George Orwell, Down the Rabbit Hole

Posted on April 19, 2012 by James Thomas Snyder

George Orwell, BBC writer and broadcaster, and world-class word-wrestler. (BBC)

George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” is one of those classics of letters that bears repeated reading throughout life. It remains a hectoring challenge to anyone who tries to write, as Orwell did, always wrestling with a deceptively simple language to articulate what we want it to say.

I first read his essay, as nearly everyone who has did, in undergraduate school and promptly forgot it amid a flood of impressions. I returned to it much later later to find his blunt advice and weird prophesy calling out like one of those burned-out stars that still shines like a beacon across the eons.

And of course, like any thoughtful piece of writing that gives back over the course of a life (The Gettysburg Address and The Great Gatsby come to mind), I came back to this article after working in public diplomacy during wartime and found it to be a nuanced source of interest and inspiration.

Orwell is often quoted from this article that “[p]olitical language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” The ellipsis is critical (it’s always quoted with the ellipsis) — he attacks across the spectrum, from Conservatives and Anarchists. The edit takes quite a bit of the sting out of the quote. And the quote itself hurts much more when removed from the context of the essay, which is his most practical manual for good, clear, political writing.

This is interesting because for a few years Orwell was what might be pejoratively called a propagandist — he wrote (and wrote well by all accounts) for the BBC during World War II, when the broadcasting arm of the British empire had a specifically political purpose in mobilizing and energizing the colonies to protect the crown from fascism. Orwell did not particularly dislike this mission (although he did hate phrases like “not particularly dislike”), but he was utterly dispirited by the waste, bureaucracy, and the “trash” and “bile” broadcast each day.

In other words, he thought the BBC could propagandize better, and this essay was in part an attempt to understand why political language was so imbecilic, dull, flat and dim. “Politics and the English Language” was one of his first comprehensive examinations of and remedies for this problem.

In fact “Politics” was part of a less-known series of articles Orwell wrote following the war, all on a theme: the nexus of language, politics, democracy and freedom. “Propaganda and Demotic Speech” (1944) is perhaps the best known after “Politics,” but then come “Politics vs. Literature” (1946), “The Prevention of Literature” (1946), and “Writers and Leviathan” (1948). These all lead, in most scholars’ understanding, to Animal Farm and 1984, and particularly Orwell’s extraordinary development of Newspeak. But taken together, they also are an expansive exploration of the relationship between politics and language and, more specifically, how we use language (specifically English), to communicate political ideas.

Orwell thought we used English badly. (“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,” he wrote.) After some thought and reading, I decided to take issue with his conclusion. I believe that the language itself is the problem regarding its carrying capacity for political ideas. Due to theoretical constructs built up for too long in the past we lack the vocabulary to express basic political concepts. Those ideas that we can express invariably come out in the cliches that Orwell despised.

The only remedy is what I have been doing on this site: to develop and substitute a new conceptual vocabulary to describe political ideas, experiences and realities. The following essay, “Democracy and Political Language,” is an homage to Orwell and another effort to expand that vocabulary.

I will attack one cliche at a time, but it feels at time as though I am brandishing a sword (or pen) at a waterfall. Fortunately we also have a mighty shield — Orwell’s own words. He struggled himself with the cliches he hated, wrestled the words to say what he thought. And that in turn shaped how he thought: “If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration.” Surely, I’m on to something.

###

In Syria, Power vs. Force

Posted on April 13, 2012 by James Thomas Snyder

Sen. John McCain speaks to France 24 April 12. (France 24)

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has been a vociferous advocate for action against the Syrian regime’s brutality against its opposition, as his recent interview with French national television amply demonstrates. To his credit, McCain has been a consistent voice for measured, forceful intervention, from Iraq and Afghanistan to Libya and Syria. He has become an extraordinary voice for the obligation to protect (O2P), comparing the moral imperative facing the international community in Syria to the examples of Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda. While a cease-fire appears to be holding, opposition demonstrations are ongoing and the regime of Bashar al-Assad has demonstrated extraordinary willingness to wield violence in order to maintain control over the country.

McCain recently returned from Turkey where he visited camps filled with Syrian refugees fleeing the regime’s repression. This is perhaps an important reminder of the necessity for finer judgment in these matters, as similar camps filled up after the invasion of Iraq and refugees poured into Syria and Jordan fleeing the violence and chaos of sectarian anarchy in the wake of invasion. The Syrian regime’s collapse would no doubt benefit American interests in the region, depriving Iran of a proxy and Hezbollah and Hamas of a paymaster. But it’s much harder to anticipate the unforeseen outcomes of centrifugal forces cut loose in the event of the regime’s demise.

