx sounded analytically pure and politically uncompromising.
By the end of the '70s, however, Althusser's star was on the wane. He had been absent during the events of May 1968, and had showed little interest in the political developments of that year. His only direct comment on the "failed revolution" of 1968 was characteristic and revealing: "When revolt ends in defeat without the workers being massacred, it is not necessarily a good thing for the working class which has no martyrs to mourn or commemorate." Even his erstwhile followers admitted that he had nothing new to offer, and his rigid stance in defense of Marxism, communism and "the revolution" made him appear irrelevant in a decade that saw the publication in France of The Gulag Archipelago, the tragedy in Cambodia, the eclipse of Mao and the steady loss of radical faith among a generation of French intellectuals. Had matters been left there, Althusser could have looked forward to a peaceful and obscure old age, a curious relic of a bizarre but forgotten era.
But then, on November 16, 1980, he murdered his wife Helene in their apartment at the Ecole Normale. Or, as the jacket copy of The New Press's translation of his memoir coyly puts it, "while massaging his wife's neck [he] discovered he had strangled her." (To be fair, this is how Althusser himself explained the event; but it is curious to find the claim reproduced unattributed on the book.) Althusser was examined by doctors, found to be mentally unfit to stand trial and locked away in a psychiatric hospital. Three years later he was released and spent his last years in a dreary flat in north Paris, emerging occasionally to startle passers-by with "Je suis le grand Althusser!" It was in these years that he drafted two versions of an autobiography. They were found after his death in 1990, and first published in French, as a single book, in 1992.
These "memoirs" are curious. Althusser would have us read them as Rousseau- like confessions, but that is hard to do, and the comparison is embarrassingly unflattering to their author. They are clearly an attempt on Althusser's part to make sense of his madness, and to that extent they are indeed revealing; by his own account he wrote them "to free myself from the murder and above all from the dubious effects of having been declared unfit to plead" (it is ironic that their posthumous impact on any unprejudiced reader will surely be to confirm the original forensic diagnosis). As a genre, however, they really come closer to magical realism. The book, especially a short early draft incongruously titled "The Facts," is full of fantasies and imagined achievements, so much so that it is sometimes hard to disentangle the fictive Althusser from the rather mundane creature whose sad story emerges in these pages.
That story is soon told. Althusser was born in 1918, the eldest child of middle-class French parents in Algeria. His father was a banker whose career took him back to Marseilles in Louis's adolescent years. The young Althusser had an utterly uneventful early career. Academically promising, he was sent to the lycee in Lyons to prepare for the entrance exam to the Ecole Normale. He passed the exam, but had to postpone his higher education when he was drafted into the army in 1939. Like many French soldiers, he had a futile war; his company was rounded up by the Germans in 1940, and he spent the next five years in a prisoner of war camp. About the only interesting thing that seems to have happened to him there was that he learned, somewhat belatedly, the pleasures of masturbation. (He was not to make love for the first time until he was 29.)
Finally admitted to the Ecole upon his return to France, Althusser did well there, coming second in the national philosophy examinations. Having spent his adolescence and his youth as an active young Catholic, he discovered left- wing politics at the Ecole and joined the Communist Party in 1948, which was about the time when other young intellectuals, nauseated and shocked by its Stalinist culture and tactics, were beginning to leave it. Shortly after graduating, Althusser obtained a teaching post at the Ecole and settled into the quiet, secure life of an academic philosopher. He was to stay in the same post until being forcibly retired in the aftermath of the scandal that ended his career.
It was during his student years that Althusser met his future wife, Helene Legotien (she had abandoned her family name, Rytmann, during the war), a woman nine years his senior who had played an active part in the Communist Resistance. As he acknowledges in his memoir, it was a troubled, even tormented relationship. They were held together by bonds of mutual destructiveness. By 1980, he writes, "the two of us were shut up together in our own private hell." Helene seems to have been an unhappy woman, insecure, tormented and bitter--and with good reason. The Communist Party abandoned her after the war, falsely accusing her of some obscure act of betrayal during the Resistance. Uneasy with her own immigrant Jewish background, and desperate for the love and attention of her husband, she put up with his moods, his women-friends and his colleagues, most of whom looked down on her from the very great height of their own vaunted intellectual standing. She was clearly not a person comfortable with herself or others; and Althusser's own bizarre personality can only have made matters worse.
For what emerges clearly from his own account is that Althusser was always a deeply troubled person. This memoir is warped and curdled by his morbid self- pity, by his insecurity and the repeated invocation of Lacanian cliches to account for his troubles. Indeed, the book's main theme is his own psychological and social inadequacy, a defect for which he naturally holds his parents responsible, in equal parts. His mother's insistence on naming him for a dead uncle is blamed for his lifelong sense of "not existing": Louis being homonymic with the word "lui," meaning "him," the young Althusser's name rendered him impersonal and anonymous. (He seems not to have given much thought to the millions of happy Louis among his fellow countrymen.) According to Althusser, his mother "castrated" him with her excessive care and attention; hence his belated discovery of women and his inability to form satisfactory relations with them. And so it goes, for page after page. Small wonder that when Louis does away with his wife, after forty years of manic-depressive bouts, hospitalization, treatment and analysis, we learn that he was taking his revenge on the older woman who not only brought him to Communism but substituted, as he admits, for mother and father alike.
There is a human tragedy here, but it is presented in a breathtakingly narcissistic key. Althusser wrote this memoir not in order to comprehend why he killed his wife, but to show himself and others that he was sane. He had been, as he puts it, "deprived of his status as a philosopher" by being declared unfit to plead, and this final loss of identity, this fear that once again he would "not exist," seems to have been the driving compulsion behind his autobiography. (Other, less exalted murderers have suffered rather greater deprivations, of course, but this, too, our author overlooks.) If we take him at his word, this fear of "not existing" was the very engine that propelled his life's work. By elaborating a doctrine in which human volition and human action counted for nought, in which theoretical speculation was the supreme practice, Althusser could compensate for a life of gloomy, introspective inaction by asserting and legitimizing his existence in the arena of the text. As he says, " I ... emerged as the victor, in the realm of pure thought."
This much, at least, we can learn from the memoir, and it casts interesting new light on the otherwise inexplicably murky and self-referential quality of the earlier philosophical writings. Althusser was reconstructing Marx to give his own life a shape with which he could live, and one that could stand respectable comparison with those of his father (a successful banker) and his wife (a Resistance fighter). We thus learn from this book that Althusser was conscious, in every sphere of his life, of "having practiced a great deception," though it never seems to have occurred to him that this insight bodes ill for the credibility of his intellectual legacy. Unfortunately for its author, however, the book reveals much more. We are presented not only with a man who is on the edge of insanity, obsessed with sexual imagery (a stick of asparagus is "stiff as a man's penis" and so on), dreams of grandeur and his own psychoanalytical history, but also with a man who is quite remarkably ignorant.
