Language has power to influence beyond all else in our world. Fear, violence and pure brute force can only take an administration so far, language is the subtle tool that makes change effective and often permanent, until more language is used to override it. We communicate with it, we debate it and we fall prey to it every day. In 1839 Edward Bulwer-Lytton originally coined the phrase “The pen is mightier than the sword”, of which a counter-argument could certainly be that in hand-to-hand combat the sword would surely deal the killing stroke, but consider the broader scope of the battle; the ‘pen’, with its subtlety and power can be used to take the fight out of the enemy or rally more troops to the cause, or to take the sword out of the equation entirely. Propaganda has and is used to sway the hearts and minds of people all over the world, and the only riposte to this is equally powerful and meaningful language. Indeed the meaning of the word ‘propaganda’ itself has been changed via common usage to the point where it no longer evokes the same ideas as it once did, similar yes, but enough to steer thoughts in different directions. In an increasingly literate and connected world governments have had to find more creative ways to appeal to their constituents, and if their machinations are uncovered, if the cables are spotted through the smoke and mirrors, then platforms crumble and influence evaporates.
Governments have long used propaganda to rationalise their position and quite often their crimes. One could say that it is the dye that makes the waters of truth murky. The leaders of the Third Reich, to use an extreme example, used politically charged language in attempt to change the history to reflect the party’s position. The Minister for Propaganda himself Joseph Goebbels was particularly and surprisingly poignant on its use and facilitation, two days after his appointment he gave a speech and declared,
“We have established a Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. These two titles do not covey the same thing. Popular enlightenment is essentially something passive; propaganda, on the other hand, is something active. We cannot be satisfied with just telling people what we want and just enlightening them as to how we are doing it. We must replace this enlightenment with an active government propaganda that aims at winning people over. It is not enough to reconcile people more or less to our regime, to move them towards a position of neutrality towards us; we would rather work on people until they are addicted to us.”
This kind of heavy-handed approach is of course destined to fail, if we put aside the brutal and unforgivable actions of such a government we can still see the distinct lack of subtlety employed. Goebbels is honest, he will make you believe whether you like it or not, and he has no qualms about telling you how he will do it. As times have passed the socially acceptable state of loyalty to the crown has faltered, and so governments have become increasingly subliminal with their approaches to language persuasion.
Consider Australia’s own government in recent times. Certain key words and phrases have been used to create political buzz around issues that would otherwise be of little interest for the general public. The first and most hotly debated of course is ‘boat people’ the term first popularised by John Howard’s government which has filtered down through successive governments and become a major political ‘issue’. To be fair, the term ‘boat people’ was actually introduced into the Australian political sphere in the 1970s, with the arrival of, yes boatloads of Vietnamese refugees in the wake of the war. But the conservative government of the time, led by one of Howard’s mentors Malcolm Frazer, took an ironically different approach to the arrivals. Frazer’s government simply took the refugees in and made little noise about what they were doing, and the Australian people more or less simply accepted the state of things. Over time however, Australians have become increasingly hostile towards refugees as Australian Parliament figures from 2011-12 show:
• “In the late 1970s, 60 per cent of Australians wanted to let a limited number of refugees arriving by boat stay, between seven and 13 per cent wanted to let any number stay, and between 20 and 32 per cent wanted to stop them from staying
• In 1993, 44 per cent of people wanted to send ‘boat people’ straight back without assessing their claims, and 46 per cent approved of holding ‘boat people’ in detention while their claims were being assessed. Only 7 per cent believed boat arrivals should be allowed to stay
• In September 2001, 77 per cent of Australians supported the Howard Government’s decision to refuse entry to the Tampa and 71 per cent believed boat arrivals should be detained for the duration of the processing of their asylum application.”
So where did all of this hostility come from, and why has this become such an issue when Australia’s actual refugee commitment is fairly minor compared to other countries. The Refugee Council of Australia’s statistics places us at 49th in the world for total amount of refugees residing in said country, which means just over one refugee per one thousand citizens.
