VOLUME 7.1JANUARY 2011—queensobserver.com

QUEEN’SINTERNATIONALOBSERVER—Issue on Politics and Literature

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THIS EDITION

Propaganda Will Eat Itself: The Contradictions and Paradoxes of George Orwell and Edward L. BernaysJORDAN RENDALL SMITH

The Polarity ofLanguage: PoliticalDiscourse and ArtisticDialectMICHELLE HUNNIFORD

Is there a Western Media Bias Against China?MICHAEL ZHANG

AFFILIATED WITH THE

No Man’s LandLIZZ McFADDEN

The Ironic CurtainSEAN McBRIEN

Politics, Steinbeck,and the Power ofSympathyDEVON MOK

Somewhere Insideand The World isBigger Now:Two Literary Depictionsof One Infamous Politi-cal and HumanitarianDebacleERIN MORAWETZ

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CONTENTS

PROPAGANDA WILL EAT ITSELFThe Contradictions and Paradoxes of George Orwell and Edward L. BernaysJORDAN RENDALL SMITH

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SOMEWHERE INSIDE AND THE WORLD IS BIGGER NOWTwo Literary Depictions of One Infamous Political and Humanitarian DebacleERIN MORAWETZ

15

THE POLARITY OF LANGUAGEPolitical Discourse and Artistic DialectMICHELLE HUNNIFORD

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IS THERE A WESTERN MEDIA BIAS AGAINST CHINA?MICHAEL ZHANG

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FICTION: NO MAN’S LANDLIZZ McFADDEN

11

THE IRONIC CURTAINSEAN McBRIEN

12

POLITICS, STEINBECK, AND THE POWER OF SYMPATHYDEVON MOK

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Propaganda Will Eat Itself: The Contradictions and Paradoxes of George Orwell and Edward L. BernaysJORDAN

RENDALL SMITH

Footnotes are located at the end of the article, on page xx. Sources can be found on the QIO website: queensobserver.com/sources

In his War Diary of 14 March 1942, George Orwell called his work as a BBC propagandist “useless, or slightly worse than useless. . . . I am regularly alleging in my newsletters that the Japanese are plotting to attack Russia. I don’t believe this to be so. . . . All propa-ganda is lies,” he concludes, “even when one is telling the truth. I don’t think this matters so long as one knows what one is doing and why” (Complete Works 13.229).1 This paradoxical generalization and its qualification epitomize Orwell’s complex attitude towards propaganda, whether as a pernicious weapon on war’s psychological front or as a strategy of conscientious resistance to that weapon’s sublimating effect. The central question that Orwell’s paradox raises is what it means to be both a propagandist and anti-propagandist. If the violence of physical attack and coun-terattack functionally reduce to the same thing, are fascist propaganda and anti-fascist propaganda, as media exten-sions of warfare, not functionally identical as well? Fine distinctions are crucial when discussing Orwell’s unique brand of remedial propaganda and the antisocial variety whose negative connotations have become indelibly associated with the word. Even within propaganda studies, “propa-ganda” is a contested term, as “one person’s propaganda is another person’s information, and the distinction between the two is often difficult to draw,” says Mark Wollaeger in Modernism, Media, and Propaganda (2006); Wollaeger goes on to say that “Orwell devoted more attention to propaganda than any British writer of his generation” (2, 4).2 As for American writers of quite a different stripe, the title goes to Edward L. Bernays (1891-1995), whose wartime government propaganda, private-sector marketing work, and exten-sive writings on the theory of propaganda made him the (self-proclaimed) father of modern “public relations counsel” (PR) and thus a prime exemplar of the decep-tive variety of state propaganda. While both men—likely unaware of one another

—made careful use of rhetoric to influence public opinion and behaviour, Bernays’s innovation was the calculated application of new theories in group psychology to “engineer consent” (as the title of his 1955 PR manual reveals) without his target public’s conscious knowledge of being manipulated. Orwell’s propaganda, on the other hand, takes the humanist intentions of Bernays’s social-psychologist influences (Le Bon, Trotter, Lippmann, and Martin) and applies them in radio and writing to raise consciousness about how state propaganda manipulates public opinion and behaviour in the interests of power, and how propaganda techniques can alternately be used as a means of resistance in speaking truth to power. Despite Orwell’s reduction of all propa-ganda to functional equivalence in the passage quoted above, he assumes a hierarchy of values distinguishing the truth-telling propaganda he wanted to produce and the mendacious kind he was forced to air. I shall thus consider his practice of propaganda—starting with his work as a Talks Producer for the BBC (1941-1943), then in his post-war essay “Politics and the English Language” (1946), and finally in his fusion of the political and the aesthetic in his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)—as successive acts of an educative, anti-propagandistic propa-ganda. Orwell fashioned a propaganda style that helps empower people to resist Bernays’s American brand of state and corporate propaganda, which inevitably found favour among some of the twentieth century’s most infamous war criminals. In his autobiographical Biography of an Idea (1965), Bernays recalls being “shocked” to hear in 1933 that Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Göbbels was “using [his] book Crystallizing Public Opinion [1923] as a basis for his destruc-tive campaign against the Jews of Germany” (652), to say nothing of the campaign against German democracy. One wonders whether Bernays’s surprise was not a little disingenuous, since he

developed PR to serve both commercial and political clients equally well, especially during wartime, assuming the functional equivalence of the two sectors.3 The very essence of Bernays’s PR work—and the reason why it was distinct from traditional advertising—was infiltration. His propa-ganda moved stealthily across media borders, especially in the deployment of product-placement advertising posing as journalism, as in his now-legendary publicity stunt that rebranded Lucky cigarettes as “Torches of Freedom” in association with the women’s liberation movement of the 1920s.4 His Crystallizing Public Opinion details how PR must “create news . . . [i]n order to appeal to the instincts and fundamental emotions of the public” (171), and thus engineer public consent for commercial or political advan-tage. With Propaganda (1928), Bernays “wrote the book” on the topic, doing PR for both the fledgling PR indus-try and for himself as its self-proclaimed father. In his typical zeal, he gives away many of the underlying assumptions that should remain hidden in order for

If the violence of physi-cal attack and counter-attack functionally reduce to the same thing, are fascist propa-ganda and anti-fascist propaganda, as media extensions of warfare, not functionally identi-cal as well?

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AboveEdward L. Bernays (centre) with Presi-dent Dwight D. Eisenhower (third from left) and the National Committee for an Adequate Overseas Information Program, 1956

BelowEdward L. Bernays (centre) with Presi-dent Dwight D. Eisenhower (third from left) and the National Committee for an Adequate Overseas Information Program, 1956

propaganda to work effectively. One such confession betrays a central contradiction:

The conscious and intelligent manipu-lation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mecha-nism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of, . . . [a] relatively small number of persons. (9; emphases added)

He goes on to sketch a ruling élite of about five thousand men: “the boards of direc-tors of our hundred or more largest indus-trial corporations, . . . the hundred leading newspaper and magazine editors, . . . the twenty leading theatrical or cinema producers, . . . [and] the most powerful financiers on Wall Street” (33). Obviously, if the public cannot elect this “true ruling power” and does not even realize the extent of its influence over elected officials, then it is perversely cynical to call “demo-cratic” what is essentially a de facto plutoc-racy. Bernays’s metaphors are revealing: the objective of propaganda is to “[regiment] the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers” (25). Yet the military chain of command is the least democratic of all forms of social organization; dictatorships militarize publics in order to eliminate dissent and secure absolute power.5 Peacetime presents a special challenge to state propagandists, forcing them toward ever more subtle psychological techniques to influence public opinion and behaviour. The crucial chapter in Propa-ganda regarding the subversion of

democratic ideals is IV, “The Psychology of Public Relations,” where Bernays acknowledges as his influences the pioneers of social psychology Gustav Le Bon, Wilfred Trotter, Walter Lippmann, and Everett Dean Martin. These thinkers influenced and/or were influenced by Sigmund Freud, who was Bernays’s uncle-in-law. With Freud as the reputed father of modern psychology and his nephew as the father of PR, psychology and propaganda are cousins in a double sense. The meaning of Bernays’s “intelli-gent manipulation” is that, with an “understand[ing of] the mechanism and motives of the group mind,” PR people can “control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it” (47; emphasis added)—that is, by process of sublimation. In Information War (2003), Nancy Snow identifies the philosopher Jacques Ellul’s “greatest contribution to the literature of propaganda6 [as] his proposition that propaganda is most effective when it is least noticeable. . . . In an open society, such as the United States, the hidden and integrated nature of the propaganda best convinces people that they are not being manipulated” (22). In America, the PR industry sidesteps the negative connota-tions of “propaganda” (Bernays rarely used the term after WWII) with the euphe-misms “public relations,” “mainstream media,” “news,” and related phenomena that shape public opinion, often under the guise of public service rather than as a private enterprise. Ironically, Bernays’s idea that propaganda must work stealthily on the consumer public grossly distorts the stated intentions of the social psychologists upon whom he draws. Le Bon, Trotter, Lippmann, and Martin all analyzed group psychology in order to provide misled publics with the outlook necessary to

