by Steven Poole
Public diplomacy
Naturally, politicians are loath to admit that they are in the propaganda business. Donald Rumsfeld, who spins and dances through the pages of this book like the hyperactive photojournalist in Apocalypse Now – the Dennis Hopper, if you will, to Dick Cheney’s Marlon Brando – claimed that it never happened. ‘We have an aversion in our country,’ he claimed primly, to ‘having propagandising take place by public officials in government.’12 Of course, propagandising did take place; it just wasn’t called that. Sometimes it was called, instead, ‘public diplomacy’.
You see how this phrase itself is already surrounded by a little glow of Unspeak. ‘Diplomacy’ implies back-and-forth discussion about terms that everyone eventually agrees on: it implies a civilised, two-way conversation. The phrase ‘public diplomacy’ borrows that implication of peaceful negotiation, but applies it instead to the government unilaterally choosing its own form of language and trying to make it stick in people’s minds by sheer force of repetition. George W. Bush made clear the real meaning of ‘public diplomacy’ when he said: ‘Our public diplomacy efforts aren’t … aren’t very robust, and aren’t very good, compared to the public diplomacy efforts of those who would like to spread hatred and … and vilify the United States.’13 How odd that Bush should speak in terms of Al Qaeda practising ‘public diplomacy’. Of course, if he said out loud that Osama bin Laden indulged in ‘propaganda’, he could not make the comparison he wants to, because he would have to acknowledge that the US does ‘propaganda’ too.
Rumsfeld himself had put it this way: ‘I […] think the United States is notably unskilful in our communications and our public diplomacy. I think that we need to do a better job. What that will accomplish, I don’t know.’14 Not for the last time, Rumsfeld shows himself a virtuoso of the switchback and the mystical non sequitur. First he claims that the US doesn’t do a good job with its ‘communications’ and its ‘public diplomacy’ – in other words, with its propaganda. But then he says he has no idea why it would be good to do a better job. Bush, though, had an idea: ‘I made some very difficult decisions that made public diplomacy hard in the Muslim world,’ he said ruefully. ‘One was, obviously, attacking Iraq.’15 That must indeed have been disappointing.
Denying the existence of ‘propaganda’, while thinking simultaneously that the US should do a better job of it, if not confessing to know why, Rumsfeld had in 2002 set up a department in the Pentagon called the Office of Strategic Influence, which was ‘developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations’.16 There was something of a public outcry when news leaked out about this propaganda machine, so it was formally disbanded, only months after its inception. But Rumsfeld later said of it: ‘You can have the name, but I’m going to keep doing every single thing that needs to be done, and I have.’17 Impressive flexibility. He was not wedded to any particular name: call it ‘public diplomacy’ or ‘strategic influence’, there would always be another term of Unspeak to describe the machinations of Unspeak itself.
The rectification of names
Let us not fall into the trap, however, of imagining that Unspeak is unprecedented, that there existed a historical golden age when politicians spoke nothing but the unvarnished, uninflected truth. British journalist Peter Oborne, for example, published in 2004 a book called The Rise of Political Lying,18 which ably analysed the misleading rhetoric of Tony Blair’s government, but did not convincingly show that ‘political lying’ had substantially increased. The very title of a satirical pamphlet, first published in 1712 and known as The Art of Political Lying (under the nom de plume Martin Scriblerus, usually attributed to John Arbuthnot), suggests otherwise. The pamphlet took the form of an extended advertisement for a fictional forthcoming book about political lying. ‘He shews,’ wrote Arbuthnot, speaking of the imaginary writer, ‘that the People […] have no Right at all to Political Truth: That the People may as well all pretend to be Lords of Manors, and possess great Estates, as to have truth told them in Matters of Government.’19 Indeed, the book would go on to prove, it was promised, that ‘Abundance of Political Lying is a sure Sign of true English Liberty.’20
Lying, of course, is older than that; and so is Unspeak itself. Consider the parable about Confucius with which we began. Unspeak consists in giving argumentative names to things. What Confucius calls ‘the rectification of names’ might then be, depending on your point of view, either the restoration of more neutral language, or its replacement with Unspeak. (Mao’s ‘great rectification’ of China in the twentieth century, for one, depended heavily on Unspeak rhetoric.) Indeed, naming things has long been thought of as a special, even magical ability. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu informs us that for this reason, the poets of traditional tribes in the Kabilya region of Algeria were accorded ‘major political functions, those of the war-lord or ambassador’.21 But sometimes the names given by war-lords and ambassadors need to be contested.
The necessity to challenge names also exercised the minds of the great Roman orators. In a guide for students of the art, Cicero advised:
[I]t will be desirable to invalidate the definition of the adversaries; but that will be invalidated if it be proved to be false. This proof must be deduced from the belief of men concerning it, when we consider in what manner and under what circumstances men are accustomed to use that expression in their ordinary writing or talking.22
Insofar as this book has a method, that is it.