He seems to know nothing of recent history. (Among his howlers is an indictment of the "Polish fascist" Pilsudski for starting the Second World War. ) He seems only late in life to have discovered Machiavelli and other classics of Western philosophy, and he even admits to a skimpy and partial acquaintance with Marx's texts (something one might have inferred from his published work). He is also unsophisticated to the point of crudity in his political analysis. He seems to have learned nothing and to have forgotten nothing in the last twenty years of his life. Thus there is much talk of "the hegemony of bourgeois, imperialist capitalism"; and he is dismissive of the dissidents of the Soviet bloc ("cut off from their own people") and contemptuous of writers like Andre Glucksmann for "putting around unbelievable horror stories of the Gulag." Those words were written in 1985!
One puts down this depressing book with an overwhelming sense of bewilderment. How could it be that so many intelligent and educated people were taken in by this man? Even if we allow that his manic fancies met some widespread need in the '60s, how are we to account for the continuing fascination that he exercises in certain circles today? In France he is largely forgotten, though the jacket blurb by Didier Eribon describes the autobiography as "magnificent" and explains that "madness [is] the inevitable price of philosophy." It is a conclusion whose deductive logic and historical accuracy are truly in the Althusserian tradition; but Eribon is a French journalist who has made a career of playing the fawning hyena to the preening lions of Parisian intellectual life, and he is not representative.
In the United States, however, there are still university research centers that devote time and money to the study of Althusser's thought, and mount expensive conferences at which professors lecture one another earnestly about " Althusserianism" in everything from linguistics to hermeneutics. Meanwhile respectable English-language publishers continue to market books with titles like The Althusserian Legacy, Althusser and the Detour of Theory, Reading Althusser, Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory and, inevitably, Althusser and Feminism, most of them unreadable excursions into the Higher Drivel.
Althusser was not a charlatan. He himself really believed that he had discovered something significant--or was about to discover something significant--when his illness struck. It is not because he was mad that he was a mediocre philosopher; indeed, the recognition of his own intellectual mediocrity may have contributed to his depressions, and thence to his loss of sanity. If there is something humiliating about the Althusserian episode in intellectual history, then, the humiliation is not his alone. He was a guru, complete with texts, a cult and true believers; and he showed occasional insight into the pathos of his followers, noting that they imitated his " smallest gestures and inflections."
Althusser's work and his life, with his drugs, his analysts, his self-pity, his illusions and his moods, take on a curiously hermetic quality. He comes to resemble some minor medieval scholastic, desperately scrabbling around in categories of his own imagining. But even the most obscure theological speculation usually had as its goal something of significance. From Althusser's musings, however, nothing followed. They were not subject to proof and they had no intelligible worldly application, except as abstruse political apologetics. What does it say about modern academic life that such a figure can have trapped teachers and students for so long in the cage of his insane fictions, and traps them still?
"Louis Althusser, The Paris Strangler," by Tony Judt Vol. 210, New Republic, 03-07-1994, pp 33.
Tony Judt is Professor of European Studies at New York University and the author of Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals 1944-1956 (University of California Press).
I include a few passages from Althusser's memoir where he discussed his scholarship:
"I obtained my diploma having written a thesis for Bachelard on Hegel's notion of content, using the false quotation, 'One content is better than two', whose author I did not know.... I do not think Bachelard read my thesis as he was very busy. One of the major themes I discussed was the 'circularity of content.' He simply objected that it might have been better to use the tem 'circulation' instead, but I disagreed. That was all he said...." (p. 161)
"I should point out that in both the written and oral exams I knew very little about most of the topics I dealt with. But I did know how to 'construct' an essay and suitably disguise my ignorance by arguing a priori whatever the subject. I also structured my arguments the way one should in a good university essay suspending theoretical judgement where appropriate, as had been instilled into me by Jean Guitton." (p. 162)
Althusser eventually became a Professor of Philosophy at the elite "Ecole normal superier" where he had originally been a student.
"What did the Ecole mean to me? Very quickly, in fact, from the outset, it was really a 'womblike' place, where I felt warm and at home and was protected from the outside world. I had no reason to leave it in order to meet people as they dropped by or came to see me, especially when I became well-known. In essence it had a maternal ambiance, was like an amniotic fluid." (p.163)
"Anyway, I carried out my duties as a philosophy teacher and felt more and more that I was a philosopher, despite all my misgivings. In fact, my philosophical knowledge of texts was rather limited. I was very familiar with Descartes and Malebranche, knew a little Spinoza, nothing about Aristotle, the Sophists and the Stoics, quite a lot about Plato and Pascal, nothing about Kant, a bit about Hegel, and finally a few passages of Marx which I had studied closely. My way of picking up and then really getting to know philosophy was legendary: I used to enjoy saying that it was all done by 'heresay' (the first confused form of knowledge according to Spinoza). I learned from Jacques Martin, who was cleverer than me, by gleaning certain phrases in passing from my friends, and lastly from the seminar papers and essays of my own students. In the end I naturally made it a point of honor, and boasted that 'I learnt by hearsay." This distinguished me quite markedly from all my university friends who were much better informed than me, to arouse astonishment, incredulity, and admiration in other people."
"I had another particular ability. Starting from a simple turn of phrase, I thought I could work out (what an illusion!), if not the specific ideas of an author or a book I had not read, at least their general drift or direction. I obviously had certain intuitive powers as well as a definite ability for seeing connections, or a capacity for establishing theoretical oppositions, which enabled me to reconstruct what I took to be an author's ideas on the basis of the authors to whom he was opposed. I proceeded spontaneously by drawing contrasts and distinctions, subsequently elaborating a theory to support this." (pp. 165-166).
From Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts Forever, A Memoir. New York: The New Press, 1994.
Louis Althusser, The Paris Strangler
by Tony Judt
I was brought up a Marxist. Nowadays that is not much of a boast, but it had its advantages. Parents and grandparents were imbued with all of the assumptions and some of the faith that shaped the European Socialist movement in its heyday. Coming from that branch of East European Jewry that had embraced Social Democracy and the Bund (the Jewish Labor organization of early twentieth- century Russia and Poland), my own family was viscerally anti-Communist. In its eyes, Bolshevism was not only a dictatorship, it was also--and this, too, was a serious charge--a travesty of Marxism. By the time I went to university, I had been thoroughly inoculated with all the classical nineteenth-century texts; and as a result I was immune to the wide-eyed enthusiasm with which Marxist revelations were greeted by those of my freshmen peers who were discovering them for the first time.