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avoid the dangerous subordination of their own interests and even instincts to those of the group. In times of war especially, the instinct of self-preservation is sacrificed to blind patriotism, resulting in a collective rush to battle and thus widespread death, disfigurement, social displacement, and cultural devastation. Gustav Le Bon (1841-1931), “noting the extreme mental inferiority of crowds” in his 1896 study The Crowd, describes how they “are always unconscious” (7, 10) and susceptible to the very doublethink described in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “the most contradictory ideas may be seen to be simultaneously current in crowds. . . . [Their] complete lack of the critical spirit does not allow [for their] perceiving these contradictions” (62). Orwell shares the same attitude in his War Diary entry of 22 March 1942, noting how German propaganda impossibly promises everything to everyone, which is “All quite sound from propaganda point of view, . . . seeing how politically ignorant the major-ity of the people are . . . and how little impressed by inconsistency” (APL 240). The aim of both Le Bon and Orwell was to make people conscious of how the ruses of group psychology (as distinct from individual psychology) undermine their personal interests. Both Wilfred Trotter (1872-1939) and Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) recognized the urgent necessity of this task, having seen the vast desolation wrought by group behaviour in World War I, the social effects of which were managed in America by the very Committee on Public Information for which Bernays worked (see footnote 3 above). In Public Opinion (1922), Lippmann’s humanism is explicit in his call for “intelligence work”: only “re-education” that separates the irrational from the political “is the way the enormous censoring, stereotyping, and dramatizing apparatus can be liquidated”; such education is necessary “to make the pupil acutely aware of how his mind works on unfamiliar facts,” such as anything read in the press, and “deeply aware of [its] own subjectivism” (407-09). Above this, Lippmann demonstrates the humanist style of clarity and eloquence as a means of inspiring his reader to studied self-consciousness—virtues that Orwell would later insist upon in “Politics and the English Language.” The incendiary last chapter of Everett Dean Martin’s (1880-1941) The Behavior of Crowds (1920) attacks the quality of thinking “in a high-school educated nation [that] reads nothing but trash and is fed up on advertising, newspa-pers, popular fiction, and propaganda,” which altogether “results not in freedom, but in what Bergson would call the triumph of mechanism over freedom”(287, 290). He decries reflex psychology,

which Bernays takes as a principal assumption of his work in Propaganda when he avers “that the human mind [is] merely a machine . . . reacting with mechanical regularity to stimuli, like a helpless, will-less automaton” (53). Martin recommends secular humanism as a mental vaccine against the lethal subver-sion of the intellect by irrational “crowd-thinking.” Orwell’s practical application of such humanist ideals is apparent in the progression of his role as first a Talks Assis-tant in the Empire Department of the BBC, then as a Talks Producer for its India Section from August 1941 to November 1943. Though he began writing such vapid British wartime propaganda pieces as “British Rations and Submarine War” in early 1942 (APL 134-36), he also found enough latitude to educate his radio audiences to see through wartime propa-ganda. In his “Paper is Precious” report (117-20), which Complete Works editor Peter Davison sees as a regular propa-ganda piece (xxv), Orwell smuggles some anti-propagandistic sentiment, glorying in the elimination of ad posters and the most intellectually insulting content of newspa-pers due to wartime rationing: “advertise-ments for useless luxuries,” “imbecilities of every kind,” and “cheap sensation calcu-lated to push the real news out of the reader’s attention” (119) were thankfully

all pushed out of English wartime society by the exigencies of rationing (alongwith good books, unfortunately). Orwell thus uses the opportunity opened by announc-ing rations—as the propaganda telescreens do ad nauseam in Nineteen Eighty-Four7—to air his anti-commercial bias. His unabashed use of the word “propaganda” to describe his work represents a departure from the author who claimed in Homage to Catalonia (1938) that he was “not writing a book of propaganda” (10). Three years later, however, he admitted in a BBC radio lecture, “The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda,” “that propaganda in some form or other lurks in every book, that every work of art has . . . a political, social and religious purpose” (Complete Works 12.486), and that recognizing such biases is vital if one hopes to maintain intellectual honesty. Weary from years of frustration with fascist propaganda, Orwell realized the paradox that educative propa-ganda had to infiltrate mendacious propa-ganda, that “One has to do one’s propa-ganda in the dark, discreetly sabotaging the policy directives when they seem more than usually silly” (War Diary of 25 April 1942; APL 286). But how does such subtlety differ from Bernays’s?

CONTINUED PAGE 17

BelowPropagandists George Orwell and Edward L. Bernays

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MICHAEL

ZHANG

On November 2, 2010, David Rothkopf, writing for Foreign Policy magazine, labelled the 2010 U.S. midterm elections the “the China election”. In his article, Rothkopf contends that China has become the predominant foreign policy concern in the United States, holding major sway with the American public. He notes that candidates in both major parties were using China as a fear-mongering tool or as a means to frame attack ads against their opponents. As China’s importance in the world grows, this trend will likely continue, particularly if matched by a stagnant U.S. economy. U.S. politicians are not the only ones portraying China’s rise with a jeering sense of negativity. Since early 2008 Western media outlets have presented a surge of negative stories on Chin. Op-ed pieces in major newspapers are consis-tently filled with anti-China posturing, criticizing the rising power on everything from the Olympics and Tibet to contami-nated toys. In response, domestic Chinese bloggers and overseas Chinese students united in the denunciation of “Western media bias”. The Chinese state-run media followed suit, accusing Western media of deliberately attempting to undermine China. As a result, the series of events became a focal point for debate. Are stories and opinion pieces really “biased” towards China, or are the Chinese too sensitive to criticism? If a bias truly exists, then what is its root cause? Is it the same orientalism that depicts Africa as a fester-ing cesspool of disease, famine, and poverty? Or is it a more subtle expression of an ideological war against China’s rise? These questions are difficult to answer. What is the definition of “Western Media”? After all, does the Christian Science Monitor really belong to the same editorial line as the Daily Telegraph? Is New York-based Epoch Times, a newspa-per run by overseas Chinese that routinely demonizes the Chinese government, considered “Western” media? Have Finnish newspapers criticized China with

precede given names. Many mistakes regarding news articles on China are innocent errors due to misunderstanding. Chinese commentators accused a German TV station of “media bias”, for showing a picture that allegedly substituted Nepalese police officers into a scene that actually portrays Tibet. This picture likely resulted from the uncertainty of online communi-cation, however, rather than a real attempt to slander China. Further, it is all common to see newspapers misspell Chinese cities, write about the wrong dates, or errone-ously caption photos. Similar confusion is noted with ubiquitous “Free Tibet” move-ments that have sprung up on campuses across North America. A large number of people in these movements do not even have a basic understanding of history in the Himalayan region, but take part because it feels morally correct.

2) Popular aversion to Chinese values and the misperceived threat to “Western liberal democracies”.

Many in the West still see China and its ruling Communists as a variation of the Stalin-Hitler-Pinochet authoritarian brand – the sort that drags dissidents into labour camps, slaughters ethnic groups wholesale, and have Orwellian control over the masses. In this sense, Chinese authori-tarianism is seen as a foil to the free and democratic societies of the Western world,

with the same degree of harshness as French ones? Chinese and Western media culture have some inherent differences. Most Chinese do not see much criticism of their government on a daily basis, while in the West this is all too common. Chinese nationals are often too quick to jump to conclusions about stories which do not fit their own worldviews. They immediately dismiss them as containing some sort of bias. At the same time, it would be unfair to claim that media outlets treat subjects dealing with China in an impartial manner. Pick up the latest version of The Economist and you will find some polariz-ing articles with scathing criticisms of China – this popular magazine does not even attempt to hide its bias. Certainly not everything that appears in Western media is “biased” towards China, but for a multitude of reasons, it is not good journalism either. There are three reasons why some see Western media as being “biased” towards China.