John Howard was something of a political genius; he found a way to solidify support toward his party from a large portion of otherwise fickle swing-voters by the use of key-phrase slogans. ‘Stop the boats’ became his go to line for any difficult situation or question and the result speaks for itself; he won the next election in a landslide. He used what he knew about the general populace to manipulate them; their fears, their ignorance and certainly their prejudices. But he obviously realised something even more important about the broader community, their tendency to disengage with wordy political language or lengthy discussion. And so catch-phrase styles of political marketing were used to capture and enthral the vapid attention span of the nation. In 2001 Mr Howard’s election speech was peppered with key words like family, defence and future and regularly used percentages. This was clearly engineered with the aim of giving the listeners a verbal poke in the ribs every couple of paragraphs to draw their attentions toward graspable phrases that could easily parroted to their friends or family over the dinner table while discussing the merits of politicians. Clearly they weren’t afraid of a good old-fashioned capitalist marketing campaign to sell their product, John Howard and the Liberal Party. Both successive governments after Howard have employed these same strategies to keep voters focused on certain things while attempting to use sleight of hand to distract from others, neither with the same level of expertise. Only media outlets have managed to keep up the same level of subtle influence, often to protect their own interests.
The media has also played an important role in political influence, with the rise of the internet print media has lost quite a lot of its power to influence universally but still remains a powerful force to make or break policies and even parties. Through language the third and fourth estates become quite enmeshed, employing the same marketing based language strategies to convey information in consumable and attractive little packages. And so we come back to the idea of the pen superseding the sword. When we look at global politics and news, we are only ever getting a second hand look at events, we rely on information from the media and our governments to learn and form opinions about the world. Both the media and politicians like to sensationalise certain elements of truth and rationalise others to filter our views through their lenses. In the case of boat people, the use of terms such as illegal immigrants and terrorists form a faceless enemy which can be used as a scapegoat and to rally people behind a political banner. One can only get so far by pushing people with a stick until they push back, better to put a scary mask on and chase them.
In his book ‘Hell’s Angels’, Hunter S Thomson spent twelve months, between 1965 and 1966, riding with the eponymous bikie gang and found while they were indeed less than exemplary characters, their infamy was driven largely by the media and politicians looking to capitalise on a rogue element of society, who refuse to cooperate and presented quite a terrifying image to the wider public. They were perfect really; deliberately dirty, smelly men riding around on obnoxious motorbikes sporting Nazi symbols and apparently trying hard to commit every social faux pas known to civilised society. Events got so out of hand that every time the Hell’s Angels tried to have a gathering they were greeted with military style resistance and social panic usually reserved for serial killers. This also provided a useful distraction for politicians trying to escape indiscretion and garner public support. The unfortunate consequence to this kind of political manipulation is often widespread condemnation and irrational hatred of the targets. In our own political landscape refugees have been described as everything from economic opportunists to terrorists, hell bent on the destruction of our nation.
Particularly the political arguments toward border protection have influenced the way we as a nation look at the world. After recent terrorist attacks on major western countries there is a real fear in the community that no place is now safe, and paramount to our way of life and protection is this idea of a border. This is a versatile word as it invokes an image of a literal screen, a barrier around the perimeters of the country. This barrier shields us from attack but also apparently serves as a kind of filter to stop other cultures from taking our essential freedoms and cultural identities away. This is of course nonsense, but such is the power of political language to conjure such concrete ideas in our minds. Creating an image of an indeterminate enemy, waiting just outside the gates to rape and burn and worse, erase our culture, our basic freedoms, has in the modern world of political discourse become a staple for any politician looking to claim and retain power of influence. This not only creates fear with which to manipulate whole communities of people but also gives others legitimacy for their petty hatred and xenophobia, making it socially acceptable to voice said opinions under the guise of ‘debate’. The irony of politicians using this kind of language to claim assaults on freedom is the inevitable lessening of individual and social freedoms aimed at restricting individualism and critical reasoning. A mob, even an angry mob, are much easier to control than a group of educated free-thinkers, though truthfully this is most likely because a mob can be directed at target while the free-thinkers stand around arguing and not stimulating the economy.