Thus, when I arrived in Paris as a graduate student in the late '60s, I was skeptically curious to see and to hear Louis Althusser. In charge of the teaching of philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure, the French elite academy for future teachers and leaders, Althusser was touted by everyone I met as a man of extraordinary gifts, who was transforming our understanding of Marx and reshaping revolutionary theory. His name, his ideas, his books were everywhere. Sitting in on his crowded and sycophantic seminar, I was utterly bemused. For Althusser's account of Marxism, to the extent that I could make any sense of it, bore no relation to anything I had ever heard. It chopped Marx into little bits, selected those texts or parts of texts that suited the master's interpretation and then proceeded to construct the most astonishingly abstruse, self-regarding and ahistorical version of Marxist philosophy imaginable. The exercise bore no discernible relationship to Marxism, to philosophy or to pedagogy. After a couple of painful attempts to adapt myself to the experience and to derive some benefit from it, I abandoned the seminar and never went back.
Returning to the subject many years later, and constrained for professional reasons to read Althusser's mercifully few published works, I understood a little better what had been going on, intellectually and sociologically. Althusser was engaged in what he and his acolytes called a " symptomatic reading" of Marx, which is to say that they took from him what they needed and ignored the rest. Where they wished Marx to have said or meant something that they could not find in his writings, they interpreted the " silences," thereby constructing an entity of their own imagination. This thing they called a science, one that Marx was said to have invented and that could be applied, gridlike, to all social phenomena.
Why invent a Marxist "science" when so much was already at hand, the Marxist "theory of history," "historical materialism," "dialectical materialism" and the rest? The answer is that Althusser, like so many others in the '60s, was trying to save Marxism from the two major threats to its credibility: the grim record of Stalinism and the failure of Marx's revolutionary forecasts. Althusser's special contribution was to remove Marxism altogether from the realm of history, politics and experience, and thereby to render it invulnerable to any criticism of the empirical sort.
In Althusser-speak, Marxism was a theory of structural practices: economic, ideological, political, theoretical. It had nothing to do with human volition or agency, and thus it was unaffected by human frailty or inadequacy. These "practices" determined history. Their respective importance, and their relationship to one another, varied with circumstances; the "dominant structure" was sometimes "economic practice" and sometimes "political practice," and so on. Of particular significance was the notion of "theoretical practice." This oxymoronic phrase, which came to be chanted, mantralike, all over Europe in those years, had the special charm of placing intellectuals and intellectual activity on the same plane as the economic organizations and the political strategies that had preoccupied earlier generations of Marxists.
This subjectless theory of everything had a further virtue. By emphasizing the importance of theory, it diverted attention from the embarrassing defects of recent practice. In such an account, Stalin's crime was not that he had murdered millions of human beings, it was that he had perverted the self- understanding of Marxism. Stalinism, in short, was just another mistake in theory, albeit an especially egregious one, whose major sin consisted of its refusal to acknowledge its own errors. This was important to Althusser, who was a member of the French Communist Party and who sought to admit the embarrassing history of that organization without undermining whatever remained of its claim to revolutionary omniscience. The Party's leadership itself had responded to this conundrum by belatedly treating Stalin as an unfortunate but parenthetical episode in the otherwise unblemished record of communism. His crimes were a mere deviation born of the cult of personality. But Althusser went one better by showing that "Stalin" and his works constituted only a collective analytical error. This performed the double service of keeping personalities out of the matter and reiterating the centrality of concepts.
It is hard, now, to recapture the mood of the '60s in which this absurd dialectical joust seemed appealing. But Althusser unquestionably filled a crucial niche. He gave young Maoists an impressively high-flown language in which to be "anti-humanist" Communists, dismissive of the "Italian road" to socialism. At the time this was a matter of some importance: the early works of Marx, notably the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, had only recently entered the canon, having for many years languished unknown and untranslated. Placed alongside his other youthful writings, they suggested a rather different Marx from the conventional image passed down from Engels via the popularizers of the early European Socialist movements; a man more interested in Romantic- era philosophy than in classical economics, an idealist whose agenda was not simply social revolution but the moral transformation of mankind. The interest in this "humanist" Marx had been aroused both by the recent French rediscovery of Hegel and by a new generation of radical intellectuals seeking to locate Marx in something other than the lineage imposed upon the European left by the doctrinaire positivism of Leninism.
Taking his cue from the growing fashion for "structuralism" (initially confined to linguistics and anthropology, but by the early '60s seeping into sociology and philosophy), Althusser worked hard to excommunicate this humanist and understandably more appealing Marx as "unscientific." In his view, to emphasize the moral condition and responsibilities of individual men was to detract from an appreciation of the larger, impersonal forces at work in history, and thus to delude the workers, or anyone else, into believing they could act on their own behalf, instead of accepting the authority of those who spoke and thought for them. In his words, "only theoretical anti-humanism justifies general practical humanism."
To flesh out his structuralist account, Althusser invented something that he and his followers called "Ideological State Apparatuses." In his heyday these were confined to the public and political world. In his memoirs, however, his attention was diverted to more personal matters. Althusser informs us that " it is an irrefutable fact that the Family is the most powerful State Ideological Apparatus" (obligatory capitals), and in reflecting upon his experience in the mental hospital he wonders "what can now be done to free the mentally ill from the Hell created for them by the combined operations of all the Ideological State Apparatuses." In Althusserian dogma the presence of these repressive and all-embracing ogres was held particularly responsible for the inconvenient stability and durability of liberal democracy. Of special note was the announcement that the university was, of all of these, the dominant one for our era. "Theoretical practice" in the academic arena was thus the site of ideological battle; and philosophy was absolutely vital as the "class struggle in theory." Scholars in their seminars were on the front line, and need feel guilty no more.
Althusser borrowed a term from the philosopher Gaston Bachelard and announced that an "epistemological break" in Marx's writings had occurred somewhere in the mid-1840s. Everything he wrote before the break was neo- Hegelian humanist flannel and could be ignored. Henceforth left-wing students and lecturers were free to jettison those bits of (the early) Marx that seemed to speak of alienation, reconciliation, human agency and moral judgment. This was hard for many people in the '60s to swallow. In Italy and in the English- speaking world, most young left-wingers were more attracted to the idea of a gentler, kinder Marx. In France, however, where the sordid political compromises of the Socialists and Communists during the battle over decolonization had left a sour taste among some of their younger supporters, this static, structuralist Marx sounded analytically pure and politically uncompromising.