1) Genuine misunderstanding and irresponsible journalism.

In some cases, so-called “West-ern media bias” is not wholly a bias but journalists not having done enough home-work on their subject matter. For example, some news anchors address the Chinese President as “Mr. Jintao”, unaware of the Chinese convention that surnames

Op-ed pieces in major newspapers are consis-tently filled with anti-China posturing.

Are stories and opinion pieces really “biased” towards China, or are the Chinese too sensi-tive to criticism?

Is there a West-ern Media Bias Against China?

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where freedom of speech is the norm, equality is guaranteed by the Constitution, and people have the right to elect their leaders. For some, China’s seemingly unstoppable economic “leapfrogging” over Western countries (when it surpassed Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany in GDP within a space of eight years) foreshadows a Cold War-esque vision of yet another gloomy struggle between “freedom” and “communism”. This characterization of China is misleading, despite prevailing popular perceptions. Journalism often reflects prevailing popular attitudes and opinions, rather than rational interpretation of facts. With both ideological and racial differ-ences, China has become the West’s new prototypical “Other”. Discrediting China, therefore, has increasingly evolved to become a zero-sum game with the legiti-macy of Western institutions, values, and supremacy. Journalism serves as the primary means to express this ideological stance. The result is biased media.

3) Uneasy relationship between journalists and the Chinese govern-ment.

China has one of the most rigid censorship regimes in the world when it comes to politically sensitive information. Foreign journalists stationed in China often face restrictions on their reporting. They are blocked off from certain areas, can only interview certain people, and are routinely “supervised” by a government bureaucrat. Over the years, these restric-tions have irked many journalists who have grown accustomed to press freedoms back in their respective countries. Due to the inherent limitations of their profession in China, journalists tend to hold very hostile views towards the Chinese government. In comparison, tourists face very little restric-tions in China once they enter the country, and the vast majority generally report very positive experiences in China. The differ-ences in opinion between journalists and tourists are markedly distinct.

Another important point is the effect the language barrier and govern-ment censorship has on China and the English-speaking world. They are quickly being separated into two spheres of information, as both sides omit and censor facts. Just as someone in the U.S. does not get a full picture of what China is like by reading the New York Times, the Chinese population is equally misinformed about the outside world and foreign perceptions of China.

The Road Ahead

Going forward, both the Western journal-ist community and Chinese nationalists should take a more sober and reflective stance on their actions. In rebutting Chinese nationalists, Western journalists point out that criticism of Chinese govern-ment policy is not equivalent to criticism of the Chinese nation or its people. In reality it is often difficult to draw the line. Most media outlets do not bother making the distinction. “China” is seen as essen-tially the same thing as the “Chinese government”, and vice-versa. That is to say, if the Chinese government did some-thing wrong, then it is “China” that is to blame. Frequent headlines like “China jails dissidents” and “China increases censorship” exemplify this very point. This type of generalizing usage should be avoided in the future. Moreover, both Western journal-ists and Chinese nationalists should avoid

characterizing the issue as a zero-sum game of China versus the West. China’s rise is not necessarily to the West’s detriment, and Western values aren’t necessarily anti-Chinese. There are a diverse range of political views and popu-lar opinions within China, just as there are a diversity of peoples and countries that inhabit the Western world. Finally, the Chinese government should gradually liberalize its press laws, particularly allowing access to dissenting

views via the internet. The rise of the internet as a platform for social activism in China and the dynamism of online discus-sion mean that the government cannot keep the censorship lid on for much further. That said, Western media should also do its best in preventing editorial negligence through hiring more Chinese-speaking staff, and educating its anchors and editors about potential issues arising from cultural and systemic biases. In an era of globalization, nothing is more important than mutual understanding.

Western journalists point out that criticism of Chinese government policy is not equivalent to criticism of the Chinese nation or its people.

About the AuthorMichael Zhang is a fourth year under-graduate student in Commerce, and a member of the Queen’s Association of Chinese Studies.

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MICHELLE

HUNNIFORD

Language is continuously evolving as a product of cultural trends. It is now the source of both overstated political discourse and an intricate musical dialect. This polarity of language provides a generational disconnect with the potential to severely affect our ability to communi-cate. Language may soon diverge irrevers-ibly, thereby altering the compatibility of speech and the meaning of words. The origin of language, while still debated, is the product of either cultural or biological evolution1. Modern language, however, evolves so rapidly that it changes before it can be defined. In the past, language evolved vertically over centuries, but rapid cultural evolution has caused language to evolve horizontally over months. Tools like the Internet and the resultant globalization create an urgency of idea-sharing which is having a profound effect on language. George Orwell, frustrated by the misuse of language, articulates the disconnect between politicized language and its public reception in his 1947 essay, Politics and the English Language. He makes a point of criticizing political language, such as the use of lofty phrases, euphemisms and unnecessary jargon. What he did not foresee was the polarization of language; the emergence of an artistic discourse related through music that would counter the convoluted speech of politicians. Orwell draws attention to the fact that “the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes”2. The decline represented by the overuse of political language has also created the need for a counter-language that would relay truth to the public. Accordingly, artists have attempted to tell the truth and use language as Orwell envisioned. There are six rules for effective writing cited by Orwell3 which dictate how words should be used. He condemns clichés, unnecessarily long words, an abundance of words, needless jargon, and the passive voice. The political speeches of politicians such as those of the former U.S.

President, George W. Bush, are perfect examples of how not to use the English language. Alternatively, the lyrics of songs throughout the twentieth century show a trend towards simplicity, truth, and acces-sibility which should be the goal of language.

Political Discourse

Political discourse favours vague speech to describe complex topics or to disguise truth. Those in positions of power tend to exert control over those beneath them and employ pretentious language to reinforce their positions of power. Political language has become synonymous with “the words [people] use to camouflage and perpetuate their dishonesty... bad language and bad politics [are] one and the same”4. Euphemisms have become commonplace. What is even more disturb-ing is the overuse (and often misuse) of language. This has led to the devaluation of words by both politicians and the media. The media is also responsible for propagating the use of political language. It takes advantage of the temporary shock value language can carry and ignores the long term loss of meaning. Words used to describe the attacks of 9/11 - “inferno, massacre, Armageddon, apocalypse, night-mare, suicide, disaster, evil, fanaticism” – are all powerful words in their own right, yet they have specific meanings5. But, these words have become synonymous

with anything negative and are now too simplified to accurately describe the situation. The true gravity of the events can never be expressed. The overuse of these words by politicians and the media further misinforms the public. One speech by George W. Bush repeats the word “terror” and its deriva-tions six times in three sentences. This example illustrates the broader issue of political discourse. Words are repeated so often that nuanced meaning and precision are lost through overuse. Phrases popular-ized by the Bush administration such as “weapons of mass destruction” should invoke worry and fear, and yet are now common jokes on satiric comedy programs like Saturday Night Live. The authority that Bush tried to establish through language is ironically undermined as he failed to follow the simple rules of language put forth by George Orwell.

“Confronting the threat posed by Iraq is crucial to winning the war on terror...those who harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves. Saddam Hussein is harboring terror-ists and the instruments of terror, the instruments of mass death and destruction. And he cannot be trusted. The risk is simply too great that he will use them, or provide them to a terror network.”6

Political speeches were not always the abysmal examples of the English language that they are today. Ancient Rome highly valued oration in its politicians, and this tradition of a politician’s ability to instill confidence in the public through his oration has endured. Moreover, some of the most famous political speeches, such as Abraham Lincoln's “Gettysburg Address”, are famous because of their concise use of language. Language needs to represent the depth of the message being conveyed without excessive linguistic padding. Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” about the American Civil War is only three

Modern language evolves so rapidly that it changes before it can be defined.

The Polarity ofLanguage: Po-litical Discourse and Artistic Dialect

9

Sources can be found on the QIO website: queensobserver.com/sources

hundred words long. The language is simple and the only repeated word is “dedicate”. The subject matter is compa-rable to September 11, but its length makes each word significant. There is no unnecessary jargon, as exemplified by this excerpt:

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live... The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”7

The development of political language as an acceptable form of commu-nication has been a favourite tool in the past so that those in power can stay in power. The most successful politicians, despite the minutia of their policies, used charisma to disguise the broad generaliza-tions and blanket statements present in their discourse. Political language has even developed beyond coherent English, in which the speeches that are meant to garner emotion are actually the sources of laughter rather than tears. By using this politicized language, politicians are able to be imprecise and avoid important topics while feigning sincerity. The current use of elaborate language is a disguise, masking the turmoil we are experiencing by numbing the public into ambivalence. Only in purifying this language can any progress be made towards bridging the gap between the ever-evolving artistic dialect and dated political discourse.

