The Age of the Warrior: Selected Writings. Robert Fisk
A French professor put it to me quite bluntly this week. ‘If we don’t dress up what we want to say in this silly language,’ she announced, ‘we are told we are being journalists.’ Well, well, I can quite see the problem. It’s good against evil, us or them, university scholarship or dirty journalism. It’s a new and dangerous phenomenon I’m talking about, a language of exclusion that must have grown up in universities over the past twenty years; after all, any non-university-educated man or woman can pick up an academic treatise or PhD thesis written in the 1920s or 30s and – however Hegelian the subject – fully understand its meaning. No longer.
About three years ago, I received a good example of this from Marc Gopin, visiting associate professor of international diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Tufts University and a visiting scholar in the programme on negotiation at Harvard. I received his latest book for review, a tome called Holy War, Holy Peace: How Religion Can Bring Peace to the Middle East. A promising title, you might think. Well, think again. For within pages, I was being bushwhacked by ‘metaphorical constructs’ and ‘universalist mythic constructs’ and ‘romanticised, amoral constructs of culture’ and ‘fundamental dialogic immediacy’ and ‘prosocial tendencies’. Here is another cracker: ‘The Abrahamic myth of a loving Patriarch and a loving God who care for a special people has created a home and a meaning system for millions of human beings.’ Come again? Meaning system? The author grew up, he says, ‘in a self-consciously exilic spirituality’. He talks about the ‘interplay’ of ‘political and mythic interdependencies’ and the ‘ubiquitous human psychological process of othering’. He wants to ‘problematise’ intervention at ‘elite’ levels. A rabbi – whom I immediately felt sorry for – was ‘awash in paradoxicality’, which apparently proved that ‘cognitive dissonance is good for intractable conflicts’. Well, you could have fooled me. There was more: ‘dialogic injuries’, ‘cultural envelope’, ‘family psychodynamics’, ‘the rich texture of hermeneutic possibility’, ‘porous barriers of spiritual identity’ and, of course, my old favourite, ‘social intercourse’. ‘Dialectic apologetics’ makes an appearance, alongside ‘persecutorial othering’ and lots of other ‘otherings’, including a reference to ‘pious transformation of old cognitive constructs as an end to othering: remythification’.
What is interesting is that when Professor Gopin chose to send a letter to President Clinton, which he prints in his book, he wrote in perfectly comprehensible English – indeed, he even got a reply from the old scallywag. The good professor was suggesting that private meetings between Jewish and Islamic leaders should become public under Clinton’s leadership and produce ‘a powerful new force for pursuing peace’. No ‘constructs’ here, you note. No ‘otherings’ or ‘meaning systems’ or ‘paradoxicalities’. Because Gopin obviously knew that his academic claptrap wouldn’t have got much further than the White House mail room.
So why this preposterous academic language? There’s a clue when Gopin compares ‘dress and behaviour codes in the Pentagon’ to ‘very complex speech and behaviour codes in academia’. Yes, university folk have to be complex, don’t they? They have to speak in a language which others – journalists, perhaps? – simply would not understand. To enter this unique circle of brain-heavy men and women, all must learn its secret language lest interlopers manage to sneak through the door. It may be that all this came about as a protective shield against political interference in academe, an attempt to make teaching so impenetrable that no MP, congressman or senator could ever make accusations of political bias in class – on the grounds that they wouldn’t have the slightest idea what the lecturer was talking about.
But I think it is about snobbishness. I recall a lady professor at George Mason University, complaining that ‘most people’ – she was referring to truck-drivers, Amtrak crews, bellhops and anyone else who didn’t oppose the Iraq war – ‘had so little information’. Well, I wasn’t surprised. University teachers – especially in the States – are great at ‘networking’ each other but hopeless at communicating with most of the rest of the world, including those who collect their rubbish, deliver their laundry and serve up their hash browns. After lecturing at another university in the States, I was asked by a member of the audience how universities could have more influence in the community. I said that they must stop using what I called ‘the poisonous language of academia’. At which there was an outburst of clapping from the students and total silence from the university staff who were present and who greeted this remark with scowls.
No, I’m not saying all teachers speak like this. There is no secret language in the work of Edward Said or Avi Shlaim or Martin Gilbert or Noam Chomsky. But it’s growing and it’s getting worse, and I suspect only students can now rebel against it. The merest hint of ‘emics’ and ‘constructs’ or ‘hermeneutic possibilities’ and they should walk out of class, shouting Winston Churchill’s famous retort: ‘This is English up with which I will not put.’
The Independent, 14 May 2005
When I worked at The Times – in the free, pre-Murdoch days – I enjoyed life as Middle East correspondent under the leadership of a bearded foreign news editor called Ivan Barnes. This brilliant, immensely humorous man – happily still with us – was a connoisseur of weasel words, get-out clauses and semantic humbug, and one of his favourite questions was this: What do you think of a man who begins each statement with the words, ‘To be completely frank and open with you’? You can see his point. ‘If someone promises to be frank with you – completely frank, mark you – then what is he being the rest of the time?’ Barnes would ask. ‘As for completely…’ On balance, I agree that the key word is ‘completely’. It reeks of 100 per cent, of totality, of black and white. It is also, I notice, one of Blair’s favourite words – along with ‘absolutely’. Blair is always being completely and absolutely honest with us. He is always absolutely convinced he was right to invade Iraq (even when the rest of the world completely realises the opposite). He is always completely and absolutely certain of his own integrity. I call this the ‘Ho-ho’ factor.
So all the Fisk radar warnings went off this week when Blair told us that ‘we have got to address the completely false sense of grievance against the West’ felt by Muslims. Completely. Muslims’ ‘sense of grievance’ – fury might be a better word – is ‘completely’ false. Is it? We are screwing up Afghanistan, destroying tens of thousands of lives in Iraq, and America now has a military presence in Turkey, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, Algeria, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Yemen and Oman – and Muslim grievance is ‘completely’ false. No, look at Blair’s statement again. He doesn’t suggest there is even a grievance. It is a false ‘sense’ of grievance. Anyone who understands mendacity knows exactly what Blair comprehends all too well: that Muslims do have a ‘sense’ of grievance and that it is not false at all.
It’s odd, though, how folk think they can get away with this stuff. Take my old chum Professor Alan Dershowitz, who announced on the evening of 11 September 2001 that I was a ‘dangerous man’ because I asked the question ‘why’ about the international crimes against humanity in the United States. This week, in an article in The Independent, Dershowitz was at it again. I especially enjoyed his description of a standard US military torture, ‘waterboarding’. He described it as ‘a technique that produces a near-drowning experience’. Ho ho. You bet it does. He says that this is torture. But why the word ‘technique’? Why does it ‘produce’ an ‘experience’? Actually, the experience is one of drowning, not ‘near-drowning’ – that’s the point of this vile practice.
I love these key phrases which are littered throughout Dershowitz’s article, so soft and gentle: ‘the nature of permissible interrogation’, ‘questionable means’, ‘latitude’ (as in ‘should more latitude be afforded to interrogators in the preventive [sic] context’), ‘sometimes excessive efforts’ and so on. All this, mark you, is premised on one totally misleading statement. ‘Weapons of mass destruction in the hands of suicide terrorists with no fear of death