By the end of the '70s, however, Althusser's star was on the wane. He had been absent during the events of May 1968, and had showed little interest in the political developments of that year. His only direct comment on the "failed revolution" of 1968 was characteristic and revealing: "When revolt ends in defeat without the workers being massacred, it is not necessarily a good thing for the working class which has no martyrs to mourn or commemorate." Even his erstwhile followers admitted that he had nothing new to offer, and his rigid stance in defense of Marxism, communism and "the revolution" made him appear irrelevant in a decade that saw the publication in France of The Gulag Archipelago, the tragedy in Cambodia, the eclipse of Mao and the steady loss of radical faith among a generation of French intellectuals. Had matters been left there, Althusser could have looked forward to a peaceful and obscure old age, a curious relic of a bizarre but forgotten era.
But then, on November 16, 1980, he murdered his wife Helene in their apartment at the Ecole Normale. Or, as the jacket copy of The New Press's translation of his memoir coyly puts it, "while massaging his wife's neck [he] discovered he had strangled her." (To be fair, this is how Althusser himself explained the event; but it is curious to find the claim reproduced unattributed on the book.) Althusser was examined by doctors, found to be mentally unfit to stand trial and locked away in a psychiatric hospital. Three years later he was released and spent his last years in a dreary flat in north Paris, emerging occasionally to startle passers-by with "Je suis le grand Althusser!" It was in these years that he drafted two versions of an autobiography. They were found after his death in 1990, and first published in French, as a single book, in 1992.
These "memoirs" are curious. Althusser would have us read them as Rousseau- like confessions, but that is hard to do, and the comparison is embarrassingly unflattering to their author. They are clearly an attempt on Althusser's part to make sense of his madness, and to that extent they are indeed revealing; by his own account he wrote them "to free myself from the murder and above all from the dubious effects of having been declared unfit to plead" (it is ironic that their posthumous impact on any unprejudiced reader will surely be to confirm the original forensic diagnosis). As a genre, however, they really come closer to magical realism. The book, especially a short early draft incongruously titled "The Facts," is full of fantasies and imagined achievements, so much so that it is sometimes hard to disentangle the fictive Althusser from the rather mundane creature whose sad story emerges in these pages.
That story is soon told. Althusser was born in 1918, the eldest child of middle-class French parents in Algeria. His father was a banker whose career took him back to Marseilles in Louis's adolescent years. The young Althusser had an utterly uneventful early career. Academically promising, he was sent to the lycee in Lyons to prepare for the entrance exam to the Ecole Normale. He passed the exam, but had to postpone his higher education when he was drafted into the army in 1939. Like many French soldiers, he had a futile war; his company was rounded up by the Germans in 1940, and he spent the next five years in a prisoner of war camp. About the only interesting thing that seems to have happened to him there was that he learned, somewhat belatedly, the pleasures of masturbation. (He was not to make love for the first time until he was 29.)
Finally admitted to the Ecole upon his return to France, Althusser did well there, coming second in the national philosophy examinations. Having spent his adolescence and his youth as an active young Catholic, he discovered left- wing politics at the Ecole and joined the Communist Party in 1948, which was about the time when other young intellectuals, nauseated and shocked by its Stalinist culture and tactics, were beginning to leave it. Shortly after graduating, Althusser obtained a teaching post at the Ecole and settled into the quiet, secure life of an academic philosopher. He was to stay in the same post until being forcibly retired in the aftermath of the scandal that ended his career.
It was during his student years that Althusser met his future wife, Helene Legotien (she had abandoned her family name, Rytmann, during the war), a woman nine years his senior who had played an active part in the Communist Resistance. As he acknowledges in his memoir, it was a troubled, even tormented relationship. They were held together by bonds of mutual destructiveness. By 1980, he writes, "the two of us were shut up together in our own private hell." Helene seems to have been an unhappy woman, insecure, tormented and bitter--and with good reason. The Communist Party abandoned her after the war, falsely accusing her of some obscure act of betrayal during the Resistance. Uneasy with her own immigrant Jewish background, and desperate for the love and attention of her husband, she put up with his moods, his women-friends and his colleagues, most of whom looked down on her from the very great height of their own vaunted intellectual standing. She was clearly not a person comfortable with herself or others; and Althusser's own bizarre personality can only have made matters worse.
For what emerges clearly from his own account is that Althusser was always a deeply troubled person. This memoir is warped and curdled by his morbid self- pity, by his insecurity and the repeated invocation of Lacanian cliches to account for his troubles. Indeed, the book's main theme is his own psychological and social inadequacy, a defect for which he naturally holds his parents responsible, in equal parts. His mother's insistence on naming him for a dead uncle is blamed for his lifelong sense of "not existing": Louis being homonymic with the word "lui," meaning "him," the young Althusser's name rendered him impersonal and anonymous. (He seems not to have given much thought to the millions of happy Louis among his fellow countrymen.) According to Althusser, his mother "castrated" him with her excessive care and attention; hence his belated discovery of women and his inability to form satisfactory relations with them. And so it goes, for page after page. Small wonder that when Louis does away with his wife, after forty years of manic-depressive bouts, hospitalization, treatment and analysis, we learn that he was taking his revenge on the older woman who not only brought him to Communism but substituted, as he admits, for mother and father alike.
There is a human tragedy here, but it is presented in a breathtakingly narcissistic key. Althusser wrote this memoir not in order to comprehend why he killed his wife, but to show himself and others that he was sane. He had been, as he puts it, "deprived of his status as a philosopher" by being declared unfit to plead, and this final loss of identity, this fear that once again he would "not exist," seems to have been the driving compulsion behind his autobiography. (Other, less exalted murderers have suffered rather greater deprivations, of course, but this, too, our author overlooks.) If we take him at his word, this fear of "not existing" was the very engine that propelled his life's work. By elaborating a doctrine in which human volition and human action counted for nought, in which theoretical speculation was the supreme practice, Althusser could compensate for a life of gloomy, introspective inaction by asserting and legitimizing his existence in the arena of the text. As he says, " I ... emerged as the victor, in the realm of pure thought."
This much, at least, we can learn from the memoir, and it casts interesting new light on the otherwise inexplicably murky and self-referential quality of the earlier philosophical writings. Althusser was reconstructing Marx to give his own life a shape with which he could live, and one that could stand respectable comparison with those of his father (a successful banker) and his wife (a Resistance fighter). We thus learn from this book that Althusser was conscious, in every sphere of his life, of "having practiced a great deception," though it never seems to have occurred to him that this insight bodes ill for the credibility of his intellectual legacy. Unfortunately for its author, however, the book reveals much more. We are presented not only with a man who is on the edge of insanity, obsessed with sexual imagery (a stick of asparagus is "stiff as a man's penis" and so on), dreams of grandeur and his own psychoanalytical history, but also with a man who is quite remarkably ignorant.
