Cassandra Voices

Tag: Cassandra Voices David Langwallner

  • Distortions Of Language

     

    What tangled web we weave when our intention is to deceive?
    Sir Walter Scott

    The distortion of language lies at the heart of the greatest of threats to human civilisation. It now effects all aspects of the public and civic sphere, from court rooms to journalism to the expression of corporate-political elites. It is what allows atrocities to be sanctioned or airbrushed.

    The distortion of language fundamentally undermines the idea of shared and purposeful communication, whether interpersonal or societal. This is what Jurgen Habermas, in a different context, referred to as Communicative Action – a term borrowed from John Austin’s idea of ideal speech language – effectively purging it of ideology and taint. Distortion undermines the use of language in terms of truth-saying or truth-telling propositions.

    Theodor Adorno famously argued that after Auschwitz to write a poem was barbaric, implying that nothing could conjure up or express in human terms such atrocities. Nevertheless, various accounts by Primo Levi as a survivor in books such as If This Is A Man (1947)  and The Truce (1963) did poetically express the horror and show how human resilience endured. Language survived in a humanistic age to express the terms of the horror, but we are now in a more obviously trans-humanist age, and remnants of civilisation are not as obviously influential or vocal.

    The propaganda and euphemisms leading up to the Holocaust involved the use of language as a masking device to conceal different meanings and agendas.

    Although I am wary of structuralism, I do believe it is often necessary to deconstruct meaning. That occurs when an expression is being used to conceal an ulterior purpose, or to make a horror more palatable. The object of euphemisms, buzz words and jargons is often to distract, deflect and misdirect.

    Kenneth Branagh’s film Conspiracy (2011) effectively depicts the use by the Nazi High command at the Wannsee Conference chaired by Heydrich of the term evacuation, which of course really meant extermination.

    The phrase more typical of our age since Srebrenica has been ethnic cleansing, which is an opaque word for genocide, which at least has been used expressly in response to the actions of the Israelis, but even the utilisation of the appropriate word in a world of distorted coverage invokes fake well-financed indignation.

    In war or military matters historically, other euphemisms are collateral damage, friendly fire, or my favourite crew transfer question – meaning coffins for the dead bodies from the space shuttle.

    George Orwell.

    Orwell

    Any discussion of language in the context of war and politics leads inevitably to George Orwell.

    The term Doublespeak has been culled from Orwell’s 1984 (1949), although it was not used in the text where expressions like Doublethink and Newspeak perfectly express the nature of propaganda.

    In our time, political speech and writing are the defence of the indefensible… Thus, political language must consist of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness… the great enemy of clear language is insincerity. Where there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms…

    Orwell elaborated on these themes earlier in his magisterial essay The Politics of the English Language (1946). He piquantly observed of political language that it ‘is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’ The essay chastises vagueness and prioritises clarity and simplicity over euphemisms.

    Thus, when defenceless villages are destroyed it is called pacification, and the plunder of property is called rectification of frontiers. One might think of other euphemisms in use today, such as affordable housing or even debt relief.

    Orwell’s essay is not confined to political language but includes all forms of distortion of language:

    The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

    Though he saw a terminal decline in the England of his time. He did suggest certain remedies well worth citing:

    1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speechwhich you are used to seeing in print. (Examples that Orwell gave included swan song, and hotbed. Such phrases are dying metaphors which a present speaker does not understand the context of, and the original meaning rendered meaningless because those who use them did not know their original meaning. The historical interpretation of the US Constitution by such as Scalia is like this.
    2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
    3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
    4. Never use the passivewhere you can use the active.
    5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargonword if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

    And the last canonical rule:

    1. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

    Linguistic Distortion

    Albert Camus is the great prose master both in terms of precision and sensuality. He can be quoted endlessly, but with respect to doublespeak there is this quotation from The Plague (1949) elaborating on Animal Farm (1950):

    There will come a time in human history when the man who says two plus two equals four will be sentenced to death.

    The criminally underrated Ernest Hemingway wrote a little known, but invaluable text called On Writing (1984), containing his observations about his craft, which curiously mirror that of Orwell.

