French Muslims took guard at a church in France's Calais during Christmas mass, as the country's government advises caution in case of terrorist attacks.
French Muslims in the northern French city of Lens made a show of solidarity with the city's Christians, volunteering as guards at the local Catholic Church Christmas mass, French media reported.
The Muslims decided to guard the church after France's Interior Ministry said that "particular vigilance" should be practiced during Christmas mass.
"Beforethe Mass,we invited themtomealswe share withpeople who live alone.And in the end,we will give themthe lightof Bethlehem, which we received from scouts," Lens Pastor Lemble said, calling the initiative "superb."
The head of the Union of Muslim Citizens of Pas-de-Calais, Abdelkader Aoussedj, said that he made the gesture after remembering how Egyptian Muslims defended Coptic Christian churches from fundamentalists in 2013.
"We would have liked this to happen everywhere else, especially at a time when Muslims are stigmatized. That is the true Islam, it has nothing to do with these fools, these bad apples," Aoussedj said.
The nearby city of Calais has been a focus of ethnic tension in recent months, as refugees, primarily Muslim, are often stuck in the city while attempting to get to Britain.
Eugenio o la proclamación de la
primavera; tuve la suerte de conocer a los falangistas de la última hornada, los
auténticos y García Serrano además de majete y buena persona era un falangista cabal. Eugenio era mi director cuando yo servía a España en tierra de infieles y de transfugas rodeado de cañones enemigos que preparaban el contubernio. Carecía de desenfilada y tenía que recurrir a mi valor personal para poner en ridiculo a aquellos "democratas" que acudían al Té de la Embajada. A punto estuve de sacar los puños que no
las pistolas por él cuando un mindudi de Cuenca me estampó ante mis propias
narices:
▬Vosotros los fachas no sabeis
escribir
▬¿Cómo? Repite eso que dijiste. El tal Martinez se volvió atrás. Mi interlocutor no se atrevió a insultar a mi "dire". Nos miramos el uno al otro con ojos alataneros llenos de desprecio. El tal Martinez trabajaba para un periódico dirigido por un falangista que era hijo de Concha Espina y luchó contra los comunistas en el Blau. Sin falangistas no hubiera habido Escuelas de Periodismo y ellos se hubieran quedado sin profesión. Estos que tanto difaman han crecido y medrado a la sombra de la herencia que les legó el Caudillo.
Fuese y no hubo nada pero aquel
sujeto larga melena y pantalones campana moda de los sesenta dios los cría y
ellos se juntan y de la abundancia del corazón habla la boca ha desaparecido del estadillo y su nombre no figura ni en las hemerotecas aunque gozara de cargos y enchufes, vera imagen del perfecto gilipollas... Eran tiempos en
que cada uno defendía a su señorito, estaba de moda, menudo eran los de “Pueblo”. Yo
vi a Raul del Pozo casi romperle, por meterse con Emilio Romero, de un botellazo la cabeza al pobre Federico
Abascal el corresponsal de La Vanguardia que ejercía por entonces de “rojo”. Eramos
demasiado exaltados lo reconozco pero no me arrpentí de nada ni me arrepiento (sólo me arrepiento de aquella chinita que hacía frufru cuando la hacía el amor en Hong Kong) y es mi estilo sacar la
cara por alguien ante el insulto y la provocación. Si lo que llevas dentro es
bilis y serrín, irás vomitando reconcomios por las esquinas en perenne
borrachera. España empezó a llenarse de resentidos. Aquel día en la reunión de la embajada me di cuenta de que hay dos
Españas irreconciliables. Yo pertenecía a la de Eugenio o la proclamación de la
primavera, era la España verdadera, la otra es un sucedaneo, un “Ersatz” como
los de Podemos. Los americanos que controlan la SER y gran parte de los medios
se han sacado un conejo de la chistera, un conejo con coleta, veremos a ver lo que dura. Sin embargo,
por aquellas calendas defendíamos los garbanzos a nuestra manera. Hoy como los
sueldos y las pensiones están asegurados por el momento el personal no protesta.
No te pases que diría el Goyo Gonzalez, aquel tipo siniestro, un machacante de
cierta agencia que cortaba el teletipo y ahora tiene un hijo en la Cope Herrera
en la Onda; pues bueno. Él también me insultó y estuve a punto de tirarlo por las
escaleras. Entonces como ahora, estaba solo, rodeado de viejos fantasmas del
pasado que hacen difícil la convivencia, atalajada con frases
rimbombantes, Y DE LLAMADAS A LOS PACTOS Y AL CONSENSO, que esconden un odio ancestral. España y yo somos así, señora, y la Patria no se negocia.
