We need to save some words for a crisis

On language and war

Various major historical events have occurred in my lifetime but only two feel, in my gut, genuinely epochal: The attacks on the United States in September 2001, and last week’s invasion by Russia of Ukraine. In that overused Gramsci quote about the new struggling to be born, last week seemed to mark the delivery of a large historical baby.

We are now in a world where Germany is committing to massively increased defense spending, long-time holdouts are considering NATO membership, and Russian oligarchs can hear the last-orders bell ringing at the bar. It’s a world where the lines are clearer and there is just cause; for all the absolute horror of the moment for Ukrainians, there may be something freeing for others about this clarified situation, and I expect over time more people will find a sense of purpose in it.

Some pundits, picking up the primitive tools of an earlier moment, have tried to fit this into the narrative of anti-wokeness, and been mocked accordingly. It’s true that the tanks rolling into the Ukraine aren’t primarily motivated by the desire to restrict pronoun choice, but at the same time there is its own parochialism in denying cultural issues figure in this matter entirely. Kremlin propaganda makes explicit use of the need to fight against a permissive Western culture – look at the image below for example, taken from Russian social media.

Image taken from Thread by Dr Lisa Gaufman, 21.02.2022

For sure, we’re not supposed to take this stuff at face value – though I believe the Russian leadership and those sympathetic to their actions do – just to acknowledge that all those fighting for Ukraine are to an extent fighting for social liberalism too, and those fighting Ukraine see its ‘Western’ social turn as one of the reasons it must be conquered. Even Matt Taibbi might acknowledge here that Putin is currently taking his opposition to ‘wokeness’ a little too far.

There is one area though where I would say that ‘Western decadence’ really is significant, and that is in the decay of our public language. The way across social debates the gravest terms – ‘fascist’, ‘murderer’, ‘genocide’, have been thrown around so casually of late has debased them as currency for moments like this. Four days before the invasion, the culture writer and scholar Grace Lavery was busy calling the journalist Helen Joyce ‘a fascist’.

If Helen Joyce is a fascist, what does that make Vladimir Putin?

This is the language of children jacked up on sugar at the sweet shop, throwing the gravest terms of history around for shocks and giggles – not least antisemitism, which Lavery evoked equally spuriously and unseriously in my view. The language of terrible things has become detached from the concepts it refers to and is now just a means of eliciting a reaction, and not much of a reaction, from a jaded crowd. This is the language of people who are so complacent about real threats that they feel it is necessary to fabricate their own.

Yet there are real threats. If we have, as I believe, entered a more serious time, or at least woken up to an already ongoing serious time, greater decorum in our public language is necessary. There needs to be some level of seal around certain words which can be broken and taken out only when the stakes are high – war, colonialism, genocide. We need to be a culture which saves frenzied outrage for matters more significant than Jimmy Carr telling a bad joke. And no, words are not and are never literal violence. Ask the Ukrainians if they’d rather be facing a convoy of Russian tasks or a series of clumsily expressed Tweets.

You can say the West is shit and the root of all evils; that’s part of the point of living in the West. But present circumstances sees that as ever more squarely revealed as a luxury belief, and our cultural elites need to think as much about how to preserve basic democratic norms as indulging them. Typically, some of those who found an uncompromising line on Rosie Duffield’s alleged transphobia have been more equivocal about Putin this week, suddenly coming over all both sidesy – although those who were happy to put the blame at NATO’s door for Russian imperialism seemed to change their minds when their pension pots looked jeopardized.

Pretending the enemies of your country are its friends is cultural decadence, though. Whether you like it or not another manifestation of it is twice having nominated the former chairman of the Stop the War Coalition, who have badly misjudged the reasons for the current situation, as a candidate for Prime Minister, and pretended opposing this is ‘right-wing’. Nominating the likes of Jeremy Corbyn for Prime Minister is not something nice, middle-class people should be messing around with, and that goes with adopting an exculpatory attitude to those who excuse genocide and exculpate dictators the world over. Taking counterintuitive stances on foreign policy is all a bit of fun - until the tanks roll into your neighbourhood and they kill you as an appeaser. The indulging of such positions are not significant factors behind the ongoing war, but they do make it harder for the liberal left to respond to it.

It’s important to acknowledge that the world view that hails Maduro as a liberator and speculates as to a diplomatic accommodation with Putin based on a ‘neutral’ Ukraine isn’t just a more extreme version of existing liberal principles – the idea that the far left are just a supercharged version of the liberal left - it’s just wrong. There may have been people arguing for the appeasement of the Nazis in 1939 and while they may have been understandable in the specific context of the time they were also, in the view of history, completely wrong. And this cultural decadence is not confined to the left; just the week an acquaintance messaged me to say that the EU was as bad as Putin. That, too, is a kind of facetious cosplay which belongs to times which, if in reality no less serious, were treated as less so. Today, the idea that the West is uniquely evil and that we should dedicate our intellectual energies to unmaking its institutions has been revealed as a relic of safer and more prosperous times.

War is a crime against ordinary life. Today, Ukrainians can’t just pop to their shops, see their kids, live their lives as they say fit, for they have to plan around bombardments, shortages and fear. Every day of our lives which we can do these things is to be celebrated; as Goethe said, nothing is more valuable than a day. To a certain extent, living our lives now entails defending the democratic and Western way of life and our freedom. Those who decry the fascism of things which aren’t fascism and the violence of those who aren’t violent are demonstrating that freedom, not disproving it: They are exercising their freedom to exaggerate. But now we really are in a crisis, and the risk being run is, in responding to it, having already used up the words. The special-occasion words. The serious words. Which means those who have exaggerated so have two options: Either try and increase the rhetoric further, which rings hollow, or try and pretend that the situation is not grave at all. You end up with ‘People who are mean to me on the internet are fascists, but actual fascists, pffttt!’

There is one specific word, though, that people across the political spectrum have been struggling to articulate this week, and that word is evil. What we have seen these last days, as a powerful state invades another sovereign state, in an attempt to subjugate it, against the wishes and to the tremendous harm of its people, is as close to an act of pure evil as we have seen in our lives. No wonder those have struggled, on left and right, who have flung grave words about for attention; those who have pretended that imperial oppression is the same as unified pan-European toy regulations, those who have thundered that Scotland is bearing the full force of colonial oppression while insisting that the oppressor should also pay for its pensions. Still, no matter how much you fling the word ‘evil’ about, it doesn’t touch the sides until the real thing shows up; all of us know what is meant by ‘evil’ when it arrives.