#misuseoflanguage

[danielweltlinger]

Here are some quotes from the unbelievable book ‘Human Smoke’  by author Nicholson Baker.

If any of you out there want to read one book that explains so much of how war and hatred is created this is the one: even if for argument’s sake only 10% of the book is factual (just about every quote and paragraph is cross-referenced and footnoted meticulously) this would be still enough information to last a lifetime in understanding the peculiar ways our world works politically and economically. Baker is a master interpreter of language and is super aware of how language can be misused to serve a political or economic purpose. He is also the author of “Double-Fold” - an expose on the 20th Century practices of libraries culling operations of primary source information (books, newspapers etc) for the purpose of space and cost-cutting in the process destroying invaluable historical content. He is an advocate and conservator of rare newspapers and books. The concept of ‘doublespeak’ - coined by George Orwell in his masterpiece “1984” referring to saying something when you mean the exact opposite – is unfortunately all too alive and well these days and is routinely abused as a concept by the world’s politicians and mass media creating all too familiar hatred and distrust between different peoples and nations. The sooner the general public start to realise how powerful, manipulative and corrupting MISUSED language is, the better for all humanity..

A young pro-war preacher, Harry Emerson Fosdick, wrote a short book, published by the Young Men’s Christian Association.

War was not gallantry and parades anymore, Reverend Fosdick said. “War is now dropping bombs from aeroplanes and killing women and children in their beds; it is shooting by telephonic orders, at an unseen place miles away and slaughtering invisible men.” War, he said, is “men with jaws gone, eyes gone, limbs gone, minds gone.”

Fosdick ended his book with a call for enlistment: “Your country needs you,” he said. It was November 1917.

(“The Challenge Of The Present Crisis” by Henry Emerson Fosdick, page 62; Ibid page 252)

 Reverend Harry Fosdick gave a sermon in Geneva, at the Cathedral of Saint Pierre. It was September 13, 1925, the opening of the League of Nations Assembly. Reverend Fosdick had renounced his previous fervent militarism; he was a well-known anti-war preacher now.

Fosdick had seen men come freshly gassed from the trenches, he said. He had heard the cries of those who wanted to die and could not.

“I hate war,” he said, “for what it forces us to do to our enemies, rejoicing over our coffee cups at the breakfast table about every damnable and devilish evil we have been able to inflict upon them. I hate war for its results, the lies it lives on and propogates, the undying hatreds that it rouses, the dictatorships that it puts in the place of democracy, and the starvation that stalks after it.” Fosdick’s speech was quoted in newspapers. Twenty-five thousand copies of it were printed and distributed. Most people agreed with it. Most of the world was pacifist.

 (“Harry Emerson Fosdick” by Robert Moats Miller, page 89; Ibid pages 497-98.)

A Nazi Party propogandist in Bavaria filed a report. The anti-Semitic campaign in his district was making no headway, he said. “Every child learns about the Jewish menace; anti-Semitic propoganda is delivered in lectures everywhere,” he wrote. Anti-Jewish posters and issues of Der Sturmer were prominently in view. “And despite all this, the campaigns have not the slightest success,” he said. “The peasants do not wish to sever their ties with Jews.”

It was October 1935.

(“The Germans and the Final Solution” by David Bankier, page 96.)

 The Royal Air Force bombed Genoa and Milan. It was June 1940. They dropped bombs on Dusseldorf, flew away for a while, and then returned to drop more bombs while people were climbing out of shelters to put out the fires. In Munster and Wertheim, the RAF lit parts of the town and then flew low, machine-gunning fire brigades. “Strong hatred against England becomes heavily concentrated,” Ohlendorf’s SS polling service reported, “and calls time and again for revenge.”

 (“Strategic Air Offensive” by H.W. Koch pages 121, 131-32.)

 Victor Klemperer, in Dresden, heard a story. At one of the local hospitals, a woman came in to see her wounded husband, back from the front. He was in very bad shape. Half of his face and his arm were gone. The woman screamed, “It’s the Jews’ fault! It’s the Jews’ fault!”

Klemperer wrote down what someone else said: “We’ll all be sent to Lublin.” It was June 11, 1940.

 (“Witness” by Victor Klemperer, page 343.)

 Churchill was sipping a glass of port in the House smoking room. Harold Nicolson was listening to him talk. A conservative member of Parliament told the prime minister that the British public was demanding the unrestricted bombing of Germany.

“You and others may desire to kill women and children,” Churchill replied, but the British government’s desire was to destroy military objectives. “My motto,” the prime minister added, “is ‘Business before Pleasure.’” It was October 17, 1940.

 (“War Years” by Harold Nicolson, page 121-22)

 Etty Hillesum, in Amsterdam, wrote in her diary: “It is the problem of our age: hatred of Germans poisons everyone’s mind.” She’d had, she remembered, a thought a few weeks earlier that “surfaced in me like a hesitant, tender young blade of grass thrusting in way through a wildeness of weeds.”

The thought was: Suppose that there were only one decent German in all of Germany. That decent German should be cherished. “And because of that one decent German it is wrong to pour hatred over an entire people,” she wrote. “Indiscriminate hatred is the worst thing there is. It is a sickness of the soul.”

It was March 15, 1941.

(“Diaries” by Etty Hillesum, page 8.)

 During an Air Raid in Berlin,  Rita Kuhn went with her family to the basement of their four-story apartment building. A woman from the Gestapo, Frau Burger – a new neighbour – was already there. Frau Burger saw the stars and ordered the Jews to leave, while bombs were dropping. “I panicked,” said Kuhn. “I started crying.”

Another woman – an Aryan, the wife of a doctor – put her arm around Kuhn’s shoulders and led her to a smaller room and comforted her. “It was okay in the small room,” Kuhn said. ‘I felt safe there.” It was fall 1941.

Soon, though, the Kuhns and Frau Burger became friends. They had tea together. Frau Burger hadn’t known Jews personally before – they were, Kuhn said, just an abstraction to her.

(“Owings” by Frauen, page 458.)