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Philip Lee
Language, the essence of what it means to be human, can be perverted into ‘hate speech’. When used by the media, many virulent expressions acquire the stamp of respectability, ensuring that language is the last social system to recover from such degradation. The following article explores this hypothesis with particular reference to Argentina and Rwanda.
It is more than 30 years since George Steiner published his collection of essays ‘about language and the crisis of language in our time’ (Steiner, 1967). In it he argued that ‘language is the defining mystery of man’ in which ‘identity and historical presence are uniquely explicit’ (Steiner, 1969: 16-17).
One of the essays first appeared in 1959 and caused considerable controversy. However, Steiner made no apology for reprinting ‘The Hollow Miracle’ since he took the view that the relationship between language and political inhumanity is crucial. The essay argued that after 1945 the German language, repository of Goethe, Heine, Brecht, Thomas Mann, Rilke and Kafka had ‘gone dead’. Why?
It was one of the peculiar horrors of the Nazi era that all that happened was recorded, catalogued, chronicled, set down; that words were committed to saying things no human mouth should ever have said and no paper made by man should ever have been inscribed with’ (Steiner: 1969: 141).
The German language had been cynically perverted and words had become conveyors of terror and falsehood. In the post-war years, a kind of rehabilitation began, hampered by a denial of the past, by revisionist historians and by an unwillingness to recognise what had taken place. ‘Everything forgets. But not language. When it has been injected with falsehood, only the most drastic truth can cleanse it’ (Steiner, 1969: 150-1).
A considerable difficulty lies in the fact that language is like the air we breathe. Imbibed from childhood, uncritically and ignorant of its socio-cultural and political trappings, we use language in a myriad different contexts and with varying degrees of intent, so that what may be acceptable in the context of a football match becomes irredeemably tainted elsewhere. Most often, as will be seen, it is in the context of conflict that extreme language and incitement to violence are ‘justified’ in the name of political expedience.
Argentina 1976-83
In 1976 a ‘Gentlemen’s Coup’ took place in Argentina, so-called because, on hearing the news, the famous writer Jorge Luis Borges said, ‘Now we are governed by gentlemen’. It initiated what came to be called the ‘Dirty War’. Army General Jorge Rafael Videla became president of a three-man junta that included Admiral Emilio E. Massera and Brigadier General Orlando R. Agosti. These men arrived with a plan called the Process for National Reorganisation, the language of which legitimised a regime of political and civil terror whose repercussions are still evident in the country today. During the Dirty War, some 30,000 civilians were kidnapped, tortured and ‘disappeared’ (murdered).
In a landmark book, Marguerite Feitlowitz has extensively documented the sadism, paranoia and deception that the military dictatorship unleashed on the Argentine people. She pays particular attention to the perversion of language as it was used to conceal and confuse and to domesticate torture and murder.
Brutal, sadistic and rapacious, the whole regime was intensely verbal. From the moment of the coup, there was a constant torrent of speeches, proclamations, and interviews; even certain military memos were made public. Newspapers and magazines, radio and television all were flooded with messages from the junta. The barrage was constant and there was no escape: Argentinians lived in an echo chamber. With diabolical skill, the regime used language to: (1) shroud in mystery its true actions and intentions, (2) say the opposite of what it meant, (3) inspire trust, both at home and abroad, (4) instil guilt, especially in mothers, to seal their complicity, and (5) sow paralysing terror and confusion. Official rhetoric displays all of the traits we associate with authoritarian discourse: obsession with the enemy, triumphal oratory, exaggerated abstraction, and messianic slogans, all based on ‘absolute truth’ and ‘objective reality’ (Feitlowitz, 1998: 20).
Apart from the usual political relabelling, in which human rights are applicable only to people of good will (i.e. those who support the regime), the enemy is anyone who criticises the regime, subversive, aggressive, cowardly, etc. Feitlowitz identifies a whole other vocabulary in which previously innocuous words are given new meanings that, subsequently, are impossible to disentangle from the period of oppression.
For example, the centrepiece of the Argentinians’ beloved barbecue is called, in Spanish, la parrilla. It is the horizontal grill on which meat is grilled and is also used to indicate the restaurant where such meat is served. But in concentration camp slang, la parrilla was the metal table on which prisoners were laid out to be tortured.
