[BRIEF NOTE] Populism, or divide-and-conquer?

Over at The New Republic, Joseph Braude has an interesting article, "Language Barrier," examining what communications barriers between the United States and the Arab world.

Since September 11, the U.S. government's bid to promote democracy and improve America's image in the Arab world has consisted largely of countering anti-American pan-Arab media with pro-American pan-Arab media. In 2003, the State Department launched a glossy magazine called Hi, which it distributed in 13 Arab countries. The U.S.-backed Al Hurra television network--which recently celebrated its first anniversary--offers programs resembling those of Al Jazeera in nearly every local market reached by its rival. The former chairman of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, Harold Pachios, has written, "Now more than ever, the United States needs it own voice in the Arabic language." And these efforts go beyond government programs. Witness the Global Americana Institute, which seeks "to engage in translation, publication, and distribution of books on the United States in Arabic. The initial volume will be the key works of Thomas Jefferson."

[. . .]

The challenge of winning hearts and minds among populations with high illiteracy rates is doubly complex in the case of the Arab world. Not only are 70 million Arabs unable to read or write; a much larger number of the region's 280 million people do not fully speak or understand the standardized Arabic language (known as "Fus'ha") that is used in broadcast news as well as official discourse and the academy. Fus'ha was introduced in schools across the region beginning about 90 years ago as a component of pan-Arab nationalism. It is a formal construct, gleaned from classical Arabic grammar and wholly consistent with Koranic syntax, designed to unite the 20-odd Arab countries culturally and politically. But nine decades later it unites, in effect, only the region's elites.

Now, it's true that Cairene Arabic, propagated by Egypt's influential printed and electronic mass media, has gained currency across the Arab world. It's also true that the different Arabics spoken are mutually unintelligible, or at least as mutually unintelligible as the different standardized Romance languages. (EDIT: Or, perhaps, not; see the comments of optimussven.) This isn't surprising, considering that Arabic has been developing across a vast and territoprially fragmented space for more than fourteen centuries, or that it was superimposed over different languages (Berber dialects in the Maghreb, Coptic in Egypt, Aramaic languages in the Fertile Crescent).

Braude's solution to the fragmentation of the Arabophone language community? Encourage the fragmentation.

The Arab world today stands at a crossroads--between an old-fashioned allegiance to the contrived political agenda of a single Arab nation (or a single Islamic nation) and a new twenty-first-century emphasis on distinct, democratic national polities that focus on their own social and political challenges. But the latter will not be possible if a country's majority does not understand the language of government. Thus where countries have grassroots movements calling for mother-tongue media and education--the list includes Egypt, Lebanon, and Morocco--the United States should support their efforts. The renowned Beirut linguist Sa'id A'il plans to publish the first ever "dictionary of Lebanese" this summer for a small group of scholars, but there is no program in place to develop his life's work into a curriculum. An independent newspaper began publishing in "Moroccan" in May 2003 and has won a large following among the working class but requires investment in order to expand.

Might the Middle East Partnership Initiative--founded with great fanfare by the Bush administration in January 2003 to promote discourse and civil society in the Arab world--consider supporting projects like these? One of the Initiative's existing projects, which subsidizes the translation and publication of children's books by Scholastic, predictably does so in Fus'ha--a one-size-fits-all approach for every Arab country. Not an encouraging sign. On the other hand, the U.S.-backed Radio Sawa, which broadcasts locally on FM dials across the region, has begun to include some local vernacular content in five separate Arab markets. More work along these lines is needed.

My reaction? I don't claim to be an Arabist, but I suspect that the sight of the United States encouraging the linguistic fragmentation of the Arab world would backfire rather spectacularly, not least because of the central role of the Arabic standard language in Islam. Compare, if you would, the role played by Mandarin Chinese in uniting the People's Republic of China, where perhaps one-third of the population speaks "dialects"--Cantonese, Shanghainese, and the like--which are actually spoken languages unintelligible to speakers of Mandarin Chinese. As Christopher Bodeen notes in the Malaysian Star, language is a major unspoken issue in modern China.

Promotion of Mandarin--known in Chinese as putonghua, or "common tongue"--began in the 1920s and became policy in 1955, six years after the communists seized power.

Its use has been encouraged through an unending series of social campaigns, including the current one featuring TV presenter Wang Xiaoya on billboards exhorting Shanghainese to "speak Mandarin ... be a modern person."

In the latest campaign, Shanghai city officials are being required to attend classes on perfecting their pronunciation, schools are nominating contestants in city-wide Mandarin speech contests and foreigners are being invited to Mandarin classes.

[. . .]

Despite support for dialects, Mandarin’s influence reaches deep. Speaking the language well is considered a sign of good breeding and education. And because China has bound the use of Mandarin so closely to the idea of national unity, promotion of other dialects can sometimes be seen as insulting if not traitorous.

Taiwan’s efforts to promote its local dialect have been angrily denounced in Beijing as "anti-Chinese". Even at an entertainment awards show in Shanghai, Chinese reporters drown out Hong Kong celebrities speaking in Cantonese with exasperated shouts of "speak Mandarin".

It's interesting to note that China is not heading towards a situation of Mandarin Chinese monolingualism across the country; China's regional languages are too strongly rooted.

"Many parts of China are heading for a situation of what linguists call diglossia, where there is one ‘high’ or public language ... and one ‘low’ or local language that is used among friends and family," says Stevan Harrell, an expert on Chinese languages at the University of Washington.

Use of dialects may even be strengthening in some areas with strong local identities, sometimes for economic reasons. In Guangzhou (that’s Mandarin for the great southern city of Canton), broad-casters are allowed to speak Cantonese to compete with the nearby Hong Kong stations.