This is important to consider when talking about political manipulation. Nationalism has in many countries been a useful tool to create social cohesion and build support for government policy, the unfortunate by-product of this is widespread distrust of anything that differs from the national identity and often a sense of narcissism that is reminiscent of the angry two year old, ‘this is MINE!, not YOURS!.’ In Australia as compared to the US, patriotism works on a much different level, the American government is lucky enough to have managed over a couple of hundred years to create a reverence for the flag, a hand-over-heart, tear in the eye, unwavering loyalty to the concept of the nation. Ironically this quite often doesn’t extend to the government itself. Australians on the other hand tend toward a mistrust of placing too much trust in this idealism, certainly many elements of our society absolutely do, but the majority seem to view it kind of embarrassing. Again though, this is more often a tool for legitimising fear rather than wholly changing the views of the people. This is where political language has evolved from shouting rhetoric to the people with a fist in the air and attempting to control their thinking, to the more subtle approach of being lightly suggestive and spinning the wheels inside their minds. In many ways this shows a higher level of engagement to political process and reasonable doubting of politicians, but still leaves a level of critical reasoning to be desired.
Even now in 2014, political discourse and persuasive language pervade our world view in ways that we often don’t perceive. This is why we should always be wary of government censorship. As Harry Truman said in a special message to the Congress on the internal security of the United States in 1950, “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” The irony of a statement such as this from the President of the US certainly isn’t lost on those who engage with political trappings. Often specifically chose political language is as much about discrediting opposition as it is promotion of the politician or their cause. Representative democracy is reliant on the voices of the people being heard, so it is necessary that they are ‘loud’ enough to make leaders listen. Fear again becomes a powerful tool in convincing the public to ‘get on board’ with government policy, reminiscent of Orwell’s warnings in his book ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, governments often attempt to implement censorship and restrictive policy under the rationalisation of safety and the idea that a person with nothing to hide has nothing to fear but inevitably causing more fear on a general basis.
In the end responsibility lies mostly with the public. Political language is engineered to elicit certain responses and the only way to avoid being manipulated is to engage critically with the information being sold. We are realistically at the mercy of information sources as we cannot possibly be at the scene of every incident to witness firsthand. But as long as we are well aware of the tactics and language usage of governments, we can demand better systems through simple engagement. Only those who are totally apathetic or disengaged open themselves up to being manipulated, the pen is indeed mightier than the sword but scientia potentia est, knowledge is power.
Articles
Windows into Vietnam, a travel diary
The first thing I remember about Vietnam is the seemingly chaotic approach to everything. As my friend and I had exited the front doors of Tan Son Nhat airport we were greeted with a milling crowd of excited people, clutching gifts and craning necks to be the first to spot whatever lucky person they were waiting for. It felt like I was watching a crowd of fans waiting for a pop star to emerge. We had arrived in the middle of the biggest event of the year in Vietnam, Tet, the New Year Festival. Traditionally at this time of year people return home to their families for celebrations that usually last about a week, it may be the only time in the year that hard-working Vietnamese people do so.
After scanning the crowd, we found our guide for the next few days, Huong, awkwardly holding a sign with our names on it. He greeted us with a nervous grin; it was obvious he had been practicing the pronunciation of our names. I found upbeat attitude infectious, a common feature of the people we met, just like his eagerness to learn just as much as he could teach. He seemed fairly young, early twenties at most, and he mostly wanted to know about what was popular with young people in Australia. I had to smile at the things he found exciting that I thought mundane, I’m sure he felt the same way about me.
Huong led us to our hotel transit van and we set off toward Ho Chi Minh City. As we drove I had made an effort to see as much as I could, to make a mental log of things to explore later. Groups of older men were relaxing in the doorways of shopfronts, well assuming that they were. It is difficult to tell the difference between a home and shop in Ho Chi Minh. Little bunches of incense burned in every available crevice in the foot path and walls. And as I sat busily snapping pictures to show everyone back home, I had become uncomfortably aware that I was sitting in a nice, comfy seat, shielded by the car window and my camera lens. I was not in amongst everything as I so wanted to be, feeling the sun on my skin, smelling the burning incense. The gentle air conditioning steeled my resolve to be less of a tourist.
