What Happens to Language When Authoritarianism Takes Hold

Resist the Perversion of Language and the Destruction of Meaning

When I was invited to do a keynote speech to open an event entitled "A Poetry Reading in Response to Antisemitism," held on Feb. 18 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City, my first impulse was to decline since I have never written about poetry. But the speech was meant to provide context about when and why antisemitism flourishes, so I said yes.

I was glad I did! I found myself writing about a favorite topic of mine that I have not had occasion to explore lately: what happens to language when authoritarianism takes hold. As autocracy comes into being, meaning is inverted (democracy=tyranny) and hate speech is elevated into state dogma.

Here is an abridged version of my talk.

Thank you for inviting me to speak. I'm honored to be at this event with so many amazing poets. I accepted this invitation because I have long felt that the most valuable responses to tragedies and oppression come from the creative realms of film, art, performance, and poetry.

The evocative power of poetry and its quality of linguistic compression means it can have a unique function of redeeming language in situations where language is being abused and also stripped of meaning by authoritarian bombast, or soiled and demeaned by becoming a carrier of hatreds and racisms.

Poetry can express the horror, the awfulness, and the intimate devastation that come with situations of oppression in which people are asked to betray themselves and those around them. This is the essence of what the brutes who govern Russia, Iran, Turkey, China, and elsewhere have done for years. It is what Trump and his Republican enablers are planning for Americans.

Propaganda is not just about getting people to believe this or that lie (say, who won the 2020 election) but also about changing the way people think and feel, and in particular it's about changing the associations they make when they hear certain words.

Among the most infamous and consequential of those associations involves the language of antisemitism, which proposes the following linkages: Jew=degenerate, Jew=rootless cosmopolitan, Jew=shady deceitful operator, Jew=globalist puppet master. And then there is Jew=subhuman, which gets us to the chilling Nazi designation of Jews as "lives unworthy of life."

That Big Lie depended on public belief in thousands of small lies about Jews, and on associations instilled by dogged Fascist propagandists that led people to believe those lies. Key to the success of this propaganda campaign was that most Germans had never met a Jew, so the Jew could become a monster, a fantastical creature.

Propagandists know that it is best to target a group that is tiny, so that few people will have a personal relation with a member of that group: few will be able to have evidence to refute the lie, as in: "but no! A Jew helped me! My best friend in school was a Jew! What you say is not always true!" The same logic holds for trans people today, who are a tiny part of the larger LGBTQ population and come in for disproportionate vitriol, attention, and demonization.

“Work Sets You Free” sign on a gate of Dachau concentration camp. The same slogan would be placed on the gates of Auschwitz—a prime example of the upside down world of autocracy. Wikimedia Commons

So, authoritarians turn language into a weapon, as well as emptying key words in the political life of a nation such as patriotism, honor, and freedom of meaning. We are well on our way in America to what I call the "upside-down world of authoritarianism", where the rule of law gives way to rule by the lawless; where those who take our rights away and jail us pose as protectors of freedom; where the thugs who assaulted the Capitol on Jan. 6 are turned into patriots; and where "leadership means killing people," as Tucker Carlson put it recently, justifying Vladimir Putin's killing of Alexei Navalny.

Some who have the misfortune to witness criminals taking over their countries have reflected about the sad fate of language in such situations. The Language of the Third Reich, by Viktor Klemperer, a Jewish linguist living in Nazi Germany, is a notable example. As Klemperer knew, authoritarians are nihilists who aim to extinguish not just their critics, but hope and meaning and ideals and possibility, and this nihilism also affects language.

The verbiage authoritarians spew at rallies and elsewhere is deadly serious, in that it incites physical violence. And yet this verbiage also means nothing: it is just a show, a display of egotistical ranting, and a distraction from corruption and crime.

This removal of meaning is why the Italian writer Elio Vittorini's 1941 novel Conversations in Sicily, written during Fascism, features a protagonist who is living through a crisis of language. He works as a typographer for a state-run newspaper, but the words he is supposed to form from the individual letters no longer make any sense to him. "It was as if I had nothing to say, nothing to affirm or negate, nothing of my own to stake a claim with."

When Vittorini wrote the book in the late 1930s, Fascism had entered its imperial, antisemitic phase, consumed with creating a glorious new order alongside Hitler, adding Jews to the roster of state enemies, and launching an absurd campaign of "linguistic autarchy" that banned words of foreign origin like cocktail bar and chauffeur (now being revived in Italy by neofascist prime minister Giorgia Meloni).

So, the typographer leaves his job and journeys to Sicily, a space that has remained, in the novel, unaffected by Fascist social engineering schemes. There he encounters Italians who are resisting: there is a guy who goes door to door to sharpen people's knives; there is another guy who is trying to find a "fresh conscience." And there are people who communicate through evasive and hermetic sounds, which Vittorini calls "parole suggellate" (“sealed words,” such as "hmm" and "ahhh") which the secret police cannot penetrate or interpret.

He also meets the ghost of his brother, who has lost his life in a Fascist imperial campaign and tells him that he is wounded again by "every published and spoken word, every millimeter of bronze erected" in memory of wars undertaken in bad faith. That's in keeping with how wars waged by autocrats today: mass loss of life among the population means nothing to the leader —just ask Putin— and neither do the rote commemorations the state engages in.

Given the authoritarian perversion of language and the demands made on language by corrupt regimes, it's not surprising that the Fascist years spawned the hermeticist movement in poetry. A 1923 poem by Eugenio Montale, which begins with the line "Don't ask us for the word to frame our shapeless spirit on all sides," anticipates the hermetic spirit

Published the year after Mussolini became prime minister in a climate of extreme violence, it ends: "Don't demand the magic word that opens worlds/some syllable that's distorted and dry as a stick/ All we can tell you today is this: what we aren't and what we don't wish for." 

Whatever Montale's intentions in writing these verses, it reads today also as a statement of non-compliance with Fascist desires for acclamation, and a refusal to take part in Fascism's language games.

"Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic," Klemperer observed. They are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all." As authoritarianism advances in America, we will look to poets to uphold the beauty and precision of words and the healing power of language.