Comparisons with the linguistic situation in the Arab world come readily to mind. Granted that the Arab world has never been politically unified in an Arab state and likely never will be, the sense of allegiance to a broader Arab world appears to be fairly potent even in Morocco, Lebanon, and Egypt, perhaps especially in these countries given their centrality (cultural, economic, political) to the Arab world.

Trying to encourage--or, perhaps, accelerate--the collapse of Arab cultural unity from the outside will be counterproductive. If the Arabic-derived vernaculars of Morocco, Lebanon, and Egypt ever attain the dignity of national languages, they'll have to do so on their own terms, within the contexts of the societies and polities which--Braude rightly notes--they would help define.

UPDATE (12:12 AM) : Matthew Yglesias reacts.

UPDATE (6:48 PM) : optimussven reacts.

[NON BLOG] One reason why I ride the TTC

Travelling west on the Queen Street streetcar after choir practice last night, I got on at the northeastern corner of Queen Street East and Jarvis with a half-dozen other people. Among this number was a couple--one man, one woman--in their 40s, screaming at each other about where they had misplaced their Valiums.

I sat down on one bank of seats; she sat down behind me on the aisle seat, he standing on the aisle beside her, the window seat being taken by another gentleman. She offered her seatmate some black licorice candies; her partner yelled at her that she shouldn't impose on him.

At the Queen TTC station, her seatmate disembarked, and she took the aisle seat. (Her partner remained seated.) At the Osgoode TTC station, the empty aisle seat was taken by a young woman who looked vaguely like Tori Spelling. This new person was intermittantly but enthusiastically chatted up by the first woman, whose partner continued to lurk in the background, hanging onto the railing.

Five minutes after we passed Osgoode into the subway-less wilds of Queen Street West, she asked the hapless young woman where to get off for the subway. She told them.

- Oh, shit!

They began swearing at each other. I looked back; they saw me.

- How the fuck do you get to the subway?

- Um, I stuttered, you can take a street car in the other direction--

Tori intervened.

- Uh, if you get out at Dufferin, you can take a streetcar north to the subway [the Bloor line].

They left at the next stop, at Dufferin, thanking her.

[BRIEF NOTE] Damn, they found out

From the inimitable, and heterosexual, heraclitus:

I surely can't be the only one who finds this picture hilarious? It's the homosexualist communist conspiracy up to no good again, this time in the Philippines, where the local Communist revolutionaries have started marrying off comrades. We, by which I mean John Derbyshire, all know this is merely the first step to the eventual homosexualist communist takeover of the liberal democratic countries and our eventual sequestering in breeder camps, where we will be forced to produce young virile children to sate their depraved lusts. Personally, I intend to collaborate with them in exchange for getting to be in charge of making babies.

[BRIEF NOTE] We never, never learn (item of evidence #2)

From the Anadolu Agency, the article "Lawyer Pekmezci Denounces Pamuk":

Orhan Pekmezci, one of lawyers affiliated with the Kayseri Bar, denounced famous writer Orhan Pamuk to the Chief Prosecutor's Office.

In an interview with the A.A on Friday, Pekmezci said, ''Pamuk formulated baseless allegations against Turkey in an interview with a Swiss newspaper.''

''I strongly condemn Pamuk who said, 'no one can talk about these, but I will tell them. 1 million Armenians and 30 thousand Kurds were killed in Turkey'. He insulted the Republic of Turkey, Turkish parliament and government, and military forces with his words. Also, his statement causes hatred and enmity among people. Therefore, I denounced him to the Chief Prosecutor's Office in Kayseri,'' he added.

Earlier, Pekmezci applied to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) for annulment of decision of the French parliament recognizing so-called Armenian genocide.

From the Gündüz Atan's article for Turkish Daily News, "The nationalist normalization":

In countries (such as Turkey and Russia) suffering from the trauma of moving from one civilization to another, the nihilistic movements that deny national identity flourished within the framework of the Marxist ideology at first. When such a movement appeared at one "end" of the spectrum, political movements based exclusively on national and religious identity appeared on the other "end" as a requirement of the very nature of dialectics.

In our country, while the leftist movement has become "more liberal" since the collapse of communism, it has continued to harbor deep-seated feelings of hate towards the state and towards the national identity, the feelings it had developed due to the traumas it suffered during the Sept. 12 administration. As a result, it has been out of the question for the nationalist movements to lose strength.

The problem is not Orhan Pamuk. The old-leftists-turned-liberals will not be able to avoid triggering nationalistic reactions as long as they consistently consider Turkey to be in the wrong (as they had done during the fight against the PKK) on such issues as Kurdish ethnic nationalism in the EU membership process, the Armenian "genocide" claims, the Greek Cypriot claims in Cyprus and the Greek claims in the Aegean. If they continue to project primitive super-ego qualities to the "state" concept, they will meet with the same nationalist reaction. If they prove to be ostensibly secular but devoid of any religious culture -- let alone any religious beliefs -- the power of the movements based on religion will continue.

I've talked about the Armenian genocide before, last April in "Genocides and Denial", last December critically in relation to the Armenian genocide and Turkey's European Union bid and relating to a nine-thousand-word-long fisking of "Genocides and Denial."

I continue to find it really and profoundly disturbing that in the year 2005, nine decades after the beginning of the slaughter of approximately one million Armenians--the slaughter that Hitler identified as the prototype of the Holocaust with his question, "Who remembers the Armenians?"--one of Turkey's most famous authors can be brought up on criminal charges for speaking the truth about a shameful period in his country's past.

This is a country that wants to join the European Union?

What, I wonder, is the word that means the exact opposite of "brilliant"?