politics

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.

No More Words

Writings, in categories of Misc & Other, from your friend Xavier F Smith

rebel without a clause

The Pitfalls of Political Language

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