Artistic Dialect

Every major event in the twenti-eth century has a musical soundtrack to accompany it. This soundtrack may contain songs to incite action, to inform the public about difficult truths, or to placate unrest by organizing chaotic emotions. These songs represent an oppo-sition to the language of politicians because their value lies in their truth, and the more controversial the subject matter, the more the song is differentiated from its lobotomized political counterpart. Wartime is usually accompanied by a surge of music that either placates the public with optimistic lyrics or exposes forbidden emotions through truthful ones. During World War Two, for instance, the increasing popularity of the radio led the audience for music to reach unprec-edented levels. Songs like “When The Lights Go On Again” provided hope for

Music is inspired by personal experiences, the social or political climate, or anything that will be relatable to an audience. Through the medium of song, musicians can speak openly about taboo topics like religion, the atrocities surrounding racial segregation, or the blatant unfairness of the draft board. The language of music is used to articulate concise messages with a level of emotional complexity to which political language can only aspire. Music is a unique product of its time. Popular rhetoric determines the genre and language used in the lyrics, while the success of a song’s integration into popular culture depends on the message and how the audience responds. Newly created lyrics are set to become primary documents that will reveal the motivations of this generation. Just as Charles Dickens accurately portrays industrial 19th century England in his novels; in a similar way, popular music acts as a primary source describing the condi-tions of our current world. The evolution of an artistic dialect is a product of a globalized society where transient language demands individual contribution. Such an immedi-ate evolution was not possible before this century. This ever-changing language has the versatility to adapt as new technology and new mediums of communication emerge. Whether a song says “Fight the Power” or “All You Need is Love”, musicians are working in a medium that allows political or social commentary and the language is kept relevant by what the audience is willing to listen to.

Conclusion

According to Orwell’s rules about the use of language, contempo-rary political language fails at effective communication while musical lyrics overtly use language to entice and convince their audience. This vast discon-nect, between patronizing political discourse and its complex, blunt counter-part in music, causes such a polarity that the two languages become mutually exclu-sive. The disconnection between these separately evolving languages has the potential to cripple our ability to commu-nicate but could simultaneously indicate the need for change within political discourse. Future politicians would do well to pick up a few tips from successful musicians; in the very least it would improve their standing on the opinion polls if not make them better equipped to communicate with their constituents.

the war to come to a close while other songs provided a necessary distraction from the global war mentality. Since then, with Vietnam and Iraq having a unique influence on American popular culture, music has provided more of a dissenting voice in direct opposition to the party line. Songs like “Fortunate Son” by Creedence Clearwater Revival may instead reflect the desire of the public for untold truths, for political faux-pas to be vocalized. “For What It’s Worth” by Buffalo Springfield calls for individual accountability and the responsibility of citizens to question what is “happening here” because “what it is ain’t exactly clear”. Although the general message may be reiterated in political speeches, music uses the language of the masses to speak for the masses.

Musicians are in a unique position, especially with the current global culture, to expand and share their opinions with a large audience. The instantaneous nature of the Internet8 is a large contribu-tor to the immediacy of language evolu-tion. Words are now created and destroyed faster than academics can record them9. The ability to rapidly create new language in response to current events is reflected in the adaptability of music; it is an impor-tant vehicle for the truth. A current example of the global nature of musical discourse is Hip Hop, but all music occupies the unique niche of being both the source of new language and the medium through which it is communi-cated. Music is a modern poetic form, with both sophisticated word choice and rhythm creating meaning. As a form of free verse poetry, the lyrics are not confined to grammatical conventions or even those of spelling. More important is the expression of ideas, by which truth can be teased out from within the lyric and the language used makes the main message accessible to a wide audience.

The current use of elaborate language is a disguise, masking the turmoil we are experi-encing by numbing the public into ambiva-lence.

About the AuthorMichelle Hunniford is a fourth year undergraduate majoring in Biology and minoring in English.

10

LIZZ

McFADDEN

The air was stiff. But it moved. It had to move. Voices made vibrations; vibrations juddered and bounced in the air, no matter how cold it was. Legs pushed the air forward, arms sucked it into circles. The news team on the scene described the mood as “electric”. But the anchor wasn’t yelling. Instead she was pumping her fist in the air, speaking into a microphone. She wasn’t marching; she was walking backwards, letting the crowd pass her. She had no idea. He did. He must’ve. He clung to the curb, his steps crossing the yellow paint strips of parking spots. Around him, we gained momentum. Each new shout, each new voice joining a chant, only made the air around him tighter. Each new joining of hands only made his clench tighter. His eyes were wet, not dripping, just glittering under the streetlights. I wondered if he’d blame it on the air; the frigid, stinging air. His hands gripped the curved end of his painted nuke, leaving shining streaks and blurry prints each time he shifted the weight of the silver casing. Above his hands, Bush and Cheney puppets grasped the same cold metal. I wondered if he’d call it electrifying. They flopped about up there. Their papier-mâché expressions were more frightening than the ski mask hiding his. Maybe beneath the wool was a stubble beard, chapped skin, a running nose. Perhaps thick eyebrows, a strong jaw, or a double chin. It didn’t matter, because his face didn’t matter. When the streetlights hit the monsters above him, they looked like ghouls in an old horror movie. I wondered if he’d planned that. The cops avoided eye contact with the crowd. They had been warned: visors down and batons ready. Yet they watched him pass by, coolly. How could he be a threat? He barely uttered the rousing cheers of “No War, No Way” and “Impeach Cheney first.” While voices hoarsened, cracked, and disappeared, only to be picked up by another, he marched onward.

His steps looked painful, as though each pound of the concrete ricocheted up to his head, like earthquake tremors, one after another. Yet, from where I was walking, his footsteps were unheard, merged with the crowd’s into a stomp, stomp, stomp. The news anchor likened the sound to a military march. I wondered if the sound brought flashbacks to his mind. The shining in his eyes were like bombs exploding in his brain. He walked no faster or slower than anyone else in the crowd. He passed a series of floats, a black-hooded, wired sculpture of a nameless prisoner, a king-sized toilet with Bush throwing money into the Saran Wrap water over and over again, and a cardboard jail cell with Cheney’s name on it. He also marched passed the people, distracted only when a color, scream, or sign caught his attention. I wondered if his glances were only a reaction, or if he really knew we were there, walking beside him, with him. He marched passed the punks in their studded jackets and spray-painted anarchy signs, the mothers carrying babies with peace buttons on their snugglies, and the girls with their cameras flashing, shouting “Stop Mad Cowboy Disease”. He marched passed the office windows above, some with gawks and signs that read, “I’d be marching if I didn’t have a boss”. He never blinked. It was as though somebody threw on a switch when he passed the veterans. They weren’t on the road, but they spat on his pressed uniform from the sidelines, behind the police barriers. His eyes did not clear. Before, they would almost have passed for glass puppy eyes. Now they were like metal, shining and dark. I wondered if he understood how much they revealed. If he knew they were too blue, an electric blue. I wondered if he knew it was hard to look at them. Yet I couldn’t look away. You could almost mistake the feeling for love, the inability to look away. Either that, or a train crash.

“Stand up for your fucking country,”

they yelled. “I am,” he said, the words surprisingly forceful. He was almost choking, I was afraid he would swallow his tongue. He swayed on the spot, as though another hock of spit would be enough to knock him to the ground. “You’re a fucking disgrace” the veterans yelled, “To your country! To your family! To the service! We were there! We fought! We did our duty! And we have to come home to this shit!” The words hit him, battered him. He staggered. “I was there too. I know. I saw. I fought, too,” he managed.From around him came the call, “Support the troops”. “I saw what we did. I did it. I did it, too.” Drowning out his voice, we responded, “Support the troops, bring them home”. His hands were still gripping the nuke, pushing it into the air. He tried to move them, as though he’d forgotten the weight of his puppets in the wake of the veterans’ words. The vets looked just like him: pressed uniforms, eyes also wet. I imagined he would have reached out to them, touched their shoulders, their emblems, their medals, their crests. But he was carrying a nuke, and the line of cops shifted to block their stalemate. “I was there, too.” He was talking to the cops now, the veterans lost behind riot gear, and his voice drowned by ours. He was talking to blank faces; the officers’ visors reflected his shaking hands, his black outline, and his quenched eyes. I wondered what he saw then. The air was no stiffer, no harder to suck into my lungs, but as I passed his still body, with only the lifeless puppets above him still moving, I wondered how much longer our voices could withstand the cold.