The things I remember most vividly about travelling in Vietnam are the things that alienated me the most. The unfamiliar smells in the air, the almost constant tooting of car horns and especially the abundantly decorated family graves in the fields along the roadside. Huong had explained that Vietnamese people believe that their dead watch over the living and it is good luck to put them near the crops. It’s an oddly wonderful feeling, to see firsthand a culture that is so different to your own, everything is a new experience. But being a tourist immediately puts you at a disadvantage, and being an inexperienced tourist only exacerbates the problem.
One of the many things I was not prepared for was the sheer madness of the roads. Literally thousands of motor scooters packed the streets both in motion and parked on the foot path. I managed to snap a picture of a scooter overtaking our van with five people crammed on-board. Two of the occupants were small children who had casually fallen asleep nestled between their parents, wind whipping drool from their open mouths. Several times I had shut my eyes and almost found faith on the highway, while our unconcerned driver casually but narrowly cars, trucks and scooters coming at us from all directions. Strangely enough I didn’t see any accidents during my time in Vietnam. I put this down to the fact that anyone who wasn’t paying attention must have been taken off the road long ago.
As we drove, we passed huge rice paddy fields with people tending them and the occasional water buffalo. This is the exact picture you imagine when somebody starts describing Vietnam. What you probably wouldn’t imagine is the giant apartment block mere feet away, or the ramshackle petrol station, or the restaurant. Many of these buildings still bear the scars of the past, and the smiles of the people make them all the more humbling. I had watched from behind my glass window, and I realised how little I knew about loss.
We stopped a few blocks from the hotel and Huong, insisting that he carry our bags for us, had led the way. I felt uncomfortable about this; he was our guide not a manservant. Too late I had discovered our mistake in choosing to stay at a fancy hotel, it was still relatively cheap by our standards and we had been excited by the prospect. We had managed to categorise ourselves as rich westerners on a luxury holiday. I had envisioned my time here being immersed in local culture and was excited at the prospect of the Tet celebrations. My naivety had grated on me as we stepped off the street into more air conditioning.
Huong had bid us farewell for the day, he would be back the next day for our tour of the Mekong Delta. As we checked in I stared longingly through the big glass doors of the hotel to the busy street outside, again I was experiencing everything through a protective screen. The scene outside was vibrant chaos, throngs of people winded in and out of huge displays of marigolds and cumquat bushes, both traditional Tet flora. Through the glass I could hear the muted tones of local pop music being broadcast from speakers hidden in the displays. My brief walk from the van to the hotel had already given me a sensory overload and I was mentally salivating at the thought of more. I was still determined to have a real adventure, despite the mistakes already made.
After dumping our bags in the room I had badgered my friend to hurry up so we could go exploring. After four days in the oppressive humidity of Singapore our energy levels were waning but excitement kept us afloat. I had taken a breath before stepping out of the hotel, this was it, I was finally going to experience Vietnam. It took about an hour to for us to realise our next mistake.
The day was much hotter than we had anticipated and we had brought neither sun protection nor water bottles. The people we passed smiled at us, two silly tourist boys panting and sweating, struggling to keep our bearings in the crowd. Luckily, enterprising locals sat at every street corner selling bottled water, hats and sunglasses. At least we weren’t the only ones. After getting better equipped I was ready to move on, and we had begun wandering around the local streets with no real aim but to get a better grasp on our surroundings.
The streets of Ho Chi Minh and indeed all of the places I visited in Vietnam had a dilapidated beauty to them. Everything seemed run down but occupied, and well used. Nothing wasted, nothing useless. I had stopped to take a photo of the power lines, what looked like fifty or so lines running from one pole in all directions. Just as chaotic as everything else here, and yet somehow it all worked. Huong had earlier described how the people of Vietnam work together toward the same goals, as one great busy hive of industry. They certainly never wasted an opportunity.
As we wandered about, a man with a bamboo pole slung across his shoulder had appeared seemingly out of thin air. Hung from each end of the pole were wooden discs about twice the size of a dinner plate, and atop each sat about six or seven drinking-coconuts, each roughly cut into the shape of a circus tent. This master salesman didn’t let his broken English or our lack of desire for coconut get in the way of a sale. With an air of enjoyment and a perfect toothy grin he handed his burden to my travelling companion and bid me take a photo. I sized them up through my camera lens and it was like worlds colliding. My awkward, pudgy friend dressed like an English explorer, next to this wizened and totally self-assured man with smiling eyes. In the end the coconut water was quite refreshing and well worth the experience.