He seems to know nothing of recent history. (Among his howlers is an indictment of the "Polish fascist" Pilsudski for starting the Second World War. ) He seems only late in life to have discovered Machiavelli and other classics of Western philosophy, and he even admits to a skimpy and partial acquaintance with Marx's texts (something one might have inferred from his published work). He is also unsophisticated to the point of crudity in his political analysis. He seems to have learned nothing and to have forgotten nothing in the last twenty years of his life. Thus there is much talk of "the hegemony of bourgeois, imperialist capitalism"; and he is dismissive of the dissidents of the Soviet bloc ("cut off from their own people") and contemptuous of writers like Andre Glucksmann for "putting around unbelievable horror stories of the Gulag." Those words were written in 1985!
One puts down this depressing book with an overwhelming sense of bewilderment. How could it be that so many intelligent and educated people were taken in by this man? Even if we allow that his manic fancies met some widespread need in the '60s, how are we to account for the continuing fascination that he exercises in certain circles today? In France he is largely forgotten, though the jacket blurb by Didier Eribon describes the autobiography as "magnificent" and explains that "madness [is] the inevitable price of philosophy." It is a conclusion whose deductive logic and historical accuracy are truly in the Althusserian tradition; but Eribon is a French journalist who has made a career of playing the fawning hyena to the preening lions of Parisian intellectual life, and he is not representative.
In the United States, however, there are still university research centers that devote time and money to the study of Althusser's thought, and mount expensive conferences at which professors lecture one another earnestly about " Althusserianism" in everything from linguistics to hermeneutics. Meanwhile respectable English-language publishers continue to market books with titles like The Althusserian Legacy, Althusser and the Detour of Theory, Reading Althusser, Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory and, inevitably, Althusser and Feminism, most of them unreadable excursions into the Higher Drivel.
Althusser was not a charlatan. He himself really believed that he had discovered something significant--or was about to discover something significant--when his illness struck. It is not because he was mad that he was a mediocre philosopher; indeed, the recognition of his own intellectual mediocrity may have contributed to his depressions, and thence to his loss of sanity. If there is something humiliating about the Althusserian episode in intellectual history, then, the humiliation is not his alone. He was a guru, complete with texts, a cult and true believers; and he showed occasional insight into the pathos of his followers, noting that they imitated his " smallest gestures and inflections."
Althusser's work and his life, with his drugs, his analysts, his self-pity, his illusions and his moods, take on a curiously hermetic quality. He comes to resemble some minor medieval scholastic, desperately scrabbling around in categories of his own imagining. But even the most obscure theological speculation usually had as its goal something of significance. From Althusser's musings, however, nothing followed. They were not subject to proof and they had no intelligible worldly application, except as abstruse political apologetics. What does it say about modern academic life that such a figure can have trapped teachers and students for so long in the cage of his insane fictions, and traps them still?
"Louis Althusser, The Paris Strangler," by Tony Judt Vol. 210, New Republic, 03-07-1994, pp 33.
Tony Judt is Professor of European Studies at New York University and the author of Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals 1944-1956 (University of California Press).
I include a few passages from Althusser's memoir where he discussed his scholarship:
"I obtained my diploma having written a thesis for Bachelard on Hegel's notion of content, using the false quotation, 'One content is better than two', whose author I did not know.... I do not think Bachelard read my thesis as he was very busy. One of the major themes I discussed was the 'circularity of content.' He simply objected that it might have been better to use the tem 'circulation' instead, but I disagreed. That was all he said...." (p. 161)
"I should point out that in both the written and oral exams I knew very little about most of the topics I dealt with. But I did know how to 'construct' an essay and suitably disguise my ignorance by arguing a priori whatever the subject. I also structured my arguments the way one should in a good university essay suspending theoretical judgement where appropriate, as had been instilled into me by Jean Guitton." (p. 162)
Althusser eventually became a Professor of Philosophy at the elite "Ecole normal superier" where he had originally been a student.
"What did the Ecole mean to me? Very quickly, in fact, from the outset, it was really a 'womblike' place, where I felt warm and at home and was protected from the outside world. I had no reason to leave it in order to meet people as they dropped by or came to see me, especially when I became well-known. In essence it had a maternal ambiance, was like an amniotic fluid." (p.163)
"Anyway, I carried out my duties as a philosophy teacher and felt more and more that I was a philosopher, despite all my misgivings. In fact, my philosophical knowledge of texts was rather limited. I was very familiar with Descartes and Malebranche, knew a little Spinoza, nothing about Aristotle, the Sophists and the Stoics, quite a lot about Plato and Pascal, nothing about Kant, a bit about Hegel, and finally a few passages of Marx which I had studied closely. My way of picking up and then really getting to know philosophy was legendary: I used to enjoy saying that it was all done by 'heresay' (the first confused form of knowledge according to Spinoza). I learned from Jacques Martin, who was cleverer than me, by gleaning certain phrases in passing from my friends, and lastly from the seminar papers and essays of my own students. In the end I naturally made it a point of honor, and boasted that 'I learnt by hearsay." This distinguished me quite markedly from all my university friends who were much better informed than me, to arouse astonishment, incredulity, and admiration in other people."
"I had another particular ability. Starting from a simple turn of phrase, I thought I could work out (what an illusion!), if not the specific ideas of an author or a book I had not read, at least their general drift or direction. I obviously had certain intuitive powers as well as a definite ability for seeing connections, or a capacity for establishing theoretical oppositions, which enabled me to reconstruct what I took to be an author's ideas on the basis of the authors to whom he was opposed. I proceeded spontaneously by drawing contrasts and distinctions, subsequently elaborating a theory to support this." (pp. 165-166).
From Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts Forever, A Memoir. New York: The New Press, 1994.
tirsdag den 28. april 2009
GEORGE ORWELL: Politics and the English Language
Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the
English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we
cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is
decadent, and our language--so the argument runs--must inevitably share
in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse
of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to
electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the
half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an
instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have
political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence
of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause,
reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an
intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because
he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely
because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the
English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are
foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to
have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.
Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which
spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take
the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more
clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political
regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and
is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to
this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have
said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of
the English language as it is now habitually written.
These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially
bad--I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen--but because they
illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are
a little below the average, but are fairly representative samples. I
number them so that I can refer back to them when necessary:
(1) I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton
who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become,
out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien (sic) to
the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to
tolerate.