As Confucius and Cicero show, Unspeak has probably been with us for as long as there has been politics. ‘[I]t is a common topic,’ noted Cicero, ‘to dwell on the wickedness of that man who endeavours to wrest to his own purposes not only the effect of things, but also the meaning of words, in order both to do as he pleases, and to call what he does by whatever name he likes.’23 On the other hand, Unspeak has become a more efficient means of global propaganda in parallel with the spread of mass media. And the ever-more-confining structure of television and radio newsbites, in particular, makes Unspeak the ideal vehicle for the dissemination of propaganda, because it packs the maximum amount of persuasion into the smallest space. Sometimes, moreover, real historical increases in the prevalence of Unspeak can be traced: for example, with the birth in English of ‘ethnic cleansing’, in Chapter Four; or in the relatively recent use of public names for military operations, discussed in Chapter Five.
Once wars, in particular, became media events, Unspeak became the norm rather than the exception of political discourse. Names became weapons. Weapons were given persuasive names. Distinctions were deliberately blurred. Realities were denied. Punishments, as Confucius predicted, did not fit the crimes. Language created a permanent culture of war.
Before the book’s attempt to justify such statements begins, the reader may wish to leap in, with an apposite question: ‘Who are you to write such a book?’ That is easy to answer in the negative. I am not a linguist; nor am I a political reporter. I claim no authority or expertise beyond a habit of close reading, practised in literary journalism. If the book has some interest, however, it may be simply that it demonstrates that you don’t have to be a specialist to resist the tide of Unspeak: you just have to pay attention. Naturally, in such a book, it is impossible that I will not myself have committed various acts of Unspeak. I leave it as an exercise for the interested reader to identify them.
‘You’ve got to be mindful of the consequences of the words,’ said George W. Bush.24 Let us follow his advice.
2
Community
Anti-social
In 2003, an eighty-seven-year-old man from Merseyside, England, was ordered by a court not to make ‘sarcastic remarks’ to his neighbours.1 The following year, two teenage brothers were forbidden from uttering the word ‘grass’.2 Then a twenty-seven-year-old Scottish woman was threatened with jail if she was seen by neighbours at her window ‘wearing only her undergarments’.3 What did these prohibitions have in common? They were all examples of a new l
egal device that sought to repress ‘anti-social behaviour’.
Anti-Social Behaviour Orders, which rapidly became known as Asbos, were introduced by Britain’s Labour government in the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act. If a person was found by a court to have engaged in ‘anti-social behaviour’, she could be served with an Asbo prohibiting her for a period of at least two years from engaging in a wide range of activities, not limited to those already indulged in. Subsequently, if she was found to have broken the order, she would face a prison term of up to five years.
In threatening recidivists with a big penal stick, the Asbo was in one way related to the ‘three strikes and you’re out’ legislation enacted in many states of the US since the late 1980s. California has among the harshest such laws: in 2003, the Supreme Court upheld a man’s sentence of fifty years to life after his ‘third strike’ offence, in which he shoplifted some videotapes.4 But though Asbos threatened much shorter sentences, they were in a sense more radical. The actions they prohibited were not crimes in the first place – otherwise they could have been dealt with in the normal fashion by the criminal law. And yet, if you were found to have committed a forbidden act under an Asbo – an act which was not in itself a crime, such as drawing the curtains while not fully dressed – you would nonetheless become a criminal, by virtue of having breached the Asbo. The government itself seemed confused about this issue, since ‘Anti-Social Behaviour’ was listed as one of many ‘Crime Types’ on the Home Office website, even though ‘anti-social behaviour’ was not itself a crime.
Since people were going to be threatened with long periods of incarceration as a result of committing acts that were not crimes in themselves, it was presumably of the utmost importance to be quite definite about what ‘anti-social behaviour’ really was. In fact, the government chose the opposite route. Alun Michael, Minister of State at the Home Office, was responsible for steering the legislation through scrutiny by the House of Commons. During questioning by a Commons committee, Michael steadfastly refused to define ‘anti-social behaviour’. He rejected proposed amendments that would ‘specify the behaviour, or […] define it as serious, [or] specify that a threshold should be defined’.5 As eventually passed, the Crime and Disorder Act defined ‘anti-social behaviour’ only in this way: as behaviour by an individual ‘that caused or was likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress to one or more persons not of the same household as himself’.6
Such vagueness of language was not in itself new. The Public Order Act of 1986 considered a person guilty of ‘Harassment, alarm or distress’ if he used ‘threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour’, or displayed ‘any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting’, ‘within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby’.7 But the maximum penalty for such an offence under the POA was merely a fine. The Asbo legislation enabled behaviour that might not even constitute an offence under the earlier law to be banned by a court, and if that ban was broken, the subject could spend five years locked up. Moreover, the decision as to whether the subject had been ‘anti-social’ in the first place, and so the subsequent imposition of an Asbo, depended only on the civil standard of proof (the ‘balance of probabilities’), rather than the criminal standard (’beyond a reasonable doubt’). Given that the stakes were so much higher, and the burden of proof so much lower than in normal criminal procedures, the continuing woolliness of definition for Asbos was a much more serious problem.