No Man’s Land

About the AuthorLizz McFadden is a third year under-graduate student majoring in Philosophy.

—FICTION

11

SEAN

McBRIEN

Political works of literature rarely age well: most are dated as soon as they appear. But most of us could easily name dissenting or censored texts which have outlasted their eras. Political fiction from the Cold War – by writers like Camus, Koestler and Pasternak – are still familiar to today’s reader. They all give unflattering descriptions of life under oppressive regimes and dictatorships. On the other hand, names like Pavlenko or Kochetov, two winners of the Stalin Prize for advanc-ing their party’s cause, are obscure and unread. North Americans today are perhaps biased when judging works like those of Kochetov. Yet there have always been defenders of Kipling, for instance, even while his stance on imperialism has become taboo. When it comes to totalitari-anism, however, it seems that the art of dissent is more capable of being pleasing than art produced for the state. The language of state oppression is simply no good at producing readable literature.

About a subjugated plainAmong its desperate and slainThe Ogre stalks with hands on hipsWhile drivel gushes from its lips.

W.H. Auden’s poem, August 1968, finds the problem with the literature of the oppressive state. In August of that year, Auden was living in Austria, close enough to get a view of the Ogre stalking north of the border: the Warsaw Pact-led invasion of Czechoslovakia by troops of the Eastern Bloc. The liberalization of Czechoslovakia during the so-called Prague Spring bothered the communist bloc, and in a few days the reformist president Alexander Dubček had been arrested and sent to Russia. His replace-ment, Gustáv Hucák, set off a euphemistically-named policy of state normalization that would stifle free expres-sion in Czechoslovakia for the next twenty-one years. Just as Auden’s Ogre speaks in drivel, an oppressive regime relies on lying,

propaganda, and censorship to interact with its subjects. Free expression through art and literature is declined in favour of dogma for the state. In a misplaced effort to make lies seem sincere, state art becomes painfully literal and asks nothing of the reader but credulity. But the language of all literature springs from irony: symbols and meta-phors rely on saying one thing and mean-ing another. This is irony at its simplest, and happens to be a requirement of both the dissenting and the literary voices. To work, both of them require a conversation with the ironic sensibility and a scorn for the literal. The act of writing from within an oppressive framework naturally requires some agility. Well-informed satire must find its way around the heavy foot of the state to survive. But forces of censorship must be adept at tracking down works that ridicule the state, despite attempts from their authors to veil them. Hide satire too well and the message is lost, not only on the censors but also on those who would best make use of the message. Like a good joke, irony asks the readers to finish the job themselves, connect what is being said literally with the symbolic implications. The language of irony is not only good for veiling criticism, but makes the point more impressive for the reader who has thought to get the message. The language of dissent and the language of literature have this in common. The persuasive power of satire is one which regimes of propaganda and censorship can never match. The historical irony is that Auden, the same poet who wrote (in In Memory to W.B. Yeats) that “poetry makes

nothing happen” had acutely pinned down the weakness of the Czech Ogre. Twenty-one years later, the regime borne out of the invasion fell under the persistent ridicule of a dissenting group of non-violent playwrights, musicians and pamphleteers. By way of self-publishing censored texts (often by hand), Republican ideas were made available to the Czech people. Among these documents were the plays of Václav Hável. As they enjoyed lavish success in New York and London, Hável’s works were prohibited in his own country while he and his family were routinely harassed by Czech secret police. Literature can only be under-taken from an ironic frame of mind, and this is where totalitarian art will always fail. The ironic mind is unknowable to the literal mind, but not vice-versa. Propa-ganda can do nothing to avoid sharp satirists except to threaten them with force, and this doesn’t always work: the playwright Hável became the first president of the new Czech-Republic in 1989, and his coterie of artists, writers and philosophers became his cabinet. If Auden had lived to watch the peaceful fall of Czech communism, it may have occurred to him that literature can act far beyond the confines of the page.

The IronicCurtain

The language of state oppression is simply no good at producing readable literature.

12

DEVON

MOK

hroughout history, literature has proven to be an influential means of political expres-sion and social commentary, articulating both public concerns and widespread feelings of discontentment through the medium of artistic narrative. This has been accredited to the capability of storytelling to engage readers on an emotional level that is rarely matched by impassive dialec-tic and statistical information alone. Great fiction draws us into the world of its protagonists and makes us identify with their struggles, rejoice in their triumphs and lament their misfortunes. We read their thoughts and we come to know their hopes, fears, and dreams. In effect, we learn to sympathize with their toils. Authors of conscious fiction recognize that human beings are deeply sentimental creatures beneath the general pretence of rational stoicism and therefore plead to our better nature, calling on our emotional attachment to the characters in order to engross us in their plight. Impressive political literature cultivates readers’ sympathies and anthropomorphizes social issues by way of character-driven narra-tives. Thus literature manages to foment impassioned support for the underlying messages it seeks to convey. This sentimental form of political writing is exemplified by preeminent American author John Steinbeck, in The Grapes of Wrath. In this piece, Steinbeck chronicles the migration of an Oklahoman sharecropper’s family to California follow-ing the Dust Bowl catastrophe of the 1930s. Steinbeck’s elucidative work offers a penetrating social commentary on the situation of migrant workers through-out the Great Depression and criticizes the United States capitalist establishment in its callous treatment of the poor. This work of fiction also celebrates the dignity and resilience of those working under the toughest of living conditions and the most predatory of business practices. The story consists of a central plotline focusing on the Joad family in their migration to California. The plotline is synchronized

with a series of interspersed narratives depicting symbolic occurrences, prevalent issues, and growing public convictions which were widely held at the time. Stein-beck paints the main characters with a sympathetic brush, describing their continuous struggle to make a living under the systematic oppression of greedy landowners, scheming bankers, and exploitative businessmen. Whereas most of the migrant farmers are portrayed as noble Samaritans, the distant figures of the big banks and the Farmers Association are depicted as faceless entities, representative of the impersonal and tyrannical forces of unencumbered capitalism. With this taken into consideration, the underlying political message is clear: workers must unionize and corporations must be held account-able for their actions. Steinbeck himself proclaimed that his intent in writing this novel was ultimately to “put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who [were] respon-sible for this [the Great Depression].” Considering the literary content of The Grapes of Wrath, it is fairly unambiguous as to who the “greedy bastards” referred. Thus it came as no surprise when the dissentious author was accused of promoting Communist propaganda following the book’s publication in 1939. Many at the time considered it blasphemy to even question the free market dogma which had been ingrained in the American psyche since the advent of industrializa-tion. Nevertheless, many people were impressed by Steinbeck’s work and the bold political statement it sought to convey. This reaction is evident in the largely positive response the novel received upon its release, with specific praise elicited for the “characters whose full and

complete actuality [would] withstand any scrutiny”. In this sense, the author succeeded in cultivating sympathy for his own ideological perspective through the portrayal of well-developed, relatable protagonists living under those impover-ished conditions he sought to illuminate. Accordingly, it was the compelling person-alities of the Joads and their compatriots that made Steinbeck’s message so resonant in academic and public circles alike. For the purpose of brevity, this article will only discuss the two most central figures introduced in The Grapes of Wrath, in order to illustrate the author’s proficiency for sympathetic character development. The character of Ma Joad gives voice to both the sheer desperation and commendable perseverance of poor migrant families under the impediments of economic turmoil and business exploita-tion. After she and her kin are evicted from their home by landowners seeking to consolidate their holdings, the family matriarch is repeatedly forced to provide for her family using minimal resources. Described by Steinbeck as “the citadel of the family” Ma serves as a source of encouragement and inspiration for the Joads, continually inciting her loved ones to resist the impulse to surrender to their plight. At one point, fearing that her family will be permanently detained by a group of agricultural inspectors who halt them during their journey, she dissuades the officers from examining their vehicle by lying that Granma, who had already died, was deathly ill and needed to be taken to the nearest hospital. She subsequently spends the rest of the night curled beside the old woman’s corpse in order to ensure that the family gets away safely. This is a

Politics, Stein-beck, and the Power of Sym-pathy

Great fiction draws us into the world of its protagonists and makes us identify with their struggles, rejoice in their triumphs and lament their misfortunes.