PROFESSOR HAROLD LASKI (Essay in Freedom of Expression)
(2) Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of
idioms which prescribes such egregious collocations of vocables as the
Basic put up with or tolerate or put at a loss or bewilder.
PROFESSOR LANCELOT HOGBEN (Interglossa)
(3) On the one side we have the free personality; by definition it is not
neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as
they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval
keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern
would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is
natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the
social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these
self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the
very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of
mirrors for either personality or fraternity?
ESSAY ON PSYCHOLOGY in Politics (New York)
(4) All the "best people" from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the frantic
fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror
of the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to
acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of
poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian
organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoisie to chauvinistic
fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the
crisis.
COMMUNIST PAMPHLET
(5) If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one
thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the
humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak
canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may lee sound and of
strong beat, for instance, but the British lion's roar at present is like
that of Bottom in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream--as gentle as any
sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be
traduced in the eyes, or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors
of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as "standard English." When the
Voice of Britain is heard at nine o'clock, better far and infinitely less
ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish,
inflated, inhibited, school-ma'am-ish arch braying of blameless bashful
mewing maidens.
LETTER IN Tribune
Each of these passages has faults of its own, but quite apart from
avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is
staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either
has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something
else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything
or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most
marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind
of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete
melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech
that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for
the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together
like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. I list below, with notes
and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of
prose-construction is habitually dodged:
Dying metaphors. A newly-invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a
visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically
"dead" (e.g., iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an
ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in
between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors
which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save
people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are:
Ring the changes on, take up the cudgels for, toe the line, ride
roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of,
an axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the
order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are
used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a "rift," for
instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign
that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors
now current have been twisted out of their original meaning without those
who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is
sometimes written tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the
anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst
of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never
the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying
would be aware of this, and would avoid perverting the original phrase.
Operators, or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out
appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with
extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic
phrases are: render inoperative, militate against, prove unacceptable,
make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for,
having the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt,
take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc., etc. The
keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single
word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase,
made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb as
prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is
wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun
constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of
by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the
'-ize' and 'de-' formations, and banal statements are given an appearance of
profundity by means of the not 'un-' formation. Simple conjunctions and
prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, having
regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on
the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved from anti-climax
by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left
out of account, a development to be expected in the near future,
deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion,
and so on and so forth.
Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as
noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basis, primary,
promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are
used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific
impartiality to biased judgments. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic,
historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable,
veritable, are used to dignify the sordid processes of international
politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an
archaic color, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot,
mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion.
Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien regime, deus ex
machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung, weltanschauung,
are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful
abbreviations i.e., e.g., and etc., there is no real need for any of the
hundreds of foreign phrases now current in English. Bad writers, and
especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly
always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than
Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict,
extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous and hundreds of others
constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon opposite numbers. The
jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty
bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc.)
consists largely of words and phrases translated from Russian, German or
French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use a Latin or
Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the '-ize'
formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind
(de-regionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and so
forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one's meaning.
The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.
1. An interesting illustration of this is the way in which the English
flower names which were in use till very recently are being ousted by
Greek ones, snap-dragon becoming antirrhinum, forget-me-not becoming
myosotis, etc. It is hard to see any practical reason for this change of
fashion: it is probably due to an instinctive turning-away from the more
homely word and a vague feeling that the Greek word is scientific.
Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art
criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long
passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.2 Words like
romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality,
as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that
they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly
even expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, "The
outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality," while another
writes, "The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its
peculiar deadness," the reader accepts this as a simple difference of
opinion If words like black and white were involved, instead of the
jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was
being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused.
The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies
"something not desirable." The words democracy, socialism, freedom,
patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different
meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a
word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the
attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally
felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it:
consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a
democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it
were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a
consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own
private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something
quite different. Statements like Marshal Petain was a true patriot, The
Soviet Press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed
to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other
words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly,
are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary bourgeois,
equality.
2. Example: "Comfort's catholicity of perception and image, strangely
Whitmanesque in range, almost the exact opposite in aesthetic compulsion,
continues to evoke that trembling atmospheric accumulative hinting at a
cruel, an inexorably serene timelessness . . . Wrey Gardiner scores by
aiming at simple bullseyes with precision. Only they are not so simple,
and through this contented sadness runs more than the surface bittersweet
of resignation." (Poetry Quarterly.)
Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me
give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time
it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a
passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a
well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor
the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches
to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and
chance happeneth
Here it is in modern English:
Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion
that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to
be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of
the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit (3), above, for
instance, contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will
be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending
of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the
middle the concrete illustrations--race, battle, bread--dissolve into the
vague phrase "success or failure in competitive activities." This had to
be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing--no one
capable of using phrases like "objective consideration of contemporary
phenomena"--would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed
way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. Now
analyze these two sentences a little more closely. The first contains 49
words but only 60 syllables, and all its words are those of everyday
life. The second contains 38 words of 90 syllables: 18 of its words are
from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six
vivid images, and only one phrase ("time and chance") that could be
called vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase,
and in spite of its 90 syllables it gives only a shortened version of the
meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind
of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to
exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of
simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still, if
you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human
fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence
than to the one from Ecclesiastes.
As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in
picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in
order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long
strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and
making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this
way of writing, is that it is easy. It is easier--even quicker, once you
have the habit--to say In my opinion it is a not unjustifiable assumption
that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only
don't have to hunt about for words; you also don't have to bother with
the rhythms of your sentences, since these phrases are generally so
arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a
hurry--when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making
a public speech--it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized
style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind
or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a
sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes
and idioms, you save much mental effort at the cost of leaving your
meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the
significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up
a visual image. When these images clash--as in The Fascist octopus has
sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot--it can
be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the
objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Look
again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor
Laski (1) uses five negatives in 53 words. One of these is superfluous,
making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip
alien for akin, making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of
clumsiness which increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben (2)
plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write
prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up
with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it
means. (3), if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply
meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading
the whole of the article in which it occurs. In (4), the writer knows
more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases
chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink. In (5), words and meaning
have almost parted company. People who write in this manner usually have
a general emotional meaning--they dislike one thing and want to express
solidarity with another--but they are not interested in the detail of
what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he
writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying
to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it
clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will
probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said
anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all
this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and
letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your
sentences for you--even think your thoughts for you, to a certain
extent-and at need they will perform the important service of partially
concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the
special connection between politics and the debasement of language
becomes clear.
In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing.
Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some
kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a "party line."
Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative
style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles,
manifestoes, White Papers and the speeches of under-secretaries do, of
course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one
almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech. When
one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the
familiar phrases--bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny,
free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder--one often has a
curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind
of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the
light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs
which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether
fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some
distance towards turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises
are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would
be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making
is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be
almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the
responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not
indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the
indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the
Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan,
can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for
most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of
political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of
euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless
villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the
countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with
incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are
robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than
they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of
frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the
back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is
called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if
one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending
Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing
off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably,
therefore, he will say something like this:
While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features
which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think,
agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is
an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors
which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply
justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.
The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words
falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering
up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one
turns, as it were instinctively, to long words and exhausted idioms, like
a cuttlefish squirting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as
"keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics
itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When
the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to
find--this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to
verify--that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all
deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years as a result of
dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A
bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who
should and do know better. The debased language that I have been
discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not
unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good
purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a
continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow. Look
back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again
and again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this
morning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in
Germany. The author tells me that he "felt impelled" to write it. I open
it at random, and here is almost the first sentence that I see: "[The
Allies] have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical
transformation of Germany's social and political structure in such a way
as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same
time of laying the foundations of a cooperative and unified Europe." You
see, he "feels impelled" to write--feels, presumably, that he has
something new to say--and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering
the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary
pattern. This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay the
foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if
one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase
anesthetizes a portion of one's brain.
I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable.
Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all,
that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we
cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and
constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes,
this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and
expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process
but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were
explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by
the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of fly-blown
metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would
interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh
the not 'un-' formation out of existence,3 to reduce the amount of Latin
and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and
strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness
unfashionable. But all these are minor points. The defense of the English
language implies more than this, and perhaps it is best to start by
saying what it does not imply.
3. One can cure oneself of the not 'un-' formation by memorizing this
sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not
ungreen field.
To begin with, it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of
obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting-up of a
"standard-English" which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it
is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which
has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and
syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning
clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is
called a "good prose style." On the other hand it is not concerned with
fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor
does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin
one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will
cover one's meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning
choose the word, and not the other way about. In prose, the worst thing
one can do with words is to surrender them. When you think of a concrete
object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing
you have been visualizing, you probably hunt about till you find the
exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you
are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a
conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in
and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your
meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible
and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures or sensations.
Afterwards one can choose--not simply accept--the phrases that will best
cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions
one's words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the
mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases,
needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can
often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs
rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following
rules will cover most cases:
(i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are
used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you
can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.
These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep
change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style
now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English,
but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in these five
specimens at the beginning of this article.
I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely
language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or
preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming
that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext
for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what
Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow
such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present
political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can
probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If
you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of
orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you
make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.
Political language-and with variations this is true of all political
parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists--is designed to make lies sound
truthful and murder respectable. and to give an appearance of solidity to
pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least
change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers
loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase--some jackboot,
Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or
other lump of verbal refuse--into the dustbin where it belongs.
English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we
cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is
decadent, and our language--so the argument runs--must inevitably share
in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse
of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to
electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the
half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an
instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have
political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence
of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause,
reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an
intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because
he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely
because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the
English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are
foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to
have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.
Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which
spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take
the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more
clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political
regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and
is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to
this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have
said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of
the English language as it is now habitually written.
These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially
bad--I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen--but because they
illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are
a little below the average, but are fairly representative samples. I
number them so that I can refer back to them when necessary:
(1) I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton
who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become,
out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien (sic) to
the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to
tolerate.
PROFESSOR HAROLD LASKI (Essay in Freedom of Expression)
(2) Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of
idioms which prescribes such egregious collocations of vocables as the
Basic put up with or tolerate or put at a loss or bewilder.
PROFESSOR LANCELOT HOGBEN (Interglossa)
(3) On the one side we have the free personality; by definition it is not
neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as
they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval
keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern
would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is
natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the
social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these
self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the
very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of
mirrors for either personality or fraternity?
ESSAY ON PSYCHOLOGY in Politics (New York)
(4) All the "best people" from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the frantic
fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror
of the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to
acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of
poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian
organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoisie to chauvinistic
fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the
crisis.
COMMUNIST PAMPHLET
(5) If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one
thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the
humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak
canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may lee sound and of
strong beat, for instance, but the British lion's roar at present is like
that of Bottom in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream--as gentle as any
sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be
traduced in the eyes, or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors
of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as "standard English." When the
Voice of Britain is heard at nine o'clock, better far and infinitely less
ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish,
inflated, inhibited, school-ma'am-ish arch braying of blameless bashful
mewing maidens.
LETTER IN Tribune
Each of these passages has faults of its own, but quite apart from
avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is
staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either
has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something
else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything
or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most
marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind
of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete
melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech
that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for
the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together
like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. I list below, with notes
and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of
prose-construction is habitually dodged:
Dying metaphors. A newly-invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a
visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically
"dead" (e.g., iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an
ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in
between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors
which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save
people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are:
Ring the changes on, take up the cudgels for, toe the line, ride
roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of,
an axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the
order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are
used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a "rift," for
instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign
that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors
now current have been twisted out of their original meaning without those
who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is
sometimes written tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the
anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst
of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never
the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying
would be aware of this, and would avoid perverting the original phrase.
Operators, or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out
appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with
extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic
phrases are: render inoperative, militate against, prove unacceptable,
make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for,
having the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt,
take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc., etc. The
keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single
word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase,
made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb as
prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is
wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun
constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of
by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the
'-ize' and 'de-' formations, and banal statements are given an appearance of
profundity by means of the not 'un-' formation. Simple conjunctions and
prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, having
regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on
the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved from anti-climax
by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left
out of account, a development to be expected in the near future,
deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion,
and so on and so forth.
Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as
noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basis, primary,
promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are
used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific
impartiality to biased judgments. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic,
historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable,
veritable, are used to dignify the sordid processes of international
politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an
archaic color, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot,
mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion.
Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien regime, deus ex
machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung, weltanschauung,
are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful
abbreviations i.e., e.g., and etc., there is no real need for any of the
hundreds of foreign phrases now current in English. Bad writers, and
especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly
always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than
Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict,
extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous and hundreds of others
constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon opposite numbers. The
jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty
bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc.)
consists largely of words and phrases translated from Russian, German or
French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use a Latin or
Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the '-ize'
formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind
(de-regionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and so
forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one's meaning.
