That Russian is a broken language

The puzzling fact that I simply do not understand Russian political discourse – I mean the sort of stuff ordinary Russians say about politics – was suddenly put in perspective for me by the reading of a Russian historian-scholar (yes) about the Khazar state which, he said, I quote (yes!) had once been “a politico-military octopus sucking out the blood of the Russian state”. (Come to think about it, this sentence is such damnable nonsense that we should name the culprit in order to shame him. Voila: Lev Gomulev).

The statement is sheer nonses: the relationship between the Khazar and the Early Russian state is no more clear (there simply are no documents to say one way or another) than the scholar’s metaphor: after all, octopi are not blood suckers. Surely, the author of the sentence knew it, but didn’t care. In fact, he didn’t care about the patent nonsense of the metaphor at all.

Why?

This statement has suddenly thrown for me into sharp relief similar statements coming from my Russian friends about “mongol-muslim hordes” and such. This is, it turns out, how all Russians speak when they talk of politics, and they speak that way because, I suddenly realized, they do not have what other nations might term political discourse (that is, rational speech about conflict of interests); their political language is no more than an overactive praise/abuse apparatus imported wholesale from the old Soviet/Russian propaganda machine wherein argument was avoided (one could hardly argue for any Soviet/Russian policy?) in favor of naked (and empty) emotional appeals.

And so, for example, “reactionary forces” (itself a meaningless propaganda-smithed verbal nonsensity) were “the beslobbered dwarf of reaction”. That closed the issue; it was not necessary to analyze further why we were all supposed to be against “reactionary forces”, for, after all, who could possibly want to be for “beslobbered dwarves”? Matters stand similarly with blood-sucking octopi.

Now, language is a crucial tool for thought – if you cannot say something and then analyze it for content, then you have no idea what you really think. (I think one can make this claim about Lev Gomulev’s statement about octopi). But language is also extraordinary fragile; it is easily broken. Why, to the extent that most of us use language to emote rather than think, one could suggest that every language is constantly subjected to a kind of process of entropy, a constant slide into chaos of meaninglessness. As great analytical philosophers knew, it takes all of one’s effort to protect our language from falling into the thick fog of nonsense, and to create and maintain the verbal tools necessary for meaningful speech.

By contrast, a sustained effort to break down a language will easily break it down, since it works, as it were, with gravity, downhill, towards natural degeneration and degrengolade. Russian political language has been broken in this way through centuries of battering with propaganda nonsense and no one seems to be trying to fix it.

The truth is that those who use it to spout nonsensical abuse understand what they say no better than I do. Quite literally, the stuff they say means nothing.