13

The value of Steinbeck as a political author stems from his ability to capture the reader through strong charac-terizations and immer-sive storytelling.

testament to both the desperation of the time and the resiliency with which count-less poor migrants, such as Ma Joad, responded to the crises they faced on a regular basis. Of all the characters presented, however, it is the brooding figure of Tom Joad who best typifies this model of the sympathetic hero. A recently paroled ex-convict in his late twenties, Tom is the second eldest son of Pa and Ma Joad. He serves as the family’s principle guardian and breadwinner throughout most of the story. It is predominantly through his eyes that we are able to see the relentless suffer-ing of the migrant workers and the grievous injustices levied against them. We bear witness to a man, with his own pride and sense of self-worth, being made to grovel to ensure his family’s survival. Steinbeck does an effective job of putting the reader in Tom’s shoes, making one feel the degrading humiliation of being forced, out of necessity, to capitulate to the bully-ing of corporate thugs and repressive law enforcement officers. As readers we behold a likeable character, firmly adher-ent to the responsibility to one’s kin, forced to endure unremitting police aggression, below-subsistence wages, and tenuous work assignments all in the hope of sufficiently providing for his family. We also bear witness to the growth of a revolu-tionary spirit as Tom begins to process the political contemplations of the dissident ex-preacher, Jim Casey. When Casey is eventually murdered by a sentry of the Hooper Corporation for leading a workers’ strike, we finally see the complete transfor-mation of Tom as he bludgeons Casey’s killer to death and runs into hiding. Later, in a speech vaguely reminiscent of the

writings of Ernesto Che Guevara in the closing statements of his ‘Motorcycle Diaries’, the young Joad conveys his newfound political outlook:

“Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat,” he said, “I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry n’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there.”

It is this radical sentiment which comes about at the story’s emotional crescendo, when Tom experiences an epiphany that is tantamount to a revolutionary awakening. While his political views are not clearly explicated, it is implied that the indignities he has been subjected to alter his perspec-tive to the point where he feels compelled to fight the injustices pervading this system for the rest of his life. Ultimately the value of Steinbeck as a political author stems from his ability to capture the reader through strong characterizations and immersive storytell-ing. This in turn adds emotional weight to the subject matter in such a way that emphatically favours the political stance being purported—in this case the view that migrant workers were being exploited for cheap labour by large corporations throughout the 1930’s. In short, The Grapes of Wrath serves as an appeal to the compassionate sentiment of ordinary citizens, by providing a voice for those who had been oppressed in American society and by humanizing them in the eyes of an

otherwise detached general public. Through the fictional characters of Ma and Tom Joad in particular, Steinbeck provides a more intimate understanding of the plight of migrant workers during the Great Depression than any newspaper or academic journal. Simply articulated, The Grapes of Wrath is unprecedented in its capacity to convey the emotional impact corporate abuses and economic downturn had on the American working class. For such is the genius of good fiction, that it often presents reality more poignantly than reality presents itself.

About the AuthorDevon Mok is a fourth year undergradu-ate student majoring in Political Science.

BelowJohn Steinbeck

14

ERIN

MORAWETZ

Somewhere Inside and The World is Bigger Now: Two Literary Depic-tions of One Infamous Political and Humanitarian Debacle

Both Ling and Lee have released memoirs of their experiences, using non-fiction literature to combine journalistic facts with emotions and personal details

Who can forget the story of American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who were detained in North Korea for five months and sentenced to twelve years of hard labour for accidentally crossing the China-North Korea border? Ling and Lee, a reporter and film editor respectively for Current TV, a media corporation funded by Al Gore, were investigating the flow of North Korean refugees along the China-North Korea border when they were apprehended, interrogated and ultimately charged for illegally entering the country and committing “hostile acts”, according to the North Korean government. The world watched as Ling and Lee’s families instigated a media blitz in the United States. Ling’s sister, Lisa, a special corre-spondent for CNN and The Oprah Show, used any connections she could to draw attention to the story. Finally, after a request by North Korean President Kim Jong-il, former U.S. President Bill Clinton traveled to the isolated Communist state and successfully negotiated the amnesty and free return of the two women. Although Laura Ling did appear in some interviews following her ordeal, including an hour-long special for Current TV and an appearance on The Oprah Show, the details of the two women’s experience were kept quiet. No one knew for sure what exactly they were originally investigating, how they managed to cross into North Korea and what their experi-ence in prison was like. In the past several months, however, both Ling and Lee have released memoirs of their experiences, using non-fiction literature to combine journalistic facts with emotions and personal details. Both works are worth reading in order to understand the story and the politics behind the ordeal, despite differences in both their approaches and messages. Laura Ling’s memoir, Some-where Inside: One Sister’s Captivity in North Korea and the Other’s Fight to Bring Her Home, was co-authored by her sister, Lisa Ling, and released in May 2010, fourteen months after she was first

detained. Written in alternating narrations, Somewhere Inside shifts between Laura Ling’s experiences within the prison and Lisa Ling’s desperate attempts outside prison to draw media attention to the issue. Laura details her depression, the cult-like admiration of Kim Jong-il that she observed, and why she confessed to trying to overthrow the North Korean government. She knew the interrogators wanted to hear a confession and thought it was the only way for forgiveness. Lisa discusses how she used social media franchises like Facebook, and the support of famous names, including Michael Jackson right before his death, to gain support. She also describes how she went on numerous talk shows to keep Ling and Lee in the spotlight. The two sisters weave a story of humanitarian conflict with personal anecdotes of their childhood together, creating a beautiful portrayal of an ugly situation. Euna Lee released her memoir, The World Is Bigger Now: An American Journalist's Release from Captivity in North Korea... A Remarkable Story of Faith, Family, and Forgiveness, in Septem-ber 2010. Lee, who had avoided the media spotlight since her return home, took a more journalistic approach in her literary work, focusing more on the story that she and Ling intended to tell. Lee, a Korean-American, expressed in an

interview with KoreAm magazine that she wrote the book as “[her] way of finishing the documentary [they] never got to show.” This is evident in her choice of content. She discusses the research that she and Ling collected and were forced to destroy about North Korean refugees. This included interviews and notes with a North Korean woman who escaped into China and was then sold in the internet sex trade, a Chinese man who harbors North Korean refugees and a former North Korean soldier who escaped the brutal regime. Though Lee also discusses her interrogations and how her faith kept her sane, she focuses on her original journalistic goal of emphasizing others’ stories more than her own. By doing so, she told quite a different story than that of the Ling sisters. Both memoirs are outstanding in their own way and together tell an even greater story. The title of Laura and Lisa Ling’s memoir, Somewhere Inside, resonates with what these stories have the capacity to do. Entry into North Korea is extremely limited and prohibited to journalists. There is no media flow out of the strictly controlled country, as the state-run Korean Central News Agency is the only source of media within the nation. Although Ling and Lee were never able to complete the story they set out to tell, they experienced the isolation, brutal-

15

ity and control of North Korea from “somewhere inside.” The 2009 arrest, detainment and sentencing of Laura Ling and Euna Lee became an intense humani-tarian issue, garnering the attention of Amnesty International, Reporters without Borders, and countless politicians and civilians who created petitions and protests. It also caused a political crisis. Though Ling and Lee both express gratitude towards Bill Clinton for the humanitarian work he did in securing their release, many have criticized his decision to negotiate with such a controlling Com-munist dictator as Kim Jong-il. In addition, several people, including William Stanton, a US Diplomat located in Taiwan, blamed Ling and Lee for crossing into North Korea. Many South Korean and Chinese leaders faulted the two journalists for endangering the subjects of

their incomplete documentary. Although Clinton stated that his visit was purely for humanitarian purposes, the entire incident from Ling and Lee’s arrest to release was filled with controversy, emotion and misinformation. With the release of both Laura Ling and Euna Lee’s memoirs, the public may finally learn what occurred “some-where inside”. We learn how truly uninten-tional their trespassing was, how hard they tried to destroy their findings in order to protect the subjects of their research, and the details of the horrific conditions in which they were forced to live in. In addition, we learn about the deep regret, fear and determination they felt through-out their five months held in North Korea. Both Somewhere Inside and The World Is Bigger Now give us insight into a nation that has tried its best to shut out the rest of

the world, a nation that is isolated, controlled and censored. The more information we can gather about North Korea’s drastically different and closed-off culture, the better prepared we are to prevent a humanitarian and political disaster like this one from ever happening again. Laura Ling and Euna Lee’s mem-oirs serve a great purpose in today’s world—they open our eyes and help us understand, which in the end is the goal of every journalist.