Nonetheless, McCain’s intriguing and clearly genuine and heartfelt appeal not to allow al-Assad his waltz of death over a yearning opposition reveals the tensions inherent to an age-old theoretical question, particularly in the wake of a series of violent and non-violent, successful and unsuccessful revolutions in the Islamic world. I am writing about the relationship between power and force, which for too long have been roughly and lazily equated.

The point of departure is McCain’s insistence that a multinational intervention against the Syrian regime, likely led by NATO, could effectively level the tools of force between the opposition and the government. This is quite a practical assessment. The regime retains the monopoly of force, McCain notes, with heavy weapons, including tanks and helicopter gunships. The Free Syrian Army is fighting mostly with firearms and video cameras. “Right now it’s artillery and tanks against Kalashnikovs,” McCain told France 24. “This is not a fair fight.”

Libya serves as the model in McCain’s thinking. There, NATO aircraft leveled the fight by eliminating the Libyan air force and “tank plinking” — a practice derided over Kosovo — destroying Libyan armor with precision strike. I’m not an operator so I hesitate to assert that the NATO campaign was carried out easily and with few civilian casualties. But by eliminating the monopoly of force, the Libyan army was put on the same footing as the armed Libyan opposition forces, making it “a fair fight”.

Perhaps most importantly in Libya — and this more closely serves my point — once heavy armor and attack aircraft were swept away, the full power of the population was liberated. Whole cities rose up against the regime and the regime found itself outmatched. Guns are little use against the masses, especially when fear is no longer a factor.

McCain didn’t allude to this, but it must have informed his thinking. Armor and aircraft make repression and killing a distant, impersonal, impervious thing. Civilians and fighters alike flee in terror from the rumble of tanks and the roar of jet engines and rotor wash. It is much harder — although the Iranian regime did its level best — to instill that kind of fear over a mass of human beings from the end of a gun.

Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians jam Tahrir Square to bring down the regime of President Hosni Mubarak, early 2011 (Getty Images via The Guardian)

The armed revolution aside, we saw precisely this triumph of power over force in Egypt and Tunisia. Masses of people cowed and then overthrew their dictatorships. In Tunisia, the revolution moved too quickly for the regime to react, but in Egypt the important factor was the neutrality of the Army. The people could face down the relatively lightly armed police and internal security forces. Confronted with a million people in Tahrir Square in Cairo (and hundreds of thousands gathered in other cities), the security forces — used to dealing with individuals or dozens of people at most — no longer could assert authority in any meaningful way. It was only a matter of time before the regime would collapse.

This was in large strokes a replay of actions that took place in Central Europe during the Velvet Revolution. Poland lived for 10 years under martial law — the rule of armor in the streets — but even this was no match for the growing power of the Polish people. Once the rest of the enslaved states of Central Europe were unable or unwilling to roll down their people as they began to march en masse — and the Center in Moscow importantly renounced the Brezhnev Doctrine of intervention as it had in Czechoslovakia and Hungary to put down popular rebellion — the state revealed itself to be made of matchwood. The power of the powerless was let loose on the world.

So power and force are not the same thing. I should emphasize that force can trump power, as we have seen in Iran and elsewhere. And power can dissipate, as we saw in Ukraine. But this does not alter the fundamental difference between them. Power is a moral concept and that is why it is inherent to politics. As a moral concept, power resides exclusively in the mind of men and women. Power is infinitely scalable, as we saw mobilizing by the millions across middle Europe and the Mahgreb.

Hannah Arendt wrote very clearly in On Violence that violence and power were not one and the same but opposites. She also wrote that war (that is, applied force) was not the result of some primal human urge toward self-destruction but, finally, the ultimate means to resolve dispute. To illuminate her insight more, I would argue that force and power are not opposites but opposing means to the same end: to change political behavior. Force is mobilized by a state (or quasi-state); power requires mobilization by something other than the state for legitimacy (although in many societies state structures are regularly put to work creating those non-state mobilizations). Force is legitimate when it is wielded by the accepted state (or quasi-state) authority; power is legitimate when it is given freely and without coercion.

The Syrian regime has learned well from the examples of both its neighbors and from history. As seen in Homs and Hama, force can trump power. Murder dismembers the political opposition. Guns and Tanks terrorize the ordinary and the innocent. But I also know that this is only a temporary terror. Whether the horror in Syria continues is a prediction someone better informed can make. Real power ultimately prevails because it is found in the minds and morals of millions of men and women. The leaders in Damascus, Moscow, and Minsk, and in Pyongyang, Tehran, Beijing, and Havana must know this.