Similarly, in a conversation with the mother of a girl who was ‘disappeared’ – itself both a euphemism and a grammatical perversion – the author discovered that the word for ‘parsley’ had been appropriated to refer to young children:
‘Parsley’, she says, perejil. ‘That’s what they called our children. Parsley is so abundant here, so cheap, greengrocers traditionally give it away. No, I always tell them, no, I won’t say it, I won’t have it. That’s how they thought of our children – cheap little leaves made for throwing away’ (Feitlowitz, 1998: 49).
Feitlowitz found that the slang that developed among torturers was an amalgam of borrowings and inventions. The word perejil seems to have derived from the French persil, used against agitators for Algerian independence in the 1950s. Other expressions have their roots in Nazi rhetoric and probably originate among the Nazis that Argentina sheltered after the Second World War, many of whom trained Argentine military and police officers.
Such misuse of language helps to ritualise torture, to provide a reason, explanation or objective. One euphemism for torture itself was ‘persuasion’. Part of a 380-page secret manual issued by the junta was devoted to a series of orders on terminology. Instead of ‘subversive forces’, ‘subversive elements’ was to be used. Instead of ‘guerrillas’, ‘armed bands of subversive criminals’. Instead of ‘wearing uniform’, ‘usurping the use of insignias, emblems and uniforms’, etc. The stigmatisation, dehumanisation and criminalisation of ordinary people was an essential strategy for encouraging acquiescence and complicity.
In this way Feitlowitz is able to compile a lexicon of terror in which ‘to disappear’, an intransitive verb with no object, becomes transitive and acquires an object: to make someone disappear. People are, therefore, ‘disappeared’, i.e. it will be impossible to discover any information as to where they are or what their fate is. Many were, of course, murdered. Trasladar, meaning to transfer or to move, becomes a euphemism for ‘to take away to be murdered’. ‘Interrogation’ equals torture. ‘Operation’ equals kidnapping. ‘Submarine’ – a traditional Argentine children’s treat consisting of a chocolate bar slowly melting in a cup of warm milk – becomes a form of torture in which a prisoner’s head is held under foul water. And so it goes on.
As the wise novelist Julio Cortázar said, ‘Under authoritarian regimes language is the first system that suffers, that gets degraded.’ I have come to believe that, even after the regime has ended, language may be the last system to recover (Feitlowitz, 1998: 61).
At first, the government-controlled mass media supported the military dictatorship, reporting the ‘convalescence’ of the nation after a period of ‘sickness’ and ‘delirium’ (La Prensa in the early days of the coup). ‘Cleansing’ was also a theme taken up by the newspapers: cleansing the walls of graffiti, i.e. erasing recent history, cleansing the streets of rubbish and crime, eradicating the villas miserias (shantytowns).
Later, courageous journalists began to speak up against the repression, although ‘By August 1976, some 100 of the country’s most prominent reporters had been forced to leave. And over the course of the regime another 92 journalists would be disappeared’ (Feitlowitz, 1998: 159). The English-language Buenos Aires Herald was particularly outspoken, especially James Neilson, a well-known Anglo-Argentine journalist. For example, it was the only newspaper to give reliable coverage to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, in direct contrast to La Prensa which one day (16 June 1978) ran an article called ‘Plaza de Mayo: Yesterday and Today’ that failed to make any mention of the Plaza’s grisly history or of the Mothers themselves, who had been a salient feature since 1977.
Rwanda 1990-94
In April 1994, Presidents Habyarimana of Rwanda and Ntaryamira of Burundi, together with other officials and dignitaries, were assassinated when their aeroplane was brought down. This act plunged Rwanda into turmoil and triggered what has come to be known as the Rwandan genocide.
Within hours of the presidential aeroplane crash, the selective assassination of opposition politicians began. Secondary targets were dissidents, journalists, human rights activists, lawyers and civil servants. The primary targets were Tutsi men and boys. Any Tutsi with education was particularly in danger. They were killed by hacking with machetes, shooting, burning alive, drowning in pit latrines and forcing family members to kill each other. These atrocities were reported in large part by the world’s mass media.