Yo leía los libros de mi director
“La ventanadaba al rio”, “La fiel infantería” “Plaza del Castillo” en mis
viajes de largo recorrido dentro del tubo londinense dejando que otros se
ocupasen de Kafka de Proust y toda esa clase de literatura disolvente y
dirimente que pusieron en órbita los “pseudo demócratas” y globales que copan actualmente
las editoriales y ejercen de comisarios del pensamiento.
Nunca, hay que decirlo por mucho
que les duela, se produjo en nuestras letras un reventón literario tan
importante como durante el franquismo con y a pesar de la censura. Fue una
floración mucho más importantes que las generaciones del 27 y del 98 sólo
igualable a la efervescencia que hubieron las letras castellanas en el siglo de
oro. García Serrano demostraba estar en poder de una prosa inimitable.
La fiel infantería , con todo y eso, no pasó la
censura ni tampoco “La Colmena” sus autores dos falangistas que nada tenían que
ver con la Santa Casa.
El primado de Toledo aquel
catalán bajito calvorota lentes redondos de concha un tipo avieso represor y reprimido que se llamaba Pla
y Daniel mandó recoger la obra alegando que en el libro se decían demasiadas
palabrotas. “examinada serena y objetivamente –dice el decreto “obstat” de don Enrique
Pla y Daniel otorgado en Toledo a 15 enero 1944- la novela del sr García
Serrano resulta
1) que se
proponen como necesarios e inevitables los pecados de lujuria de la juventud
(págs. 195 y 302); describiéndose escenas de cabarets y de prostíbulo
Que está
salpicada toda la novela de expresiones obscenas e indecorosas
2) aun cuando
varios personajes de la novela manifiestan sentimientos religiosos aparecen
éstos como algo rutinario con añadidos de sabor escéptico anticlericaly volteriano aun en labios de soldados
nacionales. (¡Pero qué cosas dice su Eminencia Reverendísima, si aquellos guripas peleando en el
frente no sabían quien era Voltaire, algunos no habíkan cumplido con la escuela cuando fueron llamados a filas!)
3) decretamos
pues que este libro nocivo a nuestra juventud sea prohibido por atentar contra
la moral y las buenas costumbres y lo denunciamos públicamente cumpliendo con
nuestros deberes pastorales”
La fielinfantería aparecería años más tarde
en una edición de 1964 alcanzando tiradas casi millonarias en la Editorial
Planeta. He aquí un libro que haría rico al editor pero no a su autor el pobre
Rafa que moriría, si no pobre como una rata, en su piso de la prolongación del
general Mola, aferrado a sus banderas de falange.
Don Marcelino Oreja, otro
meapilas del contubernio vasco, el pequeño Marcelino aquel ministro cabezón que
ocupó la cancillería de Exteriores y llegó a dar con su rotunda cabeza en un pesebre, cerró la agencia Pyresa y dejó a mi director sin
indemnización y sin subsidios. A mi ex director le visité varias veces y hasta me concedió una entrevista al ser galardonado con el premio Espejo de España.
Era el mismo de siempre talante
alegre los bigotes caídos de alabardero. Publicaba una columna en el Alcázar su
único medio de subsistencia algunos de sus artículos pueden calificarse de
antológicos y de lectura obligada en las clases de redacción y de la historia
de periodismo. Rafael García Serrano era un español de casta bonancible y de gran cosecha de la añada de 1918,
tenía una vocecita de clarisa que contrastaba con la virilidad robusta de sus
libros, escritor macho que no machista.
Su personalidad nada tenía que
ver con la agresividad y aspecto de comecocos el sambenito que le endosaron sus
enemigos. Tenía la voz atiplada ya digo y aspecto de viejo soldado de los
tercios de don Juan de Austria, que, recogidas sus banderas, se retiró a escribir y a cuidar de
su extensa familia, algunos fueron musicólogos y folkloristas acumulando la
gran tradición de canción popular instaurada por la Sección Femenina y el más
pequeño Eduardo García Serrano es hoy uno de los periodistas con más gancho en
el mundo de la Radio.