The 2009 arrest, detainment and sentencing of Laura Ling and Euna Lee became an intense humanitar-ian issue...It also caused a political crisis.

About the AuthorErin Morawetz is fourth year under-graduate student majoring in Geogra-phy.

16

Orwell’s propaganda differs in kind from PR propaganda because it is consciousness-raising in the interests of public weal rather than consciousness-suppressing in the interests of his employer. This required subtlety because of the BBC’s own routine practice of censorship. Orwell’s consciousness-raising program is evident in his work as a Talks Producer for the BBC’s Eastern Service, expanding and improving distance education programs aimed at the English literature students of Calcutta and Bombay universities (Davison xxiv). To this end, he recruited high-profile speakers such as T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Stephen Spender, Harold Laski, and a range of cultural critics, scientists, and intellectuals of both sexes and of various political stripes and ethnic backgrounds (though mostly Indian), to speak on a wide variety of topics. One especially pertinent lecture series he created for the BBC, “What It Means to Me,” featured the close exami-nation of stock wartime phrases that “have passed into general usage in the last year or two, and are flung to and fro in newspaper articles, broadcasts and so forth, without necessarily being well understood.” His task was to explain what the words “mean[t] in concrete terms” (APL 164)—at least according to his subjective experience of them—to make them “more intelligible, and at the same time, of course, to do a bit of anti-Fascist propa-ganda” (192-93). After beginning the series himself with lectures on “scorched earth” and “sabotage,” Orwell invited the Indian ex-patriot writer Mulk Raj Anand (who, like Orwell, also fought fascism on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War) to continue the series by unpacking such terms and phrases as “Fifth Column,” “propaganda, living space, new order, pluto-democracy, racialism, and so on” (193). Though the typescript of Anand’s lecture “Propaganda” (aired 29 March 1942) has not survived, it doubtless represents a type of propaganda that, unlike that theorized and practiced by

Bernays, follows Orwell’s expository, philology-based propaganda that self-reflexively draws attention to itself as propaganda against propaganda. Orwell’s plan of attack against fascist propaganda sounds simple: compare the rhetoric with the reality—as he perceives it, of course. Obviously, his Weekly News Reviews, representing the BBC’s perspective on the war, primarily fulfilled a state-propaganda function. Yet, within them, Orwell seized upon opportu-nities to expose wilful distortions of fact (assuming the facts could be known with some degree of certainty). In his Review of 17 January 1942, for instance, he affirms that, even during lulls in the fighting,

there is one kind of war that never stops for an instant, night or day, and that is the propaganda war. To the Axis powers, propaganda is an actual weapon, like guns or bombs,1 and to learn how to discount it is as important as taking cover during an air raid. . . . [Y]et one can remain quite untouched by Axis propaganda if one follows a simple rule which never fails. This is, to compare what the Axis powers say they will do with what they are actually doing. (126)

He applies this method twelve days later, in his second lecture in the “What It Means to Me” series, debunking the Nazi propagandists’ notion of “lebensraum” by

comparing their promissory rhetoric with the actual territories seized, which are not empty and agricultural (and thus waiting to be filled by German vassals), but thickly populated (143). He continued to apply this expository tack in his news reviews, sometimes making it the subject of his whole talk (25 July 1942; pp. 427-30), thus battling enemy propaganda with basic common sense and personal intuition. In the same era and by a more academic procedure, Alfred Korzybski (1879-1950) and colleagues such as English professor S. I. Hayakawa proposed a theory of general semantics in order to “immunize us against distorted communi-cation” (Fleming 3) resulting from “com-mercialized media, public relations, and the ‘propaganda technique of nationalistic madmen’” (Sproule 102).2 Korzybski assumed that knowing the basic principles of semantics would enable anyone to see when propaganda—defined as violations of those basic principles—is at work. Orwell’s anti-totalitarian propaganda certainly violates those principles: when he calls the Soviet Union “totalitarian” or Franco’s Spain “fascist,” for instance, the slurs violate the “non-identity” and “non-allness”principles, since they do not describe these countries and their people in their totality. Rather, they are abstract generalizations (violating “self-reflexiveness”) that assume stable defini-tions (violating “extensionalization”). What is common in all of these violations is that the reductive labels simplify the

RightOrwell as a producer for BBC India, with

T.S. Eliot, M. J. Tambimuttu, Nancy Parratt, Una Marson, Mulk Raj Anand,

William Empson, and others

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situation in order to make a political point. This is not to say, however, that Orwell is being deliberately mendacious. The realist assumption of his plain-speaking style is that such words are adequate descriptions of reality,1 whereas the basic assumption of Korzybski’s first principle, “non-identity,” is a nominalist one: “the word is not the thing” (Fleming 4). Orwell, however, would be the first to admit the inadequacy of such political slurs as “fascist”. In “What is Fascism?” (1944) an “As I Please” column written after years of studying its Nazi faction, he demonstrates the kind of philo-logical analysis he developed as a BBC Talks Producer. Orwell observes how easily the label is flung around to describe governments one disapproves of, irrespec-tive of the ideology behind whatever policy models they actually follow. He argues that a stable definition—at least one that is descriptivist rather than prescriptivist—is not possible. But he qualifies on the side of realism: “still, when we apply the term ‘Fascism’ to Germany or Japan or Mussolini’s Italy, we know broadly what we mean” (OP 321).2 While not based on a stable definition and not even strictly realist, “fascism” in Orwell’s usage is not easily reduced to mere rhetorical conve-nience. He insists that naming what one is up against is a necessary part of survival, as Simon Dentith emphasizes in his chapter “‘The journalists do the shouting’: George Orwell and Propaganda” (209). After all, “the war is a war for survival,” declares the manifesto “Why Not War Writers?” to which Orwell was a signatory, along with Cyril Connolly, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, and others. “Without victory our art is doomed.” The manifesto endorses a “propaganda [that is] deeper, more humanly appealing and more imaginative than [that of] newspaper men” (APL 45). It is propaganda, then, that can be distinguished from that used by fascists without reducing the propagan-dist ipso facto to an imitation of fascism. Indeed, “to say that by fighting against Nazi Germany we must become exactly like Nazi Germany is to lack any historical sense whatever,” he says in his November 1941 lecture “Culture and Democracy”. Anyone who suggests otherwise, he says, engages in “a mechanistic form of thought” (73).3 The result of diligence in politi-cal consciousness against mechanistic thought is that everything becomes rhetorical, propagandistic, and biased, even if it can point out truth with absolute conviction. The necessary qualification is to realize one’s bias. This is the meaning of the paradox we started with—that “All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth.” Orwell insisted on the ubiquity of propaganda often, and, after Homage to

Catalonia, never denied that his work for the BBC or as an independent writer was as “one who has to deal in propaganda” (381). His consolation was that “the propaganda aimed at India” under his direction was of a humane, educative variety, even if it “misses India and accidentally hits China” (426), as he remarks in his War Diary entry of 23 July 1942. Even by the spring of 1942, however, Orwell’s BBC work began to wear on him, requiring constant vigilance against a steady volley of lies issuing from both Axis and Allies. “Nowadays, whatever is said or done, one looks instantly for hidden motives and assumes that words mean anything except what they appear to mean,” he says in his War Diary (288), which, like Winston Smith’s private journal in Ninety Eighty-Four, provides a precious opportunity for truth-telling outside of professional propaganda work.4 Indeed, one gets the sense throughout Nineteen Eighty-Four and in Animal Farm (from the expulsion of Snowball in Ch. 5 onward) that the inces-sant and pervasive tumult of lies has a profoundly demoralizing effect on those with mind enough to see them as such. Stopping to speak truth to power at every instance would require a superhuman effort and mark off those doing it as obnoxiously anti-social as Gordon Com-stock in Orwell’s 1936 novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Orwell’s War Diary became a sanctuary where he could commit to paper his grievances with the intellectual climate: “We are all drowning in filth. . . . I feel that intellectual honesty and balanced judgement have simply disappeared from the face of the earth. . . . Everyone is dishonest, and everyone is utterly heartless,” he despairs. “I am not thinking of lying for political ends, but of actual changes in subjective feeling. But is there no one who has both firm opinions and a balanced outlook? Actually there are plenty, but they are powerless” (288-89). In this moment of frustration, Orwell drops the facetious tone in which he usually refers to his own anti-fascist propa-ganda and makes the crucial distinction between state propaganda and his own, which is against automatism and for the “subjective feeling” that comes of the kind of liberal-humanist education program he designed for radio. Though he had lost no conviction in the righteousness of this project, he was certainly growing tired of the sisyphean struggle against the censors, complaining in his diary of being “choked off” and forced to put “sheer rubbish on the air because of having talks which sounded too intelligent cancelled at the last moment” (367). He tendered his resignation and left the BBC in November 1943 (Taylor 324).