In total, some 800,000 people were killed, mainly Tutsi, because of their ethnic background, or on the assumption that they were supporters of the ‘rebel’ Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Hutu and Tutsi political leaders were assassinated because of their actual or supposed alliance with the RPF. In retaliation, hundreds of thousands of Hutus were killed by the RPF in the zone it controlled because of their ethnic background, and tens of thousands of Twas (the third ethnic group in Rwanda) were also victims of RPF massacres (in which three-quarters of the Twa population were decimated). The genocide left the country with thousands of widows and orphans and was followed by an exodus of approximately three million people to the neighbouring countries of Burundi, Tanzania and former Zaire.
Rwandan society is largely rural and agrarian. Kinyarwanda, its language, contains many words, expressions and proverbs that reflect this reality. Consequently, when the genocide began, ordinary words took on double meanings. For example, inyenzi (cockroach) and inzoka (snake) were used to refer to the Tutsi. A call to deal with an infestation of cockroaches or to kill a nest of snakes came to mean killing Tutsis. Many other expressions took on sinister meanings:
- ∑ Uwica imbeba ntababarira ihaka means ‘When you kill a rat, don’t spare the one that’s pregnant’. In other words, don’t just kill the Tutsi man, kill the pregnant mother as well.
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- ∑ Urandura urwiri arandurana n’imizi means ‘To get rid of a weed, you have to uproot it.’ In other words, kill the father, mother, and grandparents, and, even more barbarously, rip the unborn child out of the pregnant mother.
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- ∑ Gukoresha umupanga means ‘To work with a machete’. Normally this would mean to work in the fields or forests using the standard Rwandan tool to cut down plants and trees. But since the tall Tutsis were referred to as ‘trees’, it meant use a machete to cut down the Tutsis.
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- These expressions and many more were regularly broadcast on radio in order to incite violence.
Studies have shown that in the prelude to the events of 1994, the Hutu-led government of Rwanda actually sponsored ‘hate media’ against the Tutsi. As early as May 1990 Kangura newspaper began systematic abuse of Tutsis. In December 1990 it published the notorious ‘Ten Hutu Commandments’, inciting mistreatment of and discrimination against Tutsis. For example, ‘any Hutu man that marries, befriends or employs a Tutsi woman will be considered a traitor’; ‘every Tutsi is dishonest in business, so any Hutu who does business with a Tutsi is a traitor’; ‘Hutus should stop having mercy on Tutsis’, etc.
Kangura also began to identify and denounce people as ‘enemies’, ‘accomplices’ and ‘traitors’ secretly working for the RPF. Whatever the newspaper called for usually happened, especially when it related to individuals, and this added to the fear that the newspaper inspired. Eventually, some ten other newspapers joined the ‘hate speech’ bandwagon and engaged in varying degrees of incitement to ethnic hatred.
Yet the most notorious channel proved to be an ‘independent’ radio station devoted entirely to an extremist agenda: Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM). It began broadcasting in July 1993, conducting a persistent campaign against the Tutsi:
The language RTLM used to incite genocide indicated that the aim of this ‘battle’ was not simply to win the armed combat but rather to utterly destroy the opponent. Occasionally the analogy of the battlefield was dropped in favour of something more direct... ‘continue to keep your eyes open, remain vigilant and give them the punishment they deserve’ (Broadcasting Genocide, 1996: 116).
The ‘punishment they deserve’ was spelt out in subsequent broadcasts: ‘he should be arrested and maybe lose his head’, ‘fight them with the weapons at your disposal: you have arrows, you have spears’; ‘you kill him, you burn him’. It became an endless litany of hate.
Despite this evidence, it would be naive to assume that the genocide in Rwanda was in some way ‘caused’ by the mass media. At worse they abetted the process, in the specific instance of RTLM by identifying targets, broadcasting vehicle number plates, refuges where potential victims were hiding, and so on. Nevertheless, the demonising of the Tutsi, the twisting of language and the use of euphemisms to condone mutilation and murder, remain a source of incitement that cannot be easily disregarded.
Sensitivity to language and public expression
It is too simplistic to blame language for the ills of society, yet it is language that portrays and defines how issues and people are perceived. Propaganda, conveyed by language and defined as verbal or non-verbal communication that attempts to influence motives, beliefs, attitudes or actions, is as old as history (which, ironically, is itself propaganda). All we can do is to sensitise people to language use and the ways it can be manipulated. In this, the modern mass media can undoubtedly play a significant role in constructing a different dialogue about beliefs and attitudes. But a form of journalism that is for peace and against conflict will depend on the implementation of new criteria for the way language is used.
