Every now and then, I check in with the Iraq Daily Newspaper. It is a surreal experience. I read the book reviews, the art reviews, the bizarre section on International News. When you open up the site, over to the right is a smiling cuddly-looking Saddam beaming at you. But of course, the most frightening section to read is the Home News. Not because of what they say, but because of what they don’t say. I
When I read articles, what I am aware of is a booming silence in my ears. It’s kind of terrifying. I bitch and moan about the media in the United States, but I don’t feel a silence screaming in my ears when I read the papers. I am sure there are Americans out there who actually DO hear a screaming silence. Perhaps they are the ones who feel harassed by black helicopters at every corner of the street. Who knows. Or maybe they are just people who don’t LIKE what they read, so they feel that something must be being covered up somewhere.
A fantastic book to read on the topic of how evil fascistic regimes control the language of its citizens is I Will Bear Witness, the diary of Victor Klemperer telling his experience living in Nazi Germany as a Jew. He was an academic, an intellectual. He lost his job, he lost everything. He was married to a Christian woman, so for a while he had some protection from persecution but he watched the Jews, all of his friends, disappear from around him.
The title of the book says it all. Klemperer obsessively documented every new law, every new pogrom, every radio speech he heard, recording the entire slippery slope. He said, fiercely, “If there is nothing else that I can do, then at least I will bear witness.” And he does. To a nearly autistic degree.
He also begins to obsessively compile a “dictionary” of words which the Nazis co-opted. The violence of the Nazis existed in a literal sense, yes, people were vanishing from their houses over night…but the violence also existed in the way they controlled the language. Nobody could talk to anybody anymore. Germans no longer could read the newspaper and find out what was happening. Words like “honor” and “love” and “family” and “father” completely lost their meaning in this through-the-looking-glass world. Nazis deprived ordinary Germans of their ability to effectively communicate with each other.
Klemperer piles up his ammo, writing entry after entry after entry, analyzing what the Nazis are doing to German, the language that he loves, hoping that he will live through this terrible war and live to see his dictionary published. He did live through the war, but the dictionary was not published. Apparently, with the huge success of his journals (both volumes), editors are working on doing his great work for him. I look forward to that dictionary almost as much as I look forward to Eminem’s movie coming out next week.
I Will Bear Witness is as astonishing and as chilling to read, in its own way, as Anne Frank’s diary.
I read the step-by-step imposition of crazy racial laws on an entire people, the violence and hatred growing in such an obvious way, and become even more convinced that appeasement is not just foolish and wrong. But evil.
