"But how many human minds are capable of resisting the slow, fierce, incessant, imperceptible driving force of indoctrination."
Primo Levi, The Truce
Language has miraculously revelatory powers, but it can also render whole nations temporarily insane, spread social contagions, and incite to mass murder. It is these malign uses and effects of language that Viktor Klemperer discusses in his The Language of the Third Reich: a Philologist’s Notebook.
Klemperer was a Jewish philologist and Professor of Romance languages, who kept a diary in Berlin between 1933 and 1941, and The Language of the Third Reich comprises his observations on the changing uses of language just before and during the Third Reich (Klemperer survived the war due to his gentile wife). It is part survivor's journal, part linguistics case study, full of anecdotes and satirical portraits of his contemporaries in Berlin. Drawing on conversations, radio broadcasts, novels, official documents, songs, slogans and slang, it was intended to “observe and memorise what was going on” and show how, through language, “conscience, remorse and morality can be extinguished in whole swathes of people”.
As in 30s and 40s Germany, we too are living through an era in which “the language of a clique has become the language of everyone”. This is the language that has perforated down from American campuses, the activist language of Critical Race Theory, trans-activism, and now a resurgent, virulent anti-Semitism that has inspired middle class graduates to again, as in the Reich, become primitive herd animals mouthing ancient, atavistic blood libels. Now, as in Nazi Germany, a language of cranks and extremists, a language of fanaticism, has become the language of the everyday.
The nub of The Language of the Third Reich, its use-value for us, lies in Klemperer’s identification of the following five manipulative uses of language that made Nazism and the Holocaust possible: hysterical and hyperbolic language; euphemism; deforming and reversal of meaning; smearing and denunciation; and above all, constant repetition - especially of lies, and of old words with new meanings. It was this constant repetition, Klemperer observed, that allowed “people of average, harmless dispositions to adapt to their [Nazi] environment”.
Now, as in 1939, on campuses, on marches and on demonstrations, there are calls for the extermination of Jews, and we have seen the return of very same words and symbols regarding them discussed by Klemperer. ‘Zionist’, ‘Jewish’ and ‘Jew’ have again become conspiratorial smear-words, in part because in the Arab and Muslim world these kinds of anti-Semitic tropes and smears never disappeared, never became disreputable.
Since the pogrom of October 7th 2023, the word that has had its meaning distorted in the most sinister manner is ‘genocide’, whereby genocidal intent has been grotesquely ascribed to its intended and actual victims. Likewise, actual terrorists are being described as victims of “terrorism”, whilst military personnel fighting a proscribed terrorist group are being described as ‘terrorists’. Hamas’s Charter is explicitly genocidal: ”All of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank is consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgement Day … The Day of Judgement shall not come about until the Muslims Kill the Jews. When the Jew will hide behind stones and trees, the stones and trees will say, O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him”, and “the complete destruction of Israel is an essential condition for the liberation of Palestine.”
The word is aimed at Israel, yet it is Hamas who, with nihilistic, diabolic cynicism, have done everything they can to maximise the casualties of their own civilians to earn Israel international opprobrium and have, on every single day since the conflict began, broken breached several specific articles of the Geneva Convention. Even an image of Palestinians being led away from the theatre of war by the IDF, to preserve their lives, was described as evidence of ‘genocide’ across social media. It is these kinds of demonic reversals and distortions of language and meaning that Klemperer discusses, recounting for instance how, under the Nazis, the word ‘fanatic’ stopped being a word eliciting derision and censure and in less than ten years became instead a complimentary, praise and aspiration-word.
Klemperer gives an account of how reality-distorting, propagandistic language was enthusiastically taken up, died away, and quickly disavowed. He showed that Nazi language didn’t disappear just because of the workings of a dissident counter-language: sanity, reality, and language were restored by military defeat, institution destruction, the witnessing of punishment, a surfeit of blood, and imitation. He wrote: “all my awareness of being lied to, and my critical attentiveness, are of no avail when it comes down to it; the printed lie will get the better of me when it attacks me from all sides and is questioned by fewer and fewer people and finally by nobody at all”. This explains how people, some highly educated, can be confronted with the actual meaning of the word genocide according to international law, its many incontravertible debunkings in the context of this war, and even be made cognizant of the fact that Gaza's population has grown by 2 per cent since the conflict began, and yet can still repeat the blood libel 'genocide', in a state of cognitive dissonance.