Su tertulia es de las pocas que
merezcan (todo gran trabajo tendrá sus mermas no siempre estoy de acuerdo con
sus puntos de vista) escucharse. Es
más elegante y más florido que su padre pero tan ocurrente y pugnaz como él. Un
valiente. Se refugió y casi fue el punta de lanza de la Inter aquella emisora fundada por Serrano Suñer siguiendo las normas de la Rundfunk germana.
Aquellos humildes soldados de la
Fiel Infantería que refleja este libro en los campos de Brunete el Jarama la
Universitaria o el Ebro por una vez plantaron cara al monstruo de siete cabezas
y lo derrotaron. No `perdamos la esperanza. Semejante
proeza humillando a los señores del mundo es algoque no nos perdonarán nunca y ahí está la maula. He ahí el quid de la cuestión. ¿Podemos o no Podemos? Sea lo que Dios quiera.
Es ahí donde ha de hallarse la
grandeza de este gran libro prohibido escrito en el ardor de la juventud. No
estamos ante una gran novela sino ante un cuadro de costumbres que relata las
penalidades de unos soldados que soportaron la dureza de las trincheras con
alegría y estoicismo. No alcanza los grandes registros de “Madrid de Corte a Checa”
o “División 250” y “Cabo de Vara” o “Cuerda de presos”. Pero es el libro más alegre y más simpatico de cuantos se escribieron en la década de los cuarenta. Foxá y Salvador fueron
los grandes prosistas, y García serrano el mejor cronista porque Eugenio fue un periodista a rajatabla que proclamó la primavera hasta la muerte, de aquella gran generación que fueron la gloria de España, luchando contra viento y marea. En medio de cruel aventura de salvar a su Patria y a quienes la democracia
descataloga ahora y niega el pan y la sal. Con la iglesia hemos topado Sancho.
EL abad de lo que canta come reza
un viejo adagio castellano y pájaro que no canta algo tiene en la garganta. Alegre va el abad por el cañaveral. Un santo triste es un triste santo y una papa triste no deja de ser un pontífice paniaguado. A don Mario no le va esto de la Angélica ni se entrega a los armoniosos filados, como hacía el cura de mi pueblo en aquellos solemnes prefacios de otrora. Pues dicen que al diablo no le gusta la música y a Mahoma le asustaban las campanas alegres de la Pascua. Por lo que en el islam no hay campanarios sino minaretes. A lo mejor es por eso por lo que aparece este Papa con cara de tristeza cuando oficia. Con
todos mis respetos, en la misa del Gallo sorprendíame observar que el papa argentino
no está por la labor de cantar aunque un pajarito me dijo que le gustan los
tangos. Todas sus misas son rezadas y parece que de Difuntos a juzgar por el semblante y la cara que pone el hombre. En eso poco se parece a Wojtyla el papa que vino del Este, con un hermoso vozarrón de polaco y Benedicto XVI sin desafinar hacía lo que podía. Pablo VI tenía un oído en frente de otro (entre los papas que yo he conocido). Sin embargo, Bergoglio, nada de nada. Ni un mal oremus. Gallo que no canta algo tendrá en la garganta y que viva la gallina con su pepita. Tradicionalmente la
liturgia de navidad era muy pomposa y hasta sublime sobre todo en la lección de
la calenda entonada por el diacono. La calenda es la narración de los cinco mil
años de historia desde la creación del hombre hasta la venida al mundo del Mesías.
El himno terminaba con un apoteósico
tonal que decía “de nativitate Domini nostri Jesuchristi secundum carnem”. El coro se venía abajo cuando respondían amen los chantres, y Aleluya. En ese momento empezaban a volear las campanas anunciando la nueva buena del Nacimiento del Salvador. Gloria a Dios en las alturas y paz a los hombres de buena voluntad. Hoy de las alturas los cielos parece que se han ido los ángeles y recorren el aire aviones asesinos y drones vigilantes. Se escuchan por el horizonte clangores de guerra. Los pastores de Belén no se atreven a bajar de las montañas de Judea por miedo a los soldados israelíes y los árabes han cerrado la Basílica de la Natividad a los cristianos peregrinos. ¿Es por esta causa por la que Francisco se niega a cantar?
No entiendo por qué esta loable
ancestral tradición romana fue descartada. Parece ser que Su Santidad – y sus
razones tendrá pues para eso le dicen infalible- está por la labor de una
iglesia austera incluso en los puntos más atrayentes de su liturgia “No frills”
(nada de ringorrangos) nada de triunfalismos pues es cuestión de gustos pero a
mí me parece que la supresión de la “kalenda” ha despojado de esa alegría que
siempre ha tenido entre nosotros la Nochebuena. Asimismo, en la alocución urbi et orbi, no se
dirigió a los pueblos de la tierra en sus más de cincuenta lenguas, como solían
sus predecesores.
