Читать книгу The Age of the Warrior: Selected Writings - Robert Fisk - Страница 23
ОглавлениеThe misuse and manipulation of language – the worthless semantics of journalists and politicians and even academics – is becoming ever more frequent and ever more dangerous. It’s not just the clichés we are taught to use when we are cub reporters, nor the banal language of our pseudo-statesmen nor the secretive language of anthropologists; nor the politically ‘correct’ message of advertisers, company executives and diplomats. In the Middle East, our weasel words can be lethal, especially when they are subtly intended to define the ‘good guys’ from the ‘bad guys’, to undermine the humanity of one race of people at the expense of another. Our journalism is already biased – the initial response of French writers and intellectuals to the 1967 Middle East war is proof enough of this – without resorting to subterranean words that ‘key in’ our prejudice. Perhaps we now ‘experience’ language rather than listen to it. Over the years, I have more and more studied the Babel of lies that we produce, and the few – the pitifully few – writers who believe, like Victor Klemperer, in ‘the truth of language’.