After leaving the BBC, Orwell’s most enduring fictive and non-fictive literary output acquired an increasingly didactic character. Animal Farm (1945) takes the deceptively simple form of an animal fable, which is radically unlike any of his other writings to that point. He was doubtless aiming at a younger reading demographic. The novel answers a concern of his since the Spanish Civil War that a true history of the conflict could never be told because establishment journalistic propaganda would be the only surviving documentation available for the state history textbooks. As Orwell says in his c. 1942 essay “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War,”

I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. . . . I saw newspa-pers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various “party lines.” . . . [T]he chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history. How will the history of the Spanish War be written? If Franco remains in power his nominees will write the history books, and . . . that Russian army which never existed will become historical fact, and schoolchil-dren will learn about it generations hence. (Orwell in Spain 352-53)

Animal Farm is a history textbook in allegorical form. Its ubiquity in high school syllabi in the English-speaking West testifies to its effectiveness in introducing students to the complex historical narra-tive spanning the end of Czarist Russia through the Revolution and up to the height of Stalinism. Though the West’s preference for Animal Farm since the Cold War owed much to its anti-Soviet sentiment, Orwell meant it to counteract the propagandistic re-writing of Soviet history that he anticipated would happen if Great Britain allied itself too closely with the Soviet Union in the battle against German fascism. “Politics and the English Language,” finished four months after Animal Farm was published, is likewise aimed at the gap Orwell perceived in consciousness-raising education versus the stupefying propaganda invading public discourse, here concerning prose craft. The apparent conservative didacticism that some find irritating in the essay often distracts from its more fundamental program, which argues for a heightened diligence in achieving clarity and

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originality in writing, and against the slovenly automatism that complacently adopts fashionable obfuscation, prefabri-cated phrases, and dead metaphors. He had insisted on the same a year earlier in his essay “Propaganda and Demotic Speech” (1944), in which he castigates English state propaganda for avoiding “clear, popular, everyday language,” and thus for its “remoteness from the average man” (Complete Works 16.311). His purpose here is to recommend improve-ments to propaganda that would make it comprehensible to ordinary working people so that they could at least develop an interest in the “vitally important questions” of their time rather than remain ignorant and apathetic (315). “Politics and the English Language” takes this argument further, echoing in the conclu-sion Lippmann’s prescription to “educate a habit of introspection about the imagery evoked by printed words” (OP 409). To Orwell, counteracting the “decay of language” tied up in “the present political chaos” is possible from “the verbal end” by removing the conditions for bad writing: “If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration. . . . If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy” (398, 410). Perhaps avoiding orthodoxy is not as simple as this,

but in any climate where clear writing is endangered, resistance to obfuscation nonetheless requires an actively engaged imagination. Finally, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a complex educative piece of literature, a novel both about indoctrination and a form of it. In the crudest terms, the novel’s propaganda “message” is that any form of totalitarianism is a threat to civilization; it draws its shock value from its “this could happen to you” variety of fear mongering. Like Animal Farm, it is ostensibly against the Soviet Union, which was the only extant brand of totalitarian-ism similar to Ingsoc in scale and extent, and which acted menacingly on the West’s nascent Cold War imagination in the aftermath of World War II. While it is not tied as closely to an obviously recognizable historical narrative as Animal Farm is, Nineteen Eighty-Four is instead general enough to warn against totalitarianism emerging across the political spectrum in the West. That the Ingsoc economy is run in American dollars suggests that Oceania is an historical effect of Americanization or capitalist globalization cast in America’s image, which Orwell often associated with crass commercialism (for reasons Bernays could answer for). While the structure of Ingsoc ostensibly resembles the division of the Soviet state into an absolute dictator, inner-party vanguard, outer-party bureau-

cracy, and complaisant proletariat, it analogously resembles the organization of any of the large corporations on Bernays’s list of private-sector clients, which are themselves plutocratic in the extreme. Their presidents represent the illusion of Big Brother-like absolute leadership, their boards of governors and shareholders (the only constituency to which a corporation is legally accountable) correspond to the inner party, systems of managers and bureaucracy to the outer party, and consumer public to the “proles” (Ingsoc for “proletariat”) that divert themselves with the surplus of the outer-party’s propagandistic cultural production. Nine-teen Eighty-Four thus extends its anti-totalitarian propaganda against Western capitalist tendencies toward a totalitarian mentality that had survived into the militarized peacetime of the Cold War era, however far the West remained from the overt totalitarian coercion rampant in the Soviet Union. Many explanations for the origins of the Ministry of Love’s Room 101 focus on an actual room in the BBC Broadcasting House where Orwell attended staff meetings; however, given that the Room is a re-education centre and that “101” is a typical code for entry-level courses in North American post-secondary institutions, it may represent another indication of Ingsoc Americaniza-

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tion in the novel. Winston Smith is sentenced to an intensive re-educative brainwashing program in the Ministry of Love, and Room 101—while not an entry-level course in how to internalize an automatic aversion to disobedience against the state—is at least where the decisive blow is dealt to ways of thinking that predate Ingsoc. Winston “graduates” from the Gulag-like torture of 101 and is re-assimilated to Ingsoc publicly when the last vestige of conscious humanity has been squeezed out of him by the literaliza-tion of his worst nightmares. As show-room propaganda, Room 101 represents what totalitarianism in England would look like: “imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever,” O’Brien assures Winston (307), and thus the people of the West. The education program of the Ministry of Love is the complete inversion of the kind of humanist education Orwell practiced at the BBC and in his writings, and a projection of the “logical consequences”1 of Bernays’s style of propaganda monopolizing communication in a totalitarian fashion. The difference in basic assump-tions between the different propagandists discussed here is clearly discernable: Bernays’s encourages and exploits the mechanistic thinking and behaviour of the public with the best interests of his corpo-rate or government clientele in mind, rather than those of the public, who are functionally reduced to consumers. His social-psychologist predecessors, on the other hand, were interested in anatomizing the mechanical tendencies of group behav-

iour, which is all too vulnerable to the seduction of totalitarianism branded as a benefit to society. Their common purpose was to articulate strategies of resistance against power’s more or less intuited techniques of manipulation that, used in modern warfare, were instrumental in the deaths of millions. Like Le Bon, Trotter, Lippmann, and Martin, Orwell believed in the vital necessity of educating the public to resist the forces of mind control that benefited from destroying enormous swaths of civilization in the interests of consolidating more and more power. The definitive distinction, then, focuses on who benefits: Bernays uses propaganda in the interests of capital and political influence, whereas Orwell, consistent with the polemics of Bernays’s social-psychologist influences, uses propaganda in the interests of humanity in general, which is best served in ways that help it maximize its potential free from the constraints of state coercion. Ultimately, the justification for Orwell’s kind of propaganda is a moral one; if propaganda is used against human-ity, then it must be countered with a humane kind of propaganda sustained by techniques of persuasion, as propaganda

inevitably is, but not by injurious lies. Orwell’s objective is to educate the public into defending itself from political threats. In his work as a producer of propaganda lectures for BBC India radio, and as an author of essays and fiction that cohesively “fuse political purpose and artistic purpose,” as he says in the 1946 essay “Why I Write” (OP 463), Orwell contin-ued the humanist legacy of Bernays’s social scientists. In so doing, he has left a literary legacy that has garnered more attention than all of them, outlived the totalitarian regimes that he fought against, and will continue to activate consciousness for as long as the war on truth is fought on the psychological front.

About the AuthorJordan Rendall Smith is a �fth year PhD candidate in English, focusing on the British Romantics.

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