Cierto que en esto de los crismas
hay mucho folklore, mucho mercantilismo. Si los españoles inventamos el Belén y
lo llevamos al nuevo mundo, los ingleses se encargaron de mitificarlo con
Scrooges y Dickens. Se ha convertido en una festividad pagana y comercial. En eso lleva
razón el papa pero su alocución pascual me ha parecido rutinaria y como para salir del paso.
Alude a las guerras pero evita
meterse en berenjenales de cuáles sean las causas determinantes de las matanzas
de la horripilante guerra de Siria e Iraq, de esas terribles de esos
einwanderungen” (emigraciones en masa) o corrimiento de pueblos. Es la voluntad de Obama con sus intereses macabros.
Habría que tomar el toro por los
cuernos, Santidad y mojarse un poco más. Cristo lo haría. Pero don Mario,
aunque haya entrado al solio pontificio con un nombre franciscano, es un
jesuita. Cautela de serpiente. Doble lenguaje. Nadar y guardar la ropa. Su Santidad no quiere mojarse ni se atreve a condenar a los que le están segando su Iglesia bajo los pies. Encaje de bolillos. Vamos templando gaitas.
Desep a todos mis lectores en este día tan señalado "hodie natus est nobis" una Feliz pascua de la Navidad. No ahorraremos alabanzas ni esfuerzos en la defensa del que nació y murió por nosotros. El Emmanuel. Merry Xmas. Buon Naale. Joayeux Noel. Frohlich Weihnachten. Scahsti Raviestvo
En un histórico documento firmado por más de dos mil rabinos se afirma: “Creemos que Dios emplea muchos mensajeros para revelar su verdad”.
Más de dos mil rabinos ortodoxos han decidido firmar un documento en el que reconocen que el cristianismo es “parte del plan de Dios para la humanidad” ya que “Dios emplea muchos mensajeros para revelar su verdad”.
El documento ha sido redactado por 25 destacados rabinos ortodoxos de Israel, Estados Unidos y Europa, según información del rabino David Rosen, director de Asuntos Interreligiosos del American Jewish Committe, que ha sido recogida en ABC por Juan Vicente Boo.
Es la primera vez en dos mil años que los judíos hacen un reconocimiento de este tipo a la religión cristiana. El documento, que lleva por título “Hacer la voluntad de nuestro Padre en el cielo: hacia una asociación entre judíos y cristianos”, afirma que judíos y cristianos tienen “una misión común, basada en la Alianza, para perfeccionar el mundo bajo la soberanía del Todopoderoso” ya que “ninguno de nosotros puede llevar a cabo la misión de Dios en este mundo por separado”.
Los rabinos ortodoxos reconocen de esta manera que ambas confesiones deben trabajar juntas sin que esta “asociación” minimice “de ninguna manera las diferencias entre las dos comunidades y las dos religiones”. Los judíos sostienen, asimismo, en su declaración: “Creemos que Dios emplea muchos mensajeros para revelar su verdad”.
Durante una rueda de prensa en el Vaticano junto al cardenal Kurt Koch, el rabino David Rosen subrayó que el nuevo documento elaborado por la Santa Sede sobre las relaciones entre judíos y cristianos revela no sólo los avances en las directrices propuestas por el documento del Concilio Vaticano II Nostra Aetate de apreciar y respetar la autocomprensión judía sino también un profundo reconocimiento del lugar de la Toráen la vida del pueblo judío.
LA NOTICIA saltó a los medios. Los enemigos de nuestra Fe es lo que preendend: un magnicidio en el Vaticano, financiado por Arabia Saudita y gente extraña del Compló sionista. No caiga Su Santidad en la trampa del double talk, huya de las camaras, encierrese en su celda, como sola como hicieron toda la vída los papas y no se fie de los que se dicen sus amigos. Rece y confie en la Providencia Divina, defienda la fe y el carisma
ISIS threat to POPE: Fears for Holy Father as terror nuts plot 'FINAL MASSACRE' in Rome
EVIL Islamic State are plotting to kill POPE FRANCIS, the Vatican fears, after multiple propaganda videos threatening Rome were released by Daesh militants.