###

The Political Gospel

Posted on April 11, 2012 by James Thomas Snyder

The Sermon on the Mount, from a 6th Century mosaic, Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, Italy. (Source not identified)

Andrew Sullivan’s recent Newsweek cover article about the crisis in modern American Christianity struck me as deeply wrong for many reasons, but certainly worse for a profound misinterpretation of an “apolitical” Christ and for a common misunderstanding of politics and the political.

Much of Sullivan’s error stems from what I have argued is a thorough-going theoretical misunderstanding of politics running like a vein in the Western canon (not Church doctrine), and I see Sullivan’s essay as another opportunity to argue for the importance and relevance of politics and the political.

Sullivan seems also to maintain the usual intellectual/philosopher’s distaste for the arena, as if watching Lions tear apart Christians in the Roman coliseum without acknowledging that he’s taking part by bearing witness to the spectacle. The best avenue of approach to Sullivan’s confusion is, unfortunately, an area in which I admit I am no expert. But even a cursory glance at scripture gives lie to Sullivan’s assertion that Christ’s fundamental lesson for us all was “how [Christ] conducted himself through it all — calm, loving, accepting, radically surrendering even the basic control of his own body and telling us that this was what it means to truly transcend our world and be with God.” This is certainly not the Christ I know, who raged against the money-changers in the temple, chastised his apostles at Gethsemane, begged God to let the cup of fate pass from him or cried out in despair at the hour of his death.

Theological or scriptural disputes notwithstanding, Christ’s humanity helpfully leads us further into the temporal realm. Sullivan specifically calls Christ “apolitical.” Let us assume for now that Sullivan is talking about common political activities we are familiar with: building an organization, campaigning, reaching the masses, speaking to authority. Under that definition Christ looks very much like a modern political figure. He gathered followers (the apostles), he traveled from city to city, sought out and spoke to large audiences. He “spoke truth to power,” as the expression would have it, directly addressing the Pharisees. There is evidence that he knew he knew he had a political mission after the arrest of John the Baptist and fled Galilee. His entire life was fraught with political intrigue as he was eventually considered a liability by the Roman authority, pursued, betrayed, tried, and crucified as the ersatz King of the Jews.

But that is to borrow Sullivan’s own apparent understanding of politics and the political. It is not clear that Sullivan has a more expansive view of politics as separate from organizations, the state or government bodies — politics qua politics, as I call it — or the concept of the political as I have discussed it earlier. The notion of a normative moral vision that we would wish for others does not appear to cross his mind. Yet Christ’s entire ministry is consumed with a vision of a different world here on earth and he engages in political action to achieve it. He was not strictly a spiritual guide, advising his followers simply on matters relevant only to them. His ministry from its very beginning had clear ambition beyond that. And that makes the Gospels inherently political, contrary to Sullivan’s argument.

Sullivan borrows from the example of Thomas Jefferson, who excised only the direct quotations of Christ from his Bible for a better, more direct, more literal understanding of him; but even without the commentary of the New Testament’s authors it is impossible not to understand Christ as a political man and a tremendous, towering figure for the moral transformation of society. Sullivan wouldn’t be writing about him in Newsweek if he weren’t.

To take just the Sermon on the Mount — almost entirely direct quotations from Christ — we read a series of commandments, or what we would call political statements. The Beatitudes are not merely a recitation of who are blessed, but whom should be blessed under a new moral order. This is a political statement. Christ continues with a series of edicts: “Turn the other cheek.” “Love thine enemies.” Evil thoughts are as bad as the evil act. “Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.” “Pray to your father in secret.” “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” These commandments are so commonplace now that we forget how radical they were (and remain).

Sullivan would have these edicts remain strictly spiritual and personal — almost advisory, mere guidance. But at the beginning of the Sermon, Christ issues the simile of the Salt and the Light. Salt is no good that cannot be tasted, and light is no good that cannot be seen. That is, the Gospel will do no good if it cannot be spread; the Word cannot be heard if it is not read aloud. This is a decidedly political message. Christ is saying: go, my followers, and do my work; tell people what I have said, act on my lessons. His words come very early on in his ministry, long before he deputizes Peter as the rock of his Church.

It is stranger still that Sullivan calls Christ “apolitical” and then attacks American Protestants for losing its purpose in the frivolity of personal achievement and the Catholic Church for abandoning its moral authority during the pedophile scandals of the last decade. He seems to hate politics but then wishes the Church would get its politics right. To right his contradiction, he should have spent more time focusing on some of the good work the Church has done, and is doing right now.

