Globalise the how's-your-father

On language, coercion, and action

"it is as though we were caught in a maze of abstractions, metaphors, and figures of speech in which everything can be taken and mistaken for something else, because we have no reality, either in history or in everyday experience, to which we can unanimously appeal"

Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, Viking Press, 1961, p136

So we're having an argument about language again. We're fighting about what we can and can't say. While people are being killed. Bombed. Shot. Beaten. Blown up.

It's almost as though it might be useful for those in power to keep us arguing about words instead of, you know, doing politics. We owe our capacity to be a "political being", as Arendt tells us, to the fact that we are "endowed with the power of speech" (On Revolution, p19). But she explains how that power is one of the central aspects that has been stripped from us in this chasm between the no longer and the not yet, and we must, above all, lean in to speaking and acting together in ways that help us learn how to understand each other again.

Grace Tame has been cancelled [again, difficult language. But, in this case, yes, she has had her income smashed because institutions have literally cancelled her appearances thanks to a concerted campaign] because she used the phrase "globalise the intifada" at a protest.

To me, this whole situation is demonstrative of the category error that political language is the same as political action (see this older post for more on that), and that an attempt to control language, to legislate for it, can have a desired, predictable result. The only predictable result is that you damage both politics and language - both of which depend on shared reality - even further.

It's obvious that the word intifada has different meanings for different people.

Unfortunately, because of the way political discourse is utterly broken, we can't talk to each other about what those meanings might be and thus find our way to a shared reality in which to discuss what to do. Instead, we now fall into an adversarial battle of coercion and supremacy, using words as our weapons, speaking at each other at cross purposes, holding our meanings tightly. This is not communication. It is not politics - certainly not as Arendt understood politics.

The Arabic word intifada literally, as I understand it, means "shaking off", and is generally translated as uprising, or rebellion. It has been pointed out that the US Holocaust museum used the word in its Arabic translation of materials about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

The fact that this implies a struggle against an oppressor is, I suspect, one of the reasons some find it challenging to accept the term. But most who object to it don't dig that deeply - they simply respond to the feeling that, for them, it calls to mind the suicide bombers of the Second Intifada, despite the fact that suicide bombers, and other violent means, were the extreme end of a broad and long uprising that also encompassed many nonviolent tactics such as protests, marches and sit ins. Indeed, the fact that these nonviolent tactics were often met with overwhelming violence by the IDF is undoubtedly the key reason why violence became more frequent and intense.

Does the word itself imply violence? Well, does the word uprising in English imply violence?

I’d argue that, to the extent that we might assume it implies violence, it’s mostly because our political system forces us to imagine that the only way to overturn an oppressive regime is through violence. Nonviolence is consistently erased. Including through often describing nonviolent protests as violent, in order to discredit them. See Sydney last month. And, as noted, see the countless documented examples of the IDF firing on nonviolent and unarmed Palestinians, in the same way that US police fire on unarmed African American men - because they are coded as violent.

It’s worth remembering, of course, that the Warsaw Ghetto intifada was not nonviolent. But many others have been.

It’s bleedingly obvious to me that Grace Tame, in using the phrase "globalise the intifada", did not intend to call for violent uprising against Jews around the world. It’s entirely clear, from the context of who she is and what she campaigns for, that she was calling for protest, and it is typical disingenuous nonsense to pretend otherwise.

It’s also obvious to me that there will be some people who will hear the term with that meaning. Some of those will be Jews for whom it legitimately brings up trauma. Some, tragically, will be extremists who are tempted by the normalising of the language to act in such a way. This latter, I suspect, is a particularly uncomfortable truth for some on the left today, including friends of mine.

It’s also crucial to recognise that this particular phrase was essentially unused in Australia before governments, pushed by Jillian Segal and others, decided after the horrific Bondi attack to attempt to ban it.

Of course, after that over-reach, protesters chose to adopt the phrase. That is how our political discourse is constructed now - forcing us ever back into our respective corners.

Is it good that protesters adopted a phrase they had previously (I think) shied away from because of its possible problematic implications? No, it’s dumb. In my humble opinion, it's foolish. But it’s entirely predictable.

Do we hold Grace Tame accountable for using a phrase in this context? Surely not.

Is there any actual power in either using or banning the slogan? To me, the only lesson is that it’s only going to backfire. In each direction.

And that backfire benefits those currently in power.

The whole point of making the debate about particular phrases which we can or can't use is to make sure we don’t talk about the actual issues or, heaven forfend, actually do something. It's not about distraction, to be clear - it's about breaking politics, and boiling it down to simple coercive power.

One of the key themes of Arendt's work - clearly Between Past and Future, but also On Revolution and The Origins of Totalitarianism, too - is the dialectical relationship between politics and coercion. Politics is by definition, for her, about the capacity to talk and act together "in concert". She has this lovely line about Athenian "polis-life, which to an incredibly large extent consisted of citizens talking with one another". This talk enables action, but from action comes a will to power and to coercion. And coercion destroys our capacity to talk. It kills what makes politics live.

"Where violence rules," she says "everything and everybody must fall silent." (On Revolution, p18)

We need to constantly guard against that tendency.

If we're actually to get anywhere towards change - whether it be towards peace or climate action or ending intimate partner violence or anything else - we are going to have to stop following these old, well-worn paths that make us argue about whether can or can't use particular words, and start actually using our words to work together, patiently explaining our meanings, openly listening to each other, forming relationships, cultivating spaces where we can act together.

We have to live together in this in between in order to make the not yet a reality.