Pope Francis will carry out his papal duties as normal despite the threats
We will not let ourselves be paralysed by fear
Cardinal Pietro Parolin
The Vatican has admitted it is a target for crazed jihadis due to its religious links. Any attack would send shivers across the globe.
Cardinal Pietro Parolin said recently the Vatican was considering whether to ramp up security.
He said: "The Vatican could be a target because of its religious significance.
"We are capable of increasing the level of security in the Vatican and the surrounding area.
"But we will not let ourselves be paralysed by fear."
Rome has been the subject of a number of threatening terror films released by the extremists in recent weeks.
It is thought the focus on Rome, and specifically the Vatican City, may be in response to the Pope's recent condemnation of the deadly terror attacks in Paris, as well as its status of the capital of the Catholic world.
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St Peter's Basilica in the video, bathed in an eerie orange lightFollowing the bloody night in Paris last month last month, in which 130 people died, Pope Francis said: "Such barbarity leaves us dismayed, and we ask ourselves how the human heart can plan and carry out such horrible events.
"There are no justifications for these things."
The latest, and most ominous video, shows CGI ISIS tanks advancing on a crumbling Colosseum, promises a final battle between "believers" and "crusaders."
It also shows an eerie St Peter's Basilica, the papal enclave within the Vatican City, bathed in an orange light and accompanied by chilling music.
The video's narrator then apparently claims that ISIS will take over Rome, destroying crucifixes and taking Christian women as slaves.
Last week, yet another video was released by ISIS, again specifically mentioning the Italian capital.
In it, a jihadi vowed: "By Allah, if we brought down France in its homeland, in Paris, then we swear, by the command of Allah, we will attack America in its heartland, in Washington, Allah permitting, and we will invade Rome, Allah permitting."
GETTY
Pope Francis, who it is feared may be next on ISIS's terror hit listEarlier this year, the Pope's head of security Domenico Giani said the Holy See would not change his habits or lifestyle in light of the threats.
He said: "The Holy Father does not intend to abandon the style of his pontificate, which is based on proximity, that is, on a direct encounter with the greatest number of people possible.
"Even as pontiff, he has remained a priest who does not want to lose contact with his flock.
“Those of us entrusted with his security must adapt to his style and not the other way around.
"We must do everything possible so that he can continue to carry out his ministry as he wants and believes is best.”
At first sight, it seems hard to imagine a more unlikely pairing than George Orwell and Thomas Merton. Orwell had a profound dislike of Roman Catholic writers (though he accorded a grudging respect to Evelyn Waugh as a literary craftsman), and, had he encountered Merton – especially his earlier work – he would undoubtedly have recoiled. Not that Merton, whose centenary is this year, was a conventional religious writer. He became a Catholic in 1938 after a distinctly rackety youth, and spent most of the rest of his life as a Trappist monk in the US. But he wrote copiously, corresponding with a wide range of literary figures, including Henry Miller, James Baldwin, Czesław Miłosz, Boris Pasternak and several Latin American poets, some of whose work he also translated; another surprising friend was Joan Baez. He left behind him, in addition to a huge amount of journal material and many books on prayer and monasticism, a couple of incomplete drafts for novels and a fair quantity of poetry, published and unpublished, some of it dramatically “experimental” in style. By the mid 1960s, he was vocal in his criticisms of the Vietnam war, of the stockpiling of nuclear arms and of racial segregation and injustice in the US. And a central element in his critique of militarism was a stinging analysis of the language of war and weaponry.
This is where the conversation with Orwell might begin. In 1967, Merton published an essay on “War and the Crisis of Language”, in which he develops a distinctly Orwellian polemic against the corruption of writing itself by certain aspects of modernity. The speech of military strategists and of politicians is characterised by a narcissistic finality. There can be no real reply to the careful and reasonable calculation of the balance of mass killing in a nuclear war, because everything is so organised that you are persuaded not to notice what it is you are talking about. And when that happens, you cannot intelligently converse or argue: all there is is the definitive language imposed by those who have power. It is a natural extension of the language habitually used to describe the processes of other kinds of war. Merton relished the comment of an American commander in Vietnam: “In order to save the village, it became necessary to destroy it”, and memorably summed up the philosophy of many supporters of the Vietnam intervention:
“The Asian whose future we are about to decide is either a bad guy or a good guy. If he is a bad guy, he obviously has to be killed. If he is a good guy, he is on our side and he ought to be ready to die for freedom. We will provide an opportunity for him to do so: we will kill him to prevent him falling under the tyranny of a demonic enemy.”
George Orwell in 1950. Photograph: Ullstein Bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images The main point in all this is that creating a language that cannot be checked by or against any recognisable reality is the ultimate mark of power. What Merton characterises as “double-talk, tautology, ambiguous cliche, self-righteous and doctrinaire pomposity and pseudoscientific jargon” is not just an aesthetic problem: it renders dialogue impossible; and rendering dialogue impossible is the desired goal for those who want to exercise absolute power. Merton was deeply struck by the accounts of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, and by Hannah Arendt’s discussions of the “banality” of evil. The staggeringly trivial and contentlessremarks of Eichmann at his trial and before his execution ought to frighten us, says Merton, because they are the utterance of the void: the speech of a man accustomed to power without the need to communicate or learn or imagine anything. And that is why Merton insists that knowing how to write is essential to honest political engagement.
In an essay on Camus, whom he, like Orwell, admired greatly, Merton says that the writer’s task “is not suddenly to burst out into the dazzle of utter unadulterated truth but laboriously to reshape an accurate and honest language that will permit communication … instead of multiplying a Babel of esoteric and technical tongues”. Against the language of power, which seeks to establish aperfect self-referentiality, the writer opposes a language of “laborious” honesty. Instead of public speech being the long echo of absolute and unchallengeable definitions supplied by authority – definitions that tell you once and for all how to understand the world’s phenomena – the good writer attempts to speak in a way that is open to the potential challenge of a reality she or he does not own and control. When the military commander speaks of destroying a village to save it, the writer’s job is to speak of the specific lives ended in agony. When the agents of Islamist terror call suicide bombers “martyrs”, the writer’s job is to direct attention to the baby, the Muslim grandmother, the Jewish aid worker, the young architect, the Christian nurse or taxi driver whose death has been triumphantly scooped up into the glory of the killer’s self-inflicted death. When, as it was a few months ago, the talk is of hordes and swarms of aliens invading our shores, the writer’s task is to focus on the corpse of a four-year-old boy on the shore; to the great credit of many in the British media, there were writers (and cartoonists and photographers, too) who rose to that task.
Language of terror … Osama bin Laden in 2006. Photograph: Maher Attar/Corbis Sygma In another essay on war, Merton argues that it is not really true that war happens when reasoned argument breaks down; it is more that “reason” has been used in such a way that it subtly and inevitably moves us towards war. In his great 1946 essay on “Politics and the English Language”, Orwell is clear that linguistic degeneration is both the product and the generator of economic and political decadence. And if so, the critique of this degeneration is not a matter of “sentimental archaism” but an urgent political affair. Like Merton, he identifies the stipulative definition as one of the main culprits: a word that ought to be descriptive, and so discussable, comes to be used evaluatively. “Fascism” means “politics I/we don’t like”; “democracy” means “politics I/we do like”. “Consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.” This is really just a symptom of a deeper malaise. Vagueness, mixed metaphor, ready-made phrases, “gumming together long strips of words”, pseudo‑technical language are ways of avoiding communication. And those whose interest is in avoiding communication are those who do not want to be replied to or argued with.
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Orwell’s rules for good writing have become familiar: don’t use secondhand metaphors, don’t use long words where short ones will do, abbreviate, use the active not the passive, never use a foreign phrase when you can find an everyday alternative in English. They are rules designed to communicate something other than the fact that the speaker is powerful enough to say what he or she likes. Bad or confused metaphor (Orwell has some choice examples of which my favourite is “The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song”) presents us with something we can’t visualise; good metaphor makes us more aware, in unexpected ways, of what we see or sense. So bad metaphor is about concealing or ignoring; and language that sets out to conceal or ignore and make others ignore is language that wants to shrink the limits of the world to what can be dealt with in the speaker’s terms alone.
But there is something more to be said, which Orwell, a stout enemy of literary modernism, doesn’t quite want to say. In some earlier essays, he had argued that it wouldn’t be the end of the world if literature became less obviously sophisticated, if the range of cultural references in our writing had to be reduced in order to open it up to more participants. Without quite anticipating the more recent debates about whether there is a real difference between “high” and “low” culture, there is in his work a consistent strand of scepticism about anything that looks like complexity for its own sake, and a feeling that it ought to be possible to say things straightforwardly. And this is where he and Merton might part company. Merton was an enthusiastic modernist in this respect. A good deal