Cowardice, credulity, and conformity have always been major drivers of history, and few have the courage to separate themselves from the pack. Asking someone to disavow an ideology and its vocabulary means asking that they give up a class marker, a significant element of their social identity, and at least some of their peers. Swift observed that “you cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into on the first place”. No histories of the Middle East, lists of Palestinian pogroms or casualty data are enough to make anyone disavow anything if their motives are the pleasures of hate, of belonging, or or if they have been manipulated out of a capacity to apprehend reality.
Klemperer notes, too, that many only pay lip service or pretend to believe in a regnant ideology, that there are few true believers, and that some are relieved to be able to put to an end their draining cognitive dissonance, which is after all a kind of voluntary madness. The civilian to casualty rate in Gaza is roughly 1:1, the lowest in the history of modern conflict. No other combatant in the history of modern warfare has given advance warning of bombing, has assisted civilians to escape combat zones, or provided them with food or power. The truth is, Israel is the furthest from being genocidal of any combatant thus far in modern warfare.
The influence of propagandising bots is obviously huge, and so we've witnessed over the past year the odd spectacle of real humans repeating the words of bots. At the end of May 2024, the UN revised down by more than half its figure for civilian causualties (though this was still based on Hamas-provided data) to around 14, 000, and it didn't take into account the 7-10, 000 that would have died of natural causes in a population of Gaza's size. This 14, 000 has now been further reduced to around 10, 000. This got very little coverage in the press, as it put a lot of egg on a lot of faces, and yet despite it, many went on erroneously repeating the old figures.
The language used about Israel and the conflict has consistently conformed to Klemperer's model. Every episode that resulted in Palestinian casualties has been exaggerated into 'massacre' or 'slaughter', 'people' has become 'children', and seemingly the IDF does not have an enemy or kill any combatants. A child decapitated by shrapnel from what turned out to be a Hamas arms dump placed in the middle of a civilian area became, 'the IDF is beheading children'. Three guided rockets with 34lb warheads became '2000 lb bombs' and 'carpet bombing'. A school that hadn't been used as a school for months, that housed terrorists, and from which rockets were launched, nevertheless was still described as a school.
It hasn't just been a matter of figures: hoax after hoax has been exposed. There was the footage of 'starving children' that turned out to be children with wasting diseases, footage from Syria or from a Turkish earthquake (surely people could only be pretending to believe that doctors and parents would eat normally themselves whilst watching a child starve to death). The words 'famine' and 'starvation' have been used repeatedly, yet it's an objective fact that more food aid has been going into Gaza than did before the war started, and people repeat the word depsite there being not a single piece of photographic or other evidence. There was the hospital bombing hoax, the digging up mass graves hoax, the tanks running over Gazans hoax, the IDF raping women at the Shifa hospital hoax, the IDF snipers shooting fleeing civilians hoax - and yet, despite all this, people believe, or claim to believe, the next piece of absurd, crude propaganda that comes from Hamas.
How is this possible? Since Klemperer much research has been done on cults, conformity and and brainwashing by Robert J Lifton and others, though not in the specific context of anti-Semitism. The 1979 paper Social Identity Theory in Psychology by Tajfel and Turner, examines how individuals can create their self-image and self-concept from hastily assembled social groups, giving them a sense of belonging and self-purpose, and how if they disavow the ideas that bind these groups together due to new information, these psychological benefits will evaporate - and so cognitive dissonance is chosen over disavowal. Funda Durupina et al analysed mobs and how they are categorised by behaviour that is at once irrational and homogenous, and social media mimcry has obviously been of enormous importance to stances taken on this war.
The Language of the Third Reich illustrates well how language shapes peoples’ reality, to the point that they can deny the very evidence of their eyes, how it can possess them like a virus to the point of butchery and butchery-celebration, and why we must be especially attentive to ubiquity, repetition, and hyperbole as indications that we are being lied to or being persuaded to accept the unacceptable, to tolerate the intolerable. It also serves as a warning of how easily manipulated, weak-minded, and fallible humans are when they come under malevolent, persistent linguistic attack.
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