    He advised writers to cut out the scrollwork of ornament. Stick to what is true and cut out the superfluous. Write about what you know. Like Orwell, he emphasises the active verb and the shortest word possible.

    With respect to the issue of immigration the word removal is now used without elaboration or explanation, notably at the recent Tory conference. The word disposal invokes similar considerations. Again, this involves a form of distortion and side-tracking of reality.

    A real problem occurs when bureaucratic language or legalese conceal infamy. People often buy into it for ease of mind, or owing to a blinkered or cognitively dissociated sense that nothing is happening – or that it suits their interests. This theme is beautifully expressed in the Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest (2023).

    In terms of the precise use of language to explain horror we have the Martin Niemoller parable during the rise of Nazism:

    First, they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

    Contrast the clarity and sincerity of that with this from Donald Rumsfeld:

    Reports that say that something has not happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we do not know we do not know.

    Rumsfeld comments are wrought with care and are lying to serve a purpose or engaging in deception to so do. That is the point St. Augustine condemned in his categorisations of lying as the truly venal lie.

    Other awful phrases now creeping into our world of sound bites and doublespeak include the new normal. This is effectively a plea to accept degradation and Chinese corporate capitalism, as well as to be controlled and shrivelled in an Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Compliance is another dangerous euphemism.

    We have, conversely, also become obsessed with hygiene and health and are preyed on in that respect. Stay safe. Oh, and take our drugs. The slightest cold sets people off into hysteria, leading to limited physical contact and an increasingly asexuality.

    This new form of social hygiene divides the world into the pure and the impure. Corporate and advertising interests are adept at this. Virtually any episode of the Madmen series set in the 1950s demonstrates that. In legal terms there is always a degree of tolerance of puff and blow to use the contract law term until the disparity between claim and exaggeration meets the reality of what is being done. Simply the best. Largest in the industry.

    Advertising and politics are now so co-mingled, and have been for some time in the interests of big business, that there is now little difference between winning an election and selling tinned beans. Make the product be the change.

    Sadly, such approaches have also crept into the criminal justice system. Thus we find slogans such as no excuse for abuse, while in sex abuses cases the phrase there is no smoke without fire is migrating into closing speeches.

    Political correctness is the ultimate destruction of language, providing an excuse for no platforming people and undermining freedom of expression.

    Malcolm McDowell in Clockwork Orange.

    Simplicity has its Drawbacks

    But with all respect to Orwell and Hemingway simplicity has its drawbacks. Camus was never simple.

    Thus, in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange reveals a universe of gobbledygook, much in evidence in social media, reducing language to that of Alex the Droog. The compression of meaning into shorthand symbols or abbreviations is a return to the planet of the apes, creating simplistic misleading forms of communication such as the flawed Me Too movement.

    In my view we should reformulate the legendary text by Flaubert, The Dictionary of Received Ideas (1911-13) and Ambrose Bierce’s The Devils Dictionary (1911), filtered through the legendary dictionary of Dr Johnson in terms of providing more amplified definitions of some of the distortions of language in our age. The expression used to be followed by the real meaning.

    As in the definition of ‘Pension’ in Dr Johnsons’ dictionary: 

    In England it is understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country.

    Or ‘Faith’ from The Devils Dictionary:

    Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.

    Or Flaubert’s definition of sex as ‘Intimacy occurred.’

    I thus suggest a new dictionary of the real meanings of the doublespeak of our time, and indeed a reversion to old patterns of behaviour. This requires us to read books leading to an enhanced form of comprehension relying on clarity and simplicity.

    In this respect, self-reportage or sincerity can also be bullshit and ought to be treated with scepticism. Sincerely adopting your own euphemism can lead you to condone atrocities. It is precision and adherence to the facts that is crucial, certainly in political and civic discourse, which is not always easy.

    As Samuel Beckett, the master of succinctness once put it:

    Ever Tried. Ever Failed. Never Mind, Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better.