Biblical quotes from the Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial (Photo by the author)

It is hard to imagine, for example, the Abolitionist cause without the Church, and impossible even to articulate the Civil Rights movement without the African-American Church. The intellectual resistance to the Nazis in Germany was mostly populated by dissident Lutherans. The Catholic Church, led by Pope John Paul II, is largely responsible for liberating Poland from communism — and by extension the rest of Central Europe from the clutches of the Cold War. The debate over nuclear weapons and deterrence in the United States changed unalterably after the American Catholic Bishops issued their Pastoral Letter on War and Peace in 1983.

Today the Orthodox Church leads protests against the Soviet-era practice of abortion in Russia, where access to birth control is not pervasive. Korean and underground Chinese Christian activists run an underground railroad for North Koreans escaping their prison state. Pick a poor, resource-wracked or devastated community and you will find a Christian charity working there to alleviate suffering. And importantly (to me, especially), Christians are engaging in the important work of interfaith engagement and understanding.

I don’t think these activists would see themselves engaged in “political” activity, but I am certain they are driven by something more than the simple, calm example of Sullivan’s implacable Christ. Perhaps they heard Christ’s commandment to come out from under a bushel, to come down from the City on a Hill, to walk with and give to and love the least among us. Let us thank God for it.

But I also know that the Chinese authorities would certainly consider such behavior “political” activity and would do to Christ today what the Romans did 2,000 years ago.

###

True Primary Colors

Posted on April 5, 2012 by James Thomas Snyder

Gov. Mitt Romney during a town hall even in Wisconsin in early April (AP)

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s recent primary wins in Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Wisconsin placed him, at last, in the coveted position as the Republican Party’s “presumptive nominee” for president. He finds himself in the position that Barack Obama did during his bruising primary fight against Hillary Clinton in the 2008 cycle: he is far ahead enough that his closest challenger, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, would have to win an improbable number of delegates — three-quarters of those in the remaining races before August — to beat him.

The math is bad but not impossible for Santorum. The math was impossible yet strangely not bad for Hillary Clinton four years ago. But in this vicious, cash-burning primary run, both party partisans and outside observers have been quick to call the fight. Game over, advantage Romney, and let’s get to the main event: Romney vs. Obama.

Except, wait a minute, the Republicans haven’t even had half their primaries. And it is incredible that these reporters, commentators, and in some cases, elected officials, have simply ignored those people who ultimately choose their leaders. This obsession with the general election demonstrates an aloof disregard for democratic process or a complete contempt for primary voters who are, after all, the most committed democrats.

Primaries are more than just a means for selecting a nominee or standard-bearing candidate. They are not a simple means to an end. The process is just as important, if not more so, than the outcome. Primary races are an ongoing political dialogue between a pluralistic political community and the leaders who seek to represent them. They are means for a candidate to meet the voters, for him to make his arguments to them, and for them to make their case to him. They are a chance for the voters to meet him, and to take the measure of the man. Primary voters particularly take this responsibility very seriously. To cut this run short — in effect, to short-circuit the democratic process in favor of expedience — denies the people their power and their voice. It is undemocratic, unrepublican, antipolitical and un-American.

Hillary Clinton, ending her presidential run in 2008. (Getty images via Sydney Morning Herald)

I think how important the primary process is when we saw the guts, tenacity and fight that Hillary Clinton brought to the hustings during the 2008 campaign. Even then, calls went out early for her to abandon the fight. But she kept on, even when she knew she couldn’t win. We’ve never seen a candidate like her or a candidacy like her’s, and our political life would be poorer without her story to tell. Certainly our political rhetoric would not be so rich but for the “18 million cracks in the glass ceiling” to whom she gave voice. The President realized those voices could not be ignored and that is why in part, I think, she still holds the second-most visible job in the Administration after him.

Romney has been acting like the Republican nominee — most recently before an association of U.S. news editors — and this is a mistake. He isn’t the nominee until he convinces his own party he is their nominee first — and until he listens to his own party’s dissenters. That is an important part of the American political tradition. Winning the nomination isn’t simply a matter of tallying delegates (although, as Obama demonstrated very convincingly, that is the bottom line). It’s also a matter of listening to those who don’t agree with you, even if they are your friends.

This is a fundamental aspect of politics that gets lost in daily reporting, particularly during campaign season, as we maniacally focus on the horse surging ahead and the horse falling behind. But something else is happening, hidden behind the vote tallies and delegate counts. It’s a nation in a conversation with itself about what it is and what it would like to be. We don’t always expect the news media to listen above the daily din. But when the candidates themselves stop listening, even to their own party, that’s when our politics is in real trouble.

###