What particular level of ‘harassment, alarm or distress’ in the beholder’s mind, for example, should trigger the label of ‘anti-social behaviour’? The notion that one should be able to go about one’s daily life blissfully cocooned from any possible ‘harassment, alarm or distress’ is evidently silly. You might feel harassed by a customs official insisting on searching your bag, alarmed by the imagery of a heavy-metal T-shirt, or distressed by the way a mother snaps at her child in the supermarket. Nonetheless, you might not think that the law should provide a remedy in such cases. But the threshold at which such feelings become grounds for making a finding of ‘anti-social behaviour’ remained unclear.
‘Anti-social’ has two quite different meanings. The first is ‘opposed to sociality, averse to society or companionship’:8 thus we might call anti-social someone at a party who refuses to speak to anyone but glowers in a corner, sipping his vodka. The second meaning of ‘anti-social’ is far wider: ‘opposed to the principles on which society is constituted’, or ‘persons or actions devoid of or antagonistic to normal social instincts or practices’.9 Early Christians were prosecuted by the Roman Empire on the grounds that their behaviour was anti-social:10 this was correct, in the sense that they sought to overturn established social practices. From Jesus to Gandhi and Martin Luther King, many people have thought that battling against social norms was the right thing to do. Therefore, to use ‘anti-social’ as a condemnation requires a further unspoken supposition that what is ‘normal’ is also desirable. Confusion may arise because ‘anti-social’ in this second sense often contains a leakage of the first sense, an assumption that if one is opposed to social norms, one must be a personally dislikable character. But, of course, one can be ‘anti-social’ in the second sense while being gregarious and kind.
With Asbos, the meaning of ‘anti-social’ clearly leans towards the second definition, either opposed to society as a whole or opposed to certain ‘normal’ social practices. But a judgement of ‘anti-social behaviour’ can arise from the perceived harassment, alarm, or distress of, in the language of the Crime and Disorder Act, ‘one or more persons’ – i.e., possibly only one person. How might it be decided that the feelings of one person were in relevant harmony with those of society as a whole, or that they were perfectly in tune with what was generally considered ‘normal’? Might some people not be unusually sensitive or picky about the behaviour of their fellow human beings? Say I think that people who cough and sneeze on public transport without covering their mouth and nose are behaving anti-socially, because they spread infection to their fellow passengers by means of airborne mucus. Would I be justified in demanding that Asbos be issued against all such persons? What if I think that it is ‘anti-social’ to talk loudly on one’s mobile phone in a café – is an Asbo the correct approach there? In some cases, furthermore, it might be within the powers of those feeling harassed, alarmed, or distressed to avoid the upsetting stimulus. In the case of the young Scottish woman served with an Asbo for being seen in her underwear, for instance, one might reasonably suggest that her neighbours ought simply to stop peering in at her windows if they don’t like what they see.
The ‘anti-social’ concept is also shaky because it appears to assume only two levels of social organisation: the individual and society as a whole, with nothing in between. Yet what one often finds is a range of smaller social groups, each competing to label the other ‘anti-social’. This problem was evident in a 2004 Home Office report, which advised the government against creating a category of ‘youth nuisance’ under the rubric of ‘anti-social behaviour’. What is ‘youth nuisance’? It is a general term for teenagers hanging around on street corners. But, as the report pointed out in deadpan style: ‘while it is recognised that a group of young people can appear intimidating to members of the public, gathering in a group is not in itself necessarily anti-social’.11 Boys and girls who seek out each other’s company, indeed, are rather obviously being social. Of course, social gatherings can turn into criminal conspiracies, or gang rapes, depending on the subsequent behaviour of the group. Teenagers loitering on street corners might deliberately intimidate other citizens. But then again, they might not. To define their coming together as a group per se as ‘anti-social’ is nonsensical. Undeterred, however, the British government went on to cite ‘youth nuisance’ as a problem of ‘anti-social behaviour’,12 and constables had the power to ‘disperse’ groups of youths if they thought their behaviour
was ‘likely’ to alarm passers-by.13
Perhaps, though, these quibbles about the vagueness of the term ‘anti-social behaviour’ were all irrelevant. Alun Michael at one point sought to deflect such annoying questions posed by his fellow MPs, by denying that ‘anti-social behaviour’ really meant anything at all. ‘I was asked whether the terms “anti-social behaviour” added anything to the Bill,’ Michael told the committee. ‘Legally, it does not, but it is an essential label that sets out clearly and succinctly what the provision is about: preventing anti-social behaviour.’14 This is a classic example of the logical fallacy of petitio principii, or begging the question. According to Michael, ‘anti-social behaviour’ in itself meant nothing ‘legally’, but it served to explain that the point of the law was to prevent ‘anti-social behaviour’. But what was this ‘anti-social behaviour’ that must be prevented, if the term itself had no legal weight? Oops. Let’s hurry on. Michael admitted instead that the phrase was merely a ‘label’: in other words, a catchy phrase of propaganda. To enshrine a legally meaningless PR catchphrase in national legislation might be considered a recipe for confusion and misunderstanding, rather than something that would ‘clearly and succinctly’ inform the public. So it proved to be.