Heading off in another direction led us to a market, much like any at home except for the level of energy involved and alien the produce. Durian fruit is probably the foulest smelling and most bizarre naturally occurring things I have ever encountered. I recalled a quote from Anthony Burgess describing eating durian like “eating raspberry blancmange in the lavatory,” I wasn’t game to try it. Sitting in a little space at the end of the stalls was a man missing his leg below the knee and three of his fingers; he waved his maimed leg vaguely at people as they walked by in an attempt to beg for money. He was one of the very few Vietnamese people I saw without the trademark smile. As we continued to peruse the market a woman joined him pushing a wheeled cart. Splayed out in the cart was a physically and mentally handicapped boy no older than ten. Seeing this brought me a true appreciation for the life I was born into, how trivial and small my largest problems seemed in the face of what others endure on a daily basis. It made the happy faces I saw around me all the more bright for the knowledge of what they had faced in the past.
We soon discovered that looking like you didn’t know where you were going meant that you were probably open to buying something, so we decided to check out the war remnants museum, formerly known as the American war-crimes museum. What I remember most about this place is the profound sense of sadness that I left it with. This was definitely a place for tourists like us, but not the tacky, souvenir type. It was something that everyone who visits Vietnam should see. For once the glass covering the things I saw didn’t separate me from them. I found myself transfixed in front of a huge black and white photo of a pile of broken bodies. Neither of us spoke much on our way back to the hotel.
Once we were safely back in the calm of our room I was able to take stock. I was already worn out, physically and emotionally. My hardy friend promptly fell asleep, but I stood by the window and watched the sun set over the city. The street below my eighth-story glass screen still bustled with people, but now moving slower, like the whole crowd had slowly worn itself out. I had a lot to process, on one hand I felt good about my adventure, I was here in this foreign land experiencing new things, but on the other hand I was still doing so from behind a screen. Like it or not I was stuck with the hotels full of old, rich, European tourists for the rest of the trip and even thinking that made me feel ungrateful. Perhaps it wasn’t so bad to experience this place from behind my camera lens, I felt like I had still learned something. While I wasn’t going to have the fantasy trip I had concocted in my head I still had the rest of three weeks in this amazing country to try my best.
How I discovered my misogyny (and why that is so important)
Since a certain young man in US decided that the best way to deal with rejection was to go on a shooting spree, several debates about sexism and feminism have begun in a rising crescendo of angry rants and defensiveness. What I would like to share is my personal experience of revelation, about the way that I think, about women and the tawdry labyrinths of gender inequality. While thinking out this issue I have had many discussions with both men and women about their positions and ladies you will be displeased to know that it was mostly discussions with other guys that led me to my inevitable conclusions, which really says a great deal about the situation.
I like to think of myself as a good guy, I try to do right by other people and although I have flaws just like everyone else, I deal with them the best that I can and so retain a level of self-respect. Now this is exactly what is so difficult about discovering that you are not quite the ‘nice guy’ that you think you are. If, like me, you are a man who doesn’t consider himself sexist then I ask you to read and carefully consider your position, because, like me, you may still be guilty of making bad arguments and falling into traps of lazy thinking. Now at this point I may already have you grumbling, possibly steaming, but I ask you to bear with me, and listen, which is what we as men really need to do more often.
I have read many posts and opinion pieces lately surrounding this contentious and ever fought battle of the sexes. They tend to unfold as follows; woman makes statement about how sexism has affected her/other women, man makes counter argument about generalizations and ‘not all men’ statement, women (plural) make outraged statements about the point being missed, men (now also plural) start claiming that women are unreasonable. Until of course the whole thing degrades into what can be summarily described as a poo flinging match. What I have come to discover is at this point the arguments cease to hold any value toward the actual issue but rather become meta-arguments, arguments about the argument. Angry, mouth-frothing rants and personal attacks that leave any hope of reason far in their wake, and of course nobody learns a thing and nothing is achieved.
