
Philosopher Anna Vinkelman - about the meaning of the language in the political struggle:
“In peacetime, the dependence of thinking on culture and politics is high. But in a heated, catastrophic situation, the words begin to fight in the literal sense. Both among themselves as external political positions, and for a person. They either want to drag him to their side, or confuse him until complete mental destruction. <...>
From history, we learn tragic examples of how the loss of distance looks like. How the game of politicians forms the consciousness of citizens and politicians themselves. <...> One of the most impressive and fascinating readers of philosophical analyzes of the connection of language and politics was given to Hannna Arendt in the "banality of Evil" (1963), where she covered the lawsuit over Eichmann.
"Eichmann, who committed monstrous crimes, is constantly hiding behind the tongue:" bureaucratic style (Amtsprache) is the only language available to me. "But this bureaucratic style has become his language because it really was not able to pronounce a single unlined phrase." Arendt also says that Hitler's supporters needed to observe strict "linguistic norms". For example, in some military documents it was impossible to write the word "murder": the prescribed code designations of the murders were such words as "final decision" or "forced relocation". <...>
Replacing some words with others, politicians violated the natural ratio of the word and events, perverted this distance, turned it inside out. The embittered context was invited and destroyed the border between the internal and external. For the same reason, it became almost impossible to distinguish a lie from the truth. <...> Thus, thinking as a natural process was destroyed. It got to the point that the wording of "guaranteeing a merciful death" formed the mentality of the murderers, and evil ceased to be a crime and temptation.
In 2023, this example should serve as a reminder that the state is a large, difficult organization given in the language, but the language of the state must be monitored no less than with its own. <...>
The intellectual takes a distance to entire structures and their crisis situations. <...> Reflection and prospects of philosophers are a good way to learn to take a distance not to escape from reality, but in order to consciously come to it. <...>
The resolution of the disaster will be not only in the language - but in the language it will be too. To protect and educate your language is also a type of battle. ”