My Life in Propaganda: Language and Totalitarian Regimes - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Magda Stroinska MA (Warsaw), PhD (Edinburgh) has been a Professor of Linguistics and German at McMaster University since 1988. Her major areas of research and publication include sociolinguistics, analysis of discourse, and cross-cultural issues in pragmatics and cognition, in particular linguistic representations of culture, cultural stereotyping, language and politics, propaganda, the issues of identity in exile, aging and bilingualism, translation, interpretation and language brokering, as well as language and psychological trauma.

She has published numerous articles and book chapters and co-edited a number of books: on stereotypes in language teaching with Martin Löschmann (Stereotype im Fremdsprachenunterricht, Peter Lang 1998); on linguistic representations of culture (Relative Points of View, Berghahn 2001); on Exile, language and identity (with Vikki Cecchetto, Peter Lang 2003), on International classroom: Challenging the notion (with Vikki Cecchetto, Peter Lang 2006), and on Unspeakable: Narratives of trauma (with Vikki Cecchetto and Kate Szymanski, Peter Lang 2014). I translated Victor Klemperer's book The Language of the Third Reich from German into Polish and published it in 1992 (Polski Fundusz Wydawniczy, Toronto).

Magda Stroinska MA (Warsaw), PhD (Edinburgh) has been a Professor of Linguistics and German at McMaster University since 1988. Her major areas of research and publication include sociolinguistics, analysis of discourse, and cross-cultural issues in pragmatics and cognition, in particular linguistic representations of culture, cultural stereotyping, language and politics, propaganda, the issues of identity in exile, aging and bilingualism, translation, interpretation and language brokering, as well as language and psychological trauma.

She has published numerous articles and book chapters and co-edited a number of books: on stereotypes in language teaching with Martin L?schmann (Stereotype im Fremdsprachenunterricht, Peter Lang 1998); on linguistic representations of culture (Relative points of view, Berghahn 2001); on Exile, language and identity (with Vikki Cecchetto, Peter Lang 2003), on International classroom: Challenging the notion (with Vikki Cecchetto, Peter Lang 2006), and on Unspeakable: Narratives of trauma (with Vikki Cecchetto and Kate Szymanski, Peter Lang 2014). She translated Victor Klemperer’s book The Language of the Third Reich from German into Polish and published it in 1992 (Polski Fundusz Wydawniczy, Toronto).

Von der hinteren Coverseite

My Life in Propaganda is Magda Stroińska's personal account of growing up with communist propaganda in Eastern Europe. She compares the beliefs of her family with what she was taught at school, learning early on about double interpretations and ambiguities through language. Through her chosen field of linguistics, she analyzes ways in which propagandistic language, such as 'doubletalk, ' Orwellian 'Newspeak, ' 'weasel words, ' and, more colloquially, 'bullshit, ' is used to distort reality. The book demonstrates that democracy can never be taken for granted.

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From Chapter 5, The Facade of Doublespeak

Communist propaganda transformed ‘patriotism’, one of the key words of the Polish Romantic tradition, into a servile word with no mind of its own. It also made many people mistrustful of its intentions. When The USA PATRIOT Act was signed into law by President George W. Bush on October 26, 2001, less than two months after September 11, most people accepted the necessity to temporarily compromise civil liberties in the face of terrorist threats. The word PATRIOT helped to make people believe that allowing government to have access to private information about every citizen was indeed necessary. Few people I met know that this agreeable sounding name is an acronym for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001. This name is too convoluted to make anyone think that the acronym is just a coincidence. It cannot be a coincidence as it is a Meisterst?ck of propaganda that Goebbels would have commended. In his essays on metaphor and the war, George Lakoff (1991 and 2003) suggested that propaganda tends to frame war using various metaphors, e.g., disease, business (balancing costs and benefits) or a fairy tale. In the post 9/11 political context, terrorists, Taliban, Al-Qaida, or Saddam Hussein all fit the role of the villain while the USA could be cast as either the victim or the hero or both. In a fairy tale scenario, the hero attempts to rescue the victim from the hands of the villain. In national and international affairs, patriotism is a natural attribute of the hero figure and so hardly anyone questioned the name of the act, even though many questioned its content and its impact on individual freedoms.

In a somewhat similar way, the word ‘realism’ also came to signify the point of view that agreed with the Party line. Głowiński (1996: 132) comments that in Polish history, a reference to realism indicated either a rational and measured approach to the situation at hand or was a sign of opportunism, possibly even treason. After the martial law of 1981, ‘realism’ meant as much as agreeing that the authorities had no choice but to call in the army. This was the theory of the ‘lesser evil’ (mniejsze zło) advanced by the military government. The ‘greater evil’ was the allegedly unavoidable ‘brotherly help’ that would have been offered by the Soviet Union and other countries of the Warsaw Pact, i.e., military intervention. With time, ‘realism’ developed into an empty phrase, used to justify about anything. This means that, as Głowiński argues, it meant nothing (ibid., 133).

Another expression that was used to signify a person who was in agreement with the party line was człowiek ideowy (‘a man/person of ideas’). The adjective ideowy derives from the noun idea. While, in theory, this means as much as the English ‘idea’ or ‘thought’, in communist Newspeak the meaning was restricted to ‘progressive’ ideas, and ‘progress’ was defined according to communist ideology. In a similar fashion, ‘scientific world-view’ meant the Marxist interpretation of the world. Generally, communist Newspeak operated on dichotomies. Everything was presented as black and white, good (progressive) or evil (reactionary). However, I am not sure what the antonym of the communist ‘man of ideas’ was supposed to be. It needed to be a pejorative concept (but bezideowy, meaning ‘without ideas,’ was not common) and one that comes to my mind is ‘cosmopolitan’. Of course, it does not make much sense on the surface, but a ‘cosmopolitan’ was someone with liberal and relativist views which makes that concept close to the opposite of someone with well defined progressive views. Yet, ‘cosmopolitan’ was also most commonly used as the negative version of ‘internationalist’. Głowiński notes in 1969 that labelling an artistic movement as ‘cosmopolitan’ signalled that the authorities were about to hinder its development (Głowiński 1991: 104). He also points out that such labels had no definitive meanings as, for instance, following the March 1968 ‘events’ in Poland, Jews were accused, in turns, of Zionism (i.e., a form of nationalism) and cosmopolitanism.