And so I come to the crux of my own revelation. I was chatting to friend about my opinions on the subject and how I had felt unfairly slandered, being lumped in with other men who treat women like objects. ‘I’ am not like that, I said, and neither are my other male friends, we don’t deserve to be compartmentalized. But what he responded with made me think and eventually reconsider my ideals. Now I am going to shamefully admit that this is probably something that has been said to me by women before and probably in the context of a heated argument hence my not having processed such a statement or even remembered it long enough to have any chance of understanding. What was said was this, ‘your hurt feelings are less important than what women deal with everyday’. I realize that this statement is bound to raise some ire, as it did with me initially, so let’s take a breath and remain objective. This is really the main point that causes us as men to lose our sense of reason, we certainly don’t like to be told that our opinions and feelings aren’t important, they are important, but realistically they pale into insignificance compared to the things that women experience simply because they are women. Let me quote a mind far greater than mine in the supremely talented writer Margaret Atwood, ‘men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them’, just ponder that for a moment, when was the last time as a man you felt physically threatened by woman. And you may respond with the common argument, ‘but not all men are like that, I am not like that’, when you examine that idea you find that what you are really doing is making the argument all about you, that the entirety of women’s experiences are invalid because you aren’t like that. If, like me, you really do want to be a ‘nice guy’, a good person, then you must admit to yourself that you are not wholly exempt from blame ,and that is OK, provided you realize that changes must be made. I have also been guilty of using the adage ‘I’m a nice guy, women only like assholes’, you may be a nice guy, but in the end women don’t owe you anything, and you don’t get points for not being a prick, sorry.
So what do we do, as men trying to do the right thing. Really the most important thing we can do is to simply shut up and listen, women may get angry sometimes; perhaps even somewhat irrationally, yes it does happen. But rather than respond re-actively and angrily perhaps just acknowledge that they probably have a reason to be upset and ask yourself, what do I really know about what women deal with. As men we live in a bubble of unshared experience, while women surround us all the time we still have little common ground when it comes to our daily concerns and fears. If you listen to the women in your life, your friends, relatives or even lovers, each and every one will have a story to tell about mistreatment at the hands of a man, at the very least you must feel empathy for the women you care about, let alone all women. From here a disturbing picture of normalized sexist behaviour becomes apparent, how often do we question how a woman was dressed when she was assaulted, or what she was doing at a certain hour on her own, or how drunk she was. Does that really excuse the guy that yelled abuse at her, or felt her up or raped her? This does not exclude that fact that sometimes men are also abused, by women or also by other men. Nor does it exclude that fact that sometimes sexist behaviour is also levelled at men, but again that is not what we are talking about here and while it is still important, the statistics are heavily slanted against women.
You may read this as a preachy rant and dismiss it entirely, and women reading may simply decide that I am just another guy with a soapbox who doesn’t get it, indeed I have already expressed that it was conversations with other guys that prompted my self-awareness rather than listening to the many women expressing the same argument. This is not because I don’t respect women, but mostly because I have been guilty of letting anger and defensiveness get the best of me when presented with said arguments and when that nasty little voice takes over all objective reasoning disappears. For us guys it is vitally important to remember that by expressing their frustration and anguish at ill treatment, women are in no way attacking masculinity, they aren’t trying to tear us down, quite the contrary, they are trying desperately to make us see that their experiences are consistently of inequality and mistreatment and that things really need to change.
Often when we haven’t observed or experienced something firsthand it is difficult to relate, we may say ‘but this is 2014, equal rights were achieved long ago’, would that this was actually the case and we hadn’t simply decided that, out of sight, out of mind meant that that reality is what we decide it to be. I worried that while writing this I may be yet again making the argument all about men and being dismissive of women, but I decided that it was worth writing simply for the fact that it is our behaviour and thought patterns that need to change and if I could prompt even one guy to be self-reflexive then it would be worth it. I also hope that in some ways we can still give women faith that many of us are at least trying to understand and that while we are often guilty of poorly chosen words and thoughts we still long for a world where equal rights and respect are simply the norm.
No More Words 