The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.
1. An interesting illustration of this is the way in which the English
flower names which were in use till very recently are being ousted by
Greek ones, snap-dragon becoming antirrhinum, forget-me-not becoming
myosotis, etc. It is hard to see any practical reason for this change of
fashion: it is probably due to an instinctive turning-away from the more
homely word and a vague feeling that the Greek word is scientific.
Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art
criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long
passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.2 Words like
romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality,
as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that
they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly
even expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, "The
outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality," while another
writes, "The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its
peculiar deadness," the reader accepts this as a simple difference of
opinion If words like black and white were involved, instead of the
jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was
being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused.
The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies
"something not desirable." The words democracy, socialism, freedom,
patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different
meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a
word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the
attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally
felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it:
consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a
democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it
were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a
consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own
private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something
quite different. Statements like Marshal Petain was a true patriot, The
Soviet Press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed
to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other
words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly,
are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary bourgeois,
equality.
2. Example: "Comfort's catholicity of perception and image, strangely
Whitmanesque in range, almost the exact opposite in aesthetic compulsion,
continues to evoke that trembling atmospheric accumulative hinting at a
cruel, an inexorably serene timelessness . . . Wrey Gardiner scores by
aiming at simple bullseyes with precision. Only they are not so simple,
and through this contented sadness runs more than the surface bittersweet
of resignation." (Poetry Quarterly.)
Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me
give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time
it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a
passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a
well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor
the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches
to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and
chance happeneth
Here it is in modern English:
Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion
that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to
be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of
the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit (3), above, for
instance, contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will
be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending
of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the
middle the concrete illustrations--race, battle, bread--dissolve into the
vague phrase "success or failure in competitive activities." This had to
be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing--no one
capable of using phrases like "objective consideration of contemporary
phenomena"--would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed
way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. Now
analyze these two sentences a little more closely. The first contains 49
words but only 60 syllables, and all its words are those of everyday
life. The second contains 38 words of 90 syllables: 18 of its words are
from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six
vivid images, and only one phrase ("time and chance") that could be
called vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase,
and in spite of its 90 syllables it gives only a shortened version of the
meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind
of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to
exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of
simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still, if
you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human
fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence
than to the one from Ecclesiastes.
As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in
picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in
order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long
strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and
making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this
way of writing, is that it is easy. It is easier--even quicker, once you
have the habit--to say In my opinion it is a not unjustifiable assumption
that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only
don't have to hunt about for words; you also don't have to bother with
the rhythms of your sentences, since these phrases are generally so
arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a
hurry--when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making
a public speech--it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized
style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind
or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a
sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes
and idioms, you save much mental effort at the cost of leaving your
meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the
significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up
a visual image. When these images clash--as in The Fascist octopus has
sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot--it can
be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the
objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Look
again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor
Laski (1) uses five negatives in 53 words. One of these is superfluous,
making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip
alien for akin, making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of
clumsiness which increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben (2)
plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write
prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up
with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it
means. (3), if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply
meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading
the whole of the article in which it occurs. In (4), the writer knows
more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases
chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink. In (5), words and meaning
have almost parted company. People who write in this manner usually have
a general emotional meaning--they dislike one thing and want to express
solidarity with another--but they are not interested in the detail of
what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he
writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying
to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it
clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will
probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said
anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all
this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and
letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your
sentences for you--even think your thoughts for you, to a certain
extent-and at need they will perform the important service of partially
concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the
special connection between politics and the debasement of language
becomes clear.
In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing.
Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some
kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a "party line."
Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative
style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles,
manifestoes, White Papers and the speeches of under-secretaries do, of
course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one
almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech. When
one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the
familiar phrases--bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny,
free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder--one often has a
curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind
of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the
light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs
which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether
fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some
distance towards turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises
are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would
be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making
is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be
almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the
responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not
indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the
indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the
Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan,
can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for
most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of
political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of
euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless
villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the
countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with
incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are
robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than
they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of
frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the
back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is
called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if
one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending
Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing
off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably,
therefore, he will say something like this:
While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features
which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think,
agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is
an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors
which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply
justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.
The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words
falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering
up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one
turns, as it were instinctively, to long words and exhausted idioms, like
a cuttlefish squirting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as
"keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics
itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When
the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to
find--this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to
verify--that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all
deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years as a result of
dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A
bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who
should and do know better. The debased language that I have been
discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not
unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good
purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a
continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow. Look
back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again
and again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this
morning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in
Germany. The author tells me that he "felt impelled" to write it. I open
it at random, and here is almost the first sentence that I see: "[The
Allies] have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical
transformation of Germany's social and political structure in such a way
as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same
time of laying the foundations of a cooperative and unified Europe." You
see, he "feels impelled" to write--feels, presumably, that he has
something new to say--and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering
the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary
pattern. This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay the
foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if
one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase
anesthetizes a portion of one's brain.
I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable.
Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all,
that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we
cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and
constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes,
this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and
expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process
but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were
explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by
the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of fly-blown
metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would
interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh
the not 'un-' formation out of existence,3 to reduce the amount of Latin
and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and
strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness
unfashionable. But all these are minor points. The defense of the English
language implies more than this, and perhaps it is best to start by
saying what it does not imply.
3. One can cure oneself of the not 'un-' formation by memorizing this
sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not
ungreen field.
To begin with, it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of
obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting-up of a
"standard-English" which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it
is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which
has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and
syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning
clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is
called a "good prose style." On the other hand it is not concerned with
fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor
does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin
one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will
cover one's meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning
choose the word, and not the other way about. In prose, the worst thing
one can do with words is to surrender them. When you think of a concrete
object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing
you have been visualizing, you probably hunt about till you find the
exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you
are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a
conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in
and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your
meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible
and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures or sensations.
Afterwards one can choose--not simply accept--the phrases that will best
cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions
one's words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the
mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases,
needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can
often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs
rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following
rules will cover most cases:
(i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are
used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you
can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.
These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep
change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style
now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English,
but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in these five
specimens at the beginning of this article.
I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely
language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or
preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming
that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext
for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what
Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow
such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present
political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can
probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If
you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of
orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you
make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.
Political language-and with variations this is true of all political
parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists--is designed to make lies sound
truthful and murder respectable. and to give an appearance of solidity to
pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least
change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers
loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase--some jackboot,
Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or
other lump of verbal refuse--into the dustbin where it belongs.
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