In this sense ‘language’ goes beyond the individual meaning of a word or phrase to the discourse in which it is situated. To this end, some experimental techniques have been explored in a series of conferences organised by the Freedom Forum, based in London. Towards the end of 1998 they revisited the traditional notion that journalists simply report the facts and re-examined the political, social and cultural biases that influence news-making.
The group has made a number of recommendations that deserve in-depth reflection and discussion (see ‘What are journalists for?’, 1998: 54-55), among which are the following:
- ∑ Slogans such as ‘terrorist’, ‘extremist’ and ‘fundamentalist’ should be avoided because they reproduce and sustain essentialist assumptions about human nature and the reasons for conflict.
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- ∑ The opinions of marginalised parties should be sought not as victims but as participants in a dialogue for creative solutions because unaddressed grievances foster a culture of violence.
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- ∑ The mainstream remains the mainstream by accepting and reproducing distinctions between the ‘legitimate’ and the ‘deviant’. Rehabilitate the ‘deviant’ by interrogating the ‘legitimate’.
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- ∑ Challenge the mainstream by discovering ‘deviant’ initiatives and perspectives in ways that do not present them as aberrant.
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- ∑ Invite activists to consider the process by which real change might result from their actions.
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- ∑ Challenge the binary opposition of ‘self’ and ‘other’.
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- ∑ Flesh out identity by constructing it from many perspectives, not limited to politicians or military or strategic experts.
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- ∑ Take standards routinely applied to the’ other’ and turn them on the ‘self’.
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- ∑ Interrogate perspective by comparing logic in the situation at hand with other similar situations.
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- To which might be added: monitor language use for prejudice, bias, covert and overt distortion.
Of course there is little new in a call for objective reporting. In 1983, journalists around the world agreed a set of International Principles of Professional Ethics in Journalism which, among others, call for: ‘honest dedication to objective reality whereby facts are reported conscientiously in their proper context, pointing out their essential connections and without causing distortions... so that the public is provided with adequate material to facilitate the formation of an accurate and comprehensive picture of the world in which the origin, nature and essence of events, processes and states of affairs are understood as objectively as possible’ (Principle II).
In other words, as American linguist Benjamin Whorf (1964) pointed out, ‘Language is not simply a reporting device for experience, but a defining framework for it.’ Definitions matter but the problem, as ever, is one of implementation. If the media are to be objective and to offer fair and balanced representations of reality, they have to begin with language. The words and images they employ must carry truthfulness beyond the norm of getting the facts right into the far more demanding realm of justice and equality.
Would that it were so simple. Rehabilitating language implies rehabilitating history, religion, education, in short everything that comprises ‘culture’. Failing that, what realistic possibility is there of ensuring that language, especially public expression, promotes genuine co-operation and understanding instead of sowing discord and division?
In his autobiography, Nelson Mandela, perhaps the 20th century’s greatest humanitarian and statesman, writes:
Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and aspirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry or savour their songs. I again realised that we were not different people with separate languages; we were one people, with different tongues (Mandela, 1994: 78).
Without language, human beings cannot ‘tell each other what is good and bad, and what is just and unjust’ (Aristotle). The supreme value of language is that it makes relationships possible and it is the quality of those relationships that will determine the survival of humankind.
References
Broadcasting Genocide: Censorship, Propaganda & State-Sponsored Violence in Rwanda 1990-1994. London: Article 19.
Feitlowitz, Marguerite (1998). A Lexicon of Terror. Argentina and the Legacies of Torture. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mandela, Nelson (1994). Long Walk To Freedom. London: Little, Brown and Company.
Steiner, George (1967). Language and Silence. London: Faber & Faber. Abridged edition published in Pelican Books, 1969.
What are journalists for? Ways of working for media professionals in the age of spin, chequebook journalism and globalisation (1998). Conflict & Peace Forums, Taplow Court, Taplow, Bucks. SL6 0ER, United Kingdom.
Whorf, Benjamin L. (1964). In Hoyer (ed.), New Directions in the Study of Language.
Philip Lee studied modern languages at the University of Warwick, Coventry, and conducting at the Royal Academy of Music, London. He joined the staff of the World Association for Christian Communication in 1975 where he works in the Forum Sector on studies and publications and is Regional Co-ordinator for Europe. He is the editor of Communication For All: New World Information and Communication Order (1985) and The Democratisation of Communication (1995).
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