     

    Feature Image: Tamás Mészáros

  • A Visit to the Hague

    Late last year HHJ Gumpert KC – one of the judges in the formidable fortress that is Woolwich Crown Court the flagship anti-terrorism court in the U.K. – kindly secured for me a visit to the ICC out of court time. The tour was given by a former member of the team he led in the Congolese prosecutions.

    The ICC issued its first judgment in 2012 when it found Congolese rebel leader Thomas Lubanga Dyilo guilty of war crimes related to his abuse of child soldiers. Lubanga was sentenced to fourteen years’ imprisonment. Gumpert also successfully prosecuted Dominic Ongwen, who was sentenced to twenty-five years for myriad crimes.

    The Rome Statute, which entered into force on 1 July 2002, established the International Criminal Court, though Israel voted against it, after murmurings on the transfer of populations that is the resettlement programme. The court works on the principle of ineffectiveness, where national courts have been derelict. It lacks universal territorial jurisdiction, and may only investigate and prosecute crimes committed within member states, crimes committed by nationals of member states, or crimes in situations referred to the Court by the United Nations Security Council.

    On 17 March 2023, ICC judges issued arrest warrants for Russian leader Vladimir Putin and the Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights in Russia for alleged child abductions in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Putin was charged for actions against Ukraine, which although not a party to it, has accepted the authority of the court since 2014. Should Putin travel to a state party to it, local authorities can arrest him. Later in 2023, Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs retaliated by placing several ICC officials on its wanted list. On November 21 last year, when I was in Gompert’s court in Woolwich, warrants were formally issued for the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu.

    It occurs to me that an informal journalistic war crimes court was initiated by Christopher Hitchen, whose book The Trial Against Henry Kissinger (2001) accused Henry Kissinger of war crimes. This led to a Parisian judge issuing an arrest warrant and Kissinger hopscotching it back to the safety of Fox News. So, Netanyahu will no doubt control his foreign trips, and Ireland is clearly out of the question. Mr Putin does not seem to need to travel to enemy states.

    The process to establish the ICC district may be “triggered” by any one of three sources: (1) a state party, (2) the Security Council, or (3) a prosecutor.

    So, there is huge independence in that there is a self-originating prosecutor jurisdiction. though he needs the approval of Pre-Trial Chamber to initiate the investigation. The factors listed in Article 53 are a reasonable basis for a prosecution. These include whether the case would be admissible, or whether there are substantial reasons to believe that an investigation would not serve the interests of justice (the latter stipulates balancing against the gravity of the crime and the interests of the victims).

    Brumandinho Dam Disaster, Brazil, 2019.

    2016 Policy Paper

    During my visit there was much talk about the Policy paper on case selection and prioritisation published in September 2016, indicating that the ICC would focus on environmental crimes when selecting cases. According to this document, the Office will consider prosecuting Rome Statute crimes that result in, inter alia, the destruction of the environment, the illegal exploitation of natural resources or the illegal dispossession of land.

    Richard A. Falk coined the phrase Ecocide as a Crime Against Humanity in 1974. In my view we should also include Economicide, when one deals with the illegal dispossession of land. What about bringing banksters or hedge fund managers (including through NAMA) to justice? And what about no longer drawing a distinction between the Kinahan gang and Goldman Sachs? Or is it time bring a case against Bill Gates or Elon Musk?

    It should be born in mind that, alas, having someone prosecuted by the ICC is a tricky exercise. The Israelis clearly breached international law when they bundled Adolf Eichmann onto a plane in Argentina in 1960. How do you get Netanyahu to court? Or Putin? Or what if one indicted Trump or Bannon? A real danger is that the present U.S. administration will directly or indirectly withdraw funding for the court, even though the U.S. is not a signatory. They might even undermine American officials for working against the interests of Israel, or any of its allies in this dangerous world.

    The core concept of Crimes Against Humanity had its first incarnation during the Nuremberg Tribunal, but its inception may derive from the discourse in Sophocles ‘Antigone’ as to whether an immoral law is a law. In that play – the Rosetta stone of modern natural law – the heroine Antigone observes to the harsh, positivist Creon, King of Thebes, who will not allow her brother, who has fought against him, to be buried with the proper rites, that natural law has been breached.

