There is more tension in the political and media debate than in people’s ordinary lives. The banality with which the concepts of Nazism, fascism, genocide or apartheid are used remind me of George Orwell’s reflections written a century ago in which he said that “it must be recognized that the current political chaos is related to the decline of language and that perhaps it is possible to make some improvement starting from the verbal front”.
When there is a bad atmosphere in general, the language is vulgarized. I am not surprised to discover, pointed out Orwell in the thirties of the last century, that the German, Italian and Russian languages had deteriorated as a result of the dictatorships. Authoritarian systems fear contrasting discourses with reality. Changing the meaning of words, Montaigne said and Lewis Carroll repeated it, is the first step to distorting reality. Authoritarians are the ones who know how to do it best.
We are in the middle of a long electoral process and the rhetoric and insults run from one end to the other without calculating the consequences. The latest regrettable episode has been the protagonist of President Milei when he insulted the head of the Spanish Government and his wife without any more evidence than what has appeared in the press or what can be inferred circumstantially from a judge’s decision. The Argentine president has responded through his spokesman in Buenos Aires with a catalog of insults to Milei by Sánchez himself and especially by minister Óscar Puente, who said that the Argentine president was taking drugs.
Diplomatic bickering and hostile language that, for now, has not affected mutual economic interests and neither the good understanding between the Spanish and Argentines, with so many things shared for centuries.
We are seeing the hatred of the adversary in the politics of democratic countries daily in this year’s American electoral debate. Trump openly insults Biden and journalists and judges who oppose him. The attack on the Slovak Prime Minister, Robert Fico, was attributed to the climate of hatred in that country. The hatred between Israelis and Palestinians or between Ukrainians and Russians is a consequence of war that has previously been fueled by speeches to destroy old or new enemies.
The problem is that the political language of hate does not remain in simple words, but is transferred to the media critical mass and can eventually reach society as a whole. War is also a failure of speech.
Hatred has built up over the centuries and clashes between East and West date back to the days when the caliphates of Baghdad and Damascus reached central France in the 8th century after seizing the peninsula Iberian Then came the Crusades and later the siege of Vienna by the Ottomans. The last century is sown with irreconcilable hatreds such as the Turkish genocide against the Armenians in 1915 and the genocide of Jews and Gypsies by Nazism. Stalin launched industrial famines and murders that claimed the lives of millions.
Force can tip the balance towards whoever has more guns and more men to sacrifice. But the impact of language should not be underestimated in a world in which knowledge that transcends physical, ideological and cultural borders has been socialized. A strong earth movement has occurred in the global subsoil.
Hamas, Al-Qaida, Hizbullah or the drug cartels do not have states, not even Palestine, or armies with identified commands. If their leaders are captured or killed, they reorganize because power is not personal, but obeys a discourse that is transmitted by a narrative of hatred fueled by words of rejection of the other that come from a lot far away.
A third world war is unlikely with the tactics and strategies of the previous ones. We may witness a globalized war without borders or armies or general staffs in which new technologies allow great ideological battles to be waged through Orwellian ministries of truth that destroy dissenters, minorities who have their own ideas, those who have the value of free thinking.