Just what is going on in the world? What is all of this “cancellation”, “Critical Race Theory”, “alt-right” business really all about? In one word, it is about language. “Yes,” some might well say, “we know that.” Some others might say: “It is about far more than language, it is about politics and power.” 

Both of these “some” are of course perfectly correct. If Modernism and Post-modernism had any lessons to teach us it was that: he/she/they who control the language, control the politics.

Colonialism, apartheid, Nazism, the Chinese Communist Party, the Bolsheviks of the Soviet Union — all understood the simple political truth: if you can get “them” to speak like “me”, to use my words rather than their own, you will have gone quite some way to controlling and dominating them.

Furthermore, if they don’t speak like you and you wish to undermine them, you can say they don’t speak pure, suiwer, correct, “the king’s” or “queen’s” versions of the language and are thus inferior and should/can/must be excluded (what some might call “cancelled” today).

And as the British upper class have found, you can run a country very effectively based on how you speak rather than who you are. Just look at Rishi Sunak or for that matter Benjamin Disraeli. Despite what Trevor Noah has said, it really doesn’t seem to matter what Sunak’s race is. What matters is how he speaks. (Of course I am not denying that there are racists out there that say he doesn’t belong etc. But Sunak is head of the Conservative Party!).

Another proof of this is Boris Johnson. Widely considered to be more English than roast beef, Johnson actually gets his name from that wokest of woke things, a name change. His grandfather was a man of Turkish descent by the name of Osman Kemal who changed his name to Wilfred Johnson.

George Orwell once wrote that quite commonly one finds “the founders of nationalist movements do not even belong to the country they have glorified. Sometimes they are outright foreigners, or more often they come from peripheral areas where nationality is doubtful. Examples are Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon, De Valera, Disraeli, Poincaré, Beaverbrook.”

One could of course add HF Verwoerd, who was Dutch. But I am straying somewhat from the point. Interestingly, what most of these nationalists claimed was that there was some purity in the German, Russian, English and Afrikaner people and that that purity was held in the language itself. Most of these nationalists attempted to get the nation to speak in one specific way, with a very specific and “pure” vocabulary.

One thing that Orwell knew better than most is that if you can control the language people speak, you can control the people. This is precisely what the likes of Helen Zille recognise too with her fight against “wokeness”. But people like Zille also make demands on language. Her argument, along with the alt-right’s, is precisely the other side of the same coin. The right’s claim is that you must carry on using their language, a language built on an ideology of the past.

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Both sides, both left and right, are determined in their claims that their language better reflects reality. But the reality is, that neither side’s language reflects reality. They are, as Wittgenstein might have put it, engaged in a language game. As Orwell and the Russian philosopher Bakhtin (who were both in many senses victims of Empire) would have said, the Right and the Left’s language is rooted in ideology, and ideological language is a play for power, not a reflection of truth.

Truth, Orwell suggested in his essays, comes from a continual internal reflection on one’s own prejudices. Orwell continually forced himself to challenge his own upbringing. He tried to recognise his own prejudices and sought to understand them. Bakhtin, in turn, thought that truth could only be found in a mixture of all the ideologies. As he once suggested, truth is a symphony, while ideological language is the attempt to reduce that symphony to a simple tune played on the piano keyboard.

When the Right say, in South Africa, that there is a white farmers’ genocide, they are simply not playing the whole symphony that is the South African truth. When the Left say that if there was something called “reverse racism” white people would be living in townships, they are taking a very narrow view on racism. It suggests that racism only ends in apartheid, which it does not. There is plenty of racism in the world without there being apartheid. And as Orwell repeatedly noted, we are all capable of irrational racial prejudices.

The battle out there is something very different to these reflections on truth. The battle is about getting others to speak in the way you do, to use your words and your arguments. These demands of language are always ideological. From forcing people to learn in Afrikaans, to demands on calling somebody “they/them” instead of “he/she”, these language battles are ideological, and they are about holding power.

Of course, we should not see power as solely negative, power can be a force for good. And language does shift, sometimes for ideologically good reasons. Not using certain words that offend fellow members of your society is certainly a good thing — that’s if you want society to get along.

However, the power that is obtained within ideology and the use of its purified language is deeply questionable. Some of the most inclusive states in the world have generally been led by parties and governments with “broad churches”, with many ideologic voices, dialects and languages within them.

The ANC was once such a party, now no longer. These days of course the ANC mocks and mimics at being diverse and having beliefs. It is now a crucible of nothingness, its leaders are a set of “hollow men” who seem to be in it largely for the Orwellian slop in the trough.

Sadly, the political battles that we see today are no longer democratic ones, and they have little to do with who controls our roofless and largely dysfunctional Parliament. Just take the DA (or at least its national leaders). They have largely given up on the idea of power through the national vote. Instead, they have taken to Twitter as some form of surrogate.

Developing micro-powers on the Twittersphere is seemingly a great substitute for the ballot box. This has been recognised the world over. Power is now a matter of the gathering forces on social media — no doubt with the hope of gaining actual political power by largely populist and dubiously “democratic” means.

And how those who desire power across the world seek it on social media is by convincing and cajoling others to speak and tweet like them.

People say, relatively regularly, that their “Twitter personality” is different to their real one. Just why would this be so unless something very strange is going on? Or at least some form of game is being played.

Like the colonised, the aspirant working-class or lower-middle-class English person, the Party junior, the Twitter user knows that to become something in the system they have to be something other than themselves. They must speak the language game of the powerful — whoever this might be.

All of this, I am afraid, has little to do with truth and democracy. And as happened with colonialism, the British class system, and apartheid, it will come to no good. DM