    Yes; for it was not Zeus that had published me that edict; not such are the laws set among men by the justice who neither dwells with the gods below; nor deemed I that thy decrees were of such force, that a mortal could override the unwritten and unfailing statutes of heaven. For their life is not of to-day or yesterday, but from all time, and no man knows when they were first put forth…

    From the great Roman statesman Cicero’s perspective, an unjust law is not a law: ‘Those who formulated wicked and unjust statutes for nations, thereby breaking their promises and agreements, put into effect anything but laws.’

    Most famous of all, early Christian lawyers, St Augustine of Hippo said: ‘lex iniusta non-Est lex’ – an unjust law is not a law.

    Radbruchs’s Formula

    A crucial juristic figure was the German Gustav Radbruch (1878-1949), both a law professor and a government minister during the Weimar Republic. In Radbruchs’s Formula he argued that where statute law was incompatible with positivist law to an intolerable degree, and where it negated the principle of equality, which is central to justice, it could be disregarded.

    [P]reference is given to the positive law, duly enacted and secured by state power, even where it is unjust and fails to benefit the people unless it conflicts with justice to so intolerable a level that a statute becomes in effect false law and must therefore yield to justice…where there is not even an attempt at justice. Where equality, the core of justice, is deliberately betrayed in positive law then the statute is not merely false law it lacks completely the very nature of law.

    For him justice (Gerechtigkeit) was linked to human rights. Thus, in Funf Minuten Rechtsphilosophie he contended that there was a law which was above statute: ‘However one may like to describe it: the law of God, the law of nature, the law of reason.’

    It is important to note that his views were followed in various German cases after the War and was part of the discourse that led to the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal.

    Historically much later, in the 1992 cases of Strelitz, Kessler and Krenz, former East German Border Guards were convicted of offences despite section 27/2 of the East German Border Act that indicated that the protection of the border outweighed the right to life. The German Supreme Court in endorsing Radbruch indicated that:

    [A] justification available at the time of the act can be disregarded due to its violation of superior law if it shows an evident and gross violation of basic principles of justice and humanity… The contradiction of the positive law to justice must be of such unbearable proportions that the law must yield to justice as incorrect law.

    A group of Bosniaks from the Lašva Valley close by Travnik, Bosnia and Herzegovina that were forced out of their homes and villages by Croat forces in 1993. Photo: Mikhail Evstafiev.

    Ethnic Cleansing

    The Nuremberg Court and The European Convention on Human Rights were set up with the idea that the cataclysms of the past must never happen again. Sadly more have come to pass. In Bosnia we witnessed the arrival of a modern variant: ethnic cleansing. In 1992, the United Nations General Assembly deemed ethnic cleansing to be a form of genocide stating that it was:

    Gravely concerned about the deterioration of the situation in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina owing to intensified aggressive acts by the Serbian and Montenegrin forces to acquire more territories by force, characterised by a consistent pattern of gross and systematic violations of human rights…. controlled areas of concentration camps and detention centres, in pursuit of the abhorrent policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’, which is a form of genocide.

    In 2001, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) judged that the 1995 Srebrenica massacre was genocide though the Court had no authority to determine whether it amounted to war crimes and Crimes against Humanity. A kind of fore runner of the ICC though ad hoc.

    The court concluded by seeking to eliminate a part of the Bosnian Muslims, the Bosnian Serb forces had committed genocide. They targeted for extinction the 40,000 Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica, a group which was emblematic of the Bosnian Muslims in general.  They stripped all the male Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly and young, of their personal belongings and identification, and deliberately and methodically killed them, solely on the basis of their identity.

    Slobodan Milosevic, the former President of Serbia and of Yugoslavia, was the most senior political figure to stand trial at the ICTY. He was charged with having committed genocide. The formal accusation accused him of planning, preparing and executing the destruction of the Bosnian Muslim national, ethnical, racial or religious groups, as such, in named territories within Bosnia and Herzegovina.

    He died during his trial, on 11 March 2006, and no verdict was returned. Ten years later, Radovan Karadzic was found guilty of genocide in Srebrenica, war crimes and Crimes against Humanity, ten of the eleven charges in total, and sentenced to forty years’ imprisonment.

    Morality of the Law

    The natural lawyer Lon Fuller, in supporting Radbruch, argues that the German courts were correct in striking down the Nazi laws and that a legal system must have certain characteristics if it is to command the fidelity of a right-thinking person. Fuller, in The Morality of Law, (1964) argues that Nazi law did not have coherence and goodness and instances the use of retroactive legislation, such as the Rohm purge of 1934. Further, for Fuller, the Nazi laws were deeply immoral for a variety of procedural reasons. They were not published, they were vague, and they could not be interpreted in a congruent fashion.

    We are now entering such a dangerous universe. In camera, unpublished surveillance laws are violating privacy, and retroactive and overly broad legislation erode free expression. The anti-immigration hysteria and the rise of the far right may lead to de facto ethnic cleansing. The control of the world by transnational corporations has occurred through violations of privacy, data mining and economic crime.

    The real concern in northern Europe and in Brussels also is around how AI will not be controlled by a corporate economy. Why is that? Considerations of profit will ensure, as the former head of AI in Google recently argued, that within thirty years there is a ten to twenty percent chance of human liquidation. It trespasses in an unbridled way on boundaries.

    The question of compensation and reparation also arose in our discussion at the ICC, and I mentioned that the Innocence Project in all its conferences has a separate stream for the exonerated. So does the ICC. Thus, surely it is time the Irish government finally to deliver on its Magdalene Laundry promises, and compensate those disposed by banksters? Fat chance.

    The concept of obligations ergo omnes needs to be extended to new challenges. The ICC needs to be supported to extend its jurisdiction. They seem beleaguered but to quote Halldor Laxness they are at least Independent People. Independent People are important. Thus bankers were jailed in his native land Iceland when Independent People prevailed.

    Feature Image: The premises of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands. The ICC moved into this building in December 2015.

  • The Austrian Mind

    There still exists – even today – a yearning, a nostalgia for European solidarity, a solidarity of European culture. Regrettably, solidarity itself no longer exists, except in hearts, in consciences, in the minds of a few great men at the heart of each nation. European consciousness – or what one might call a ‘cultural European awareness’ – had been on the wane for years ever since the awakening of national identity. You could say that patriotism has killed Europe.
    Joseph Roth, On the End of the World (first published in 1933).

    Late last month 28.9% of Austrians voted for the Freedom Party (FPÖ) led by Herbert Kickl, an avowedly anti-migrant, anti-Islamic party, founded in the 1950s by former Nazis. The governing conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) gained 27.5% lost 20 seats, while its coalition partner, the Greens received 8.2%, losing 10 seats. In third place, the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) received 21.1%, marking its worst result ever. In fourth place, the liberal NEOS increased its share to 9.1%.

    We can only hope that the conservatives do not enter into a coalition with Kickl’s party as Hindenburg did with Hitler’s Nazi party. Perhaps a Dutch solution will at least dilute the forces of darkness. Kickl was formerly the speech writer of the now-deceased long-time leader of the Freedom Party, Jörg Haider, but Kickl is far less ambiguous in his pronouncements than his former boss.

    What’s clear is that the far right is on the rise across Europe, Ireland and the world. My own childhood in Ireland, as a half-Austrian, not unlike Hugo Hamilton’s experience as recounted in his autobiography The Speckled People, involved casual racism and bullying on account of my background.

    At one level Austria is among the most cultured of nations.  So, I defend it. Ma Vlast as Smetana said about Czech Bohemia, albeit a defensive posture often leads to a failure in understanding. Why Kickl? What is the Austrian Mind that has created this?

    Mozart family, c. 1780 (della Croce); the portrait on the wall is of Mozart’s mother.

    Mozart of Salzburg

    My family, who I am close to, hail from Salzburg, home of the Fespiele. Mozart was, of course, born in Salzburg where a little museum glorifies his brief tenure on Earth. Mozart’s music combines lyricism, frivolity and profundity in equal parts. What it points to in the human condition is not just chocolate-box fripperies, or the texture of lightness that is Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, but the darkness therein. Darkness threads through the Austrian mind, juxtaposed with light.

    Thus, Don Giovanni is about the destructive powers of rakish satanism, also evident in Stefan Zweig’s arguably best book beautifully filmed by Max Ophuls’ Letters from an Unknown Women.

    In Mozart also the incomparable Magic Flute splendidly rendered into film by Ingmar Bergman, is in effect about the dubious justification of freemasonry to which Mozart belonged; and also, a cri de coeur, in praise of enlightened and benevolent monarchism against the vectors of state and, in particular, church authoritarianism. This assertion of a wise moderation against extremism resonates today.

    The great enfant terrible of Austrian letters and its greatest post-war writer Thomas Bernhard was gloriously insulting about Austria. His masterpiece Woodcutters (1984) is about a man in a chair at a party sipping Champagne. Letting fly at Austrian bourgeois hypocrisy, he says:

    Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretence, never genuine, never real.

    In his will, Bernhard ordered that none of his works should be performed in Austria. This has been deliberately avoided. All cultures have their tropes.

    The Merry Widow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tv1GNZCyL64

    Austrian Kitsch

    Culturally, Austrians, along with the Irish and British, have far too close a relationship with kitsch. The Merry Widow light operetta, like a jaded ritual, is still performed in the Lehrer Theatre in Bad Ischl and elsewhere. The Blue Danube is not unlike a classic Britpop song.

    The great Herman Broch was fascinated by kitsch, linking it correctly to a decline in values:

    The maker of kitsch does not create inferior art, he is not an incompetent or a bungler, he cannot be evaluated by aesthetic standards; rather, he is ethically depraved, a criminal willing radical evil. And since it is radical evil that is manifest here, evil per se, forming the absolute negative pole of every value-system, kitsch will always be evil, not just kitsch in art, but kitsch in every value-system that is not an imitation system.”

    In some respects, the triumph of kitsch paves the way for Nazism, as Broch and indeed Robert Musil have both argued. Radical evil and bad art is evident in our age too. This is a kind of camp fascism which Susan Sontag also identified.

    Beethoven was of course German, but lived and died in Vienna. His darkness is a counterpart to Mozart’s light. His deafness influences the isolated pessimism of the later atonal dark sonatas, and are close to the finality of expression in musical terms that Beckett created in language.

    His final string quartet is integral to Dr Faustus by Thomas Mann, where the satanic composer, modelled on Heidegger, sells his soul to the devil.

    I have found that it must not be. The good and the noble, what they call the human, even though it is good and noble, what men have fought for, have stormed citadels for, and in their moment of fulfilment, have jubilant proclaimed it is not to be. It is not to be, it will be taken back. I will take it back.

    Mann, the great German conservative, had the moral integrity to decamp to the U.S. and to Switzerland, but a crucial point to appreciate is that conservatism is not all bad if it conserves the good and the ethical too. So, the Christian Democrats in Austria have a stark choice, whether to embrace satanism or not.

    Sleepwalkers

    The rise of Nazism is also anticipated brilliantly in Broch’s The Sleepwalkers, one of the great novels of Austrian heritage. In the character of Hugenau, a man solely motivated by profit – homo economicus to use the term favoured by the nefarious law and economics movement in Chicago – we have a real sense in 1918 of a brutalised generation containing the seeds of fascism. The book culminates in the murder of a journalist and the rape of his wife.

    This is akin to neoliberal Europe today where meaningful journalism has been effectively killed and defiled, as state-sponsored criminals launch hatred at ‘the other.’ Off with their heads, or to Rwanda, or now Albania.

    The legendary Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke in The White Ribbon, based in pre-war Germany at the turn of the twentieth, demonstrated how damage had been done to a whole generation by a cruel form of authoritarianism. Today, social media has augmented the problem of semi-literacy. Strange fruit, as Billie Holiday would say, is ready for demonisation. In Ireland the neoliberal governing parties have generated the social conditions for riots and a new decadence.

    As for Italy, the land of Fellini and Da Vinci, where the far-right mayor of Monfalcone near Joycean Trieste has banned cricket as she does not like Bangladeshi people in her town; they only play cricket she says and contribute nothing. The fact that such football clubs as AC Milan was originally a cricket club seems lost on her. Mayor Anna Maria Casing, elected on an anti-immigration platform is now an MEP. Her far-right colleague, prime minister Meloni prosecuted Roberto Saviano the legendary journalist for calling her a bastard over her immigration policies.

    So, Austria is not alone in its infamy.

    The darkly pessimistic Herman Broch shows how the far right and populism go hand-in-hand with hatred:

    It is always he, unfortunate wretch, who assumes the role of executioner in the process of value-disintegration, and on the day when the trumpets of judgment sound it is the man released from all values who becomes the executioner of a world that has pronounced its own sentence.

    The Rathaus (City Hall), the seat of the local government.

    Golden Age

    The golden age of Vienna ended peremptorily with the dismembering of the Austrian empire, after the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo sparked the inferno of World War I, when leaders sleepwalked into war. This is the state of somnambulism that Broch also identified evident in Musil.

    The word Kaakinen is Broch’s playful word for Vienna which, in effectively means shit. Thus, he writes in The Man Without Qualities:

    Stupidity is active in every direction and can dress up in all the clothes of truth. Truth, on the other hand, has for every occasion only one dress and one path, and is always at a disadvantage.

    In Zweig’s retroactive memoir The World of Yesterday there are references to Freud and Herzl (one of the founders of Zionism), among the titanic intellectual figures of pre-war Vienna. These are curiously name-dropped like the celebs of our time, but in a curious state of derealisation of how history is closing in. Freud, who was Austrian, died as an emigre from fascism in the U.K..

    Whether the concept of hysteria is sexual or not, no doubt this is a hysterical age where all sorts of fantasises are being sublimated into nefarious activities and agendas – and indeed where persecution delusions are omnipresent. This leads to the scapegoating of immigrants.

    Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1930.

    The Sound of Silence

    Ludwig Wittgenstein is central to our age of distortion and manipulative language. The fundamental achievement of his Tractatus is a recognition of the limitations of language. It can only show and represent, he argues, and, within limitations, clarify. Thus, language is context-specific, self-limiting and denuded of ethical and moral context.

    Reading Wittgenstein, like reading Hemingway, Camus, and Beckett, clarifies how language should be used clearly, and is most useful for everyday life, but not ethics. The final line of the Tractatus has acquired a mythical status: ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.’

    Silence is important, but when we can speak let us speak out ethically. A recent Austrian Nobel laureate is Peter Handke is a great writer, though not in Thomas Bernhard’s league. Handke’s flirtation with the Serbian cause, however well-intentioned and misconstrued, leave a degree of doubt, given the Austrian mindset, but there is a rich warm humanism in his work.

    Handke argues you must create silence or, rather, the effect of silence, through words. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams his recent recollections of his mother’s suicide is jaw-dropping, and among the best books published in the last ten years. So let us create the silence of words, before it is too late.

    Feature Image ‘Avenue in the park of Schloss Kammer’ produced by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt in 1912 whilst he was living near the village of Unterach on the southern shore of lake Attersee in Austria.

  • Regulating Online Safety: Ireland v. U.K.

    U.K. lawmakers, unlike their Irish counterparts, are currently agonising over the Online Safety Bill 2023. It is far less draconian than the recent Irish Bill, which I recently assessed. 

    This is currently being reviewed in the House or Lords – a body not to be automatically dismissed. This archaic assembly is still capable of acting as a real corrective to the excesses of Parliament. They can delay and amend, but also, crucially, awaken moral authority to invite reconsideration, as with Tony Blair’s draconian anti-terror legislation.

    Thus, the U.K. is not passing a misguided and extremist Hate Speech Act, as in Ireland, but will continue to rely on its existing empiric and specific Protection Against Hatred legislation.

    The core differences between the Irish legislation and that being considered for the U.K. are as follows:

    First, the U.K.’s Online Safety Bill is primarily concerned with protecting underage minors from harmful content online. Assuming material is not subject to an existing criminal sanction, adults are allowed to be self-regulating, when viewing, for example, pornography or extremist political content. This is a sensible response that recognises that censorship can often be counter-productive, and treats adults as adults.

    Secondly, the U.K. is not establishing a potentially political controlled commission in Ireland which will fine, pressurise, and finally enforce compliance.

    Finally, the U.K. legislation is primarily concerned with taming the Wild West of the internet and social media, not established media. The Irish legislations targets all media.

    At one level this shows that the British state is confident in the conformity of established vectors of public opinion. But there is a world of difference between the rambunctious content found in, for example, the right-wing Telegraph or the left-wing New Statesman, and servile and increasingly anodyne content found in legacy Irish media. However, the Overton window is narrowing over on Fleet Street too.

    The era of Covid-19 has witnessed unprecedented conformity, censorship of scientists and censorship-by-omission. This dangerous trend recalls Clarence Darrow’s speech in the Scopes Monkey Trial in which a high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee’s Butler Act, which had made it illegal for teachers to teach human evolution in any state-funded school is apposite:

    Today it is the public-school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lectures, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, your honour, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century weights burdened the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.

    The British have a long tradition of being protective of intellect and permissible disagreement, which is, arguably, innate to Protestantism. They have never been subject to Savonarola figures, as in culturally Catholic countries like Ireland. Today civil society in the U.K. has not uniformly approved of a glossary of politically correct terms – as we seem to have in Ireland, where the Bishop’s crozier has been replaced by the corporate induction.

    The recent criminalisation of the mere possession of offensive materials in Ireland is akin to the banning of books from libraries in the U.S. Bible Belt.

    Yet remarkably, when the Irish government consulted the public over 70% of those who responded suggested they should not enact it. The rubber-stamping exercise had backfired. In response, Leo Varadkar airily claimed ‘the vast majority of people, don’t make submissions to public consultations’, meaning they’re ‘not necessarily reflective of public opinion.’ So why bother with the exercise?

    Yet it is clear the Irish establishment does not appreciate expert independent opinion when this diverges from an intended outcome – an opinion recently expressed by Supreme Court Justice Charleton. Intelligent opinion cannot be allowed to upset vested absurdity. There really is nothing worse than a so-called moral principle cloaking a vested interest.

    The ultra-censorious Archbishop of Dublin John Charles McQuaid offers an interesting case study in this context. He was like Richelieu or Talleyrand – more important than the monarch du jour. In Ireland today religiously ordained censorship has been replaced by proto-corporate social control. Fintan O’Toole’s is probably the leading ideologue in Ireland today.

    Sinn Féin’s unwillingness to oppose the Bill demonstrates a distinct lack of judgment, naivete and even a certain quality of turkeys voting for Christmas, as we the inexorable crisis in what Jürgen Habermas calls participatory democracy continues.

    I suspect that prior to the forthcoming 2025 election the new law will be used to nullify dissent, perhaps extending to opposition to support for the War in Ukraine. Sinn Féin may wish to become the arbiters of acceptable speech, but they must get into power first. That ought to have led to a cautionary opposition.

    It is of course necessary for the State to regulate the Promethean capacity of the internet and, in particular, protect children from harmful content. The question is how to police and monitor it. One solution that China offers is complete censorship. It is fair to say that Ireland is veering in that direction.

    The question is thus one of nuance and balance. The U.K.’s Online Safety Bill seeks to protect children in a variety of ways from accessing illegal content, by providing for risk assessments and modes of entry, including age identification.

    But the Irish act applies this restrictive approach to adults and established media and then sets up a commission of politically appointed individuals to determine whether the content provider is to be fined or prosecuted.

    The Irish polity has never trusted independent adults to form their own opinions, and the current legislation reflects that paternalistic attitude. A chill wind blows in the U.K. but a hurricane is raging in Ireland, with the steady denudation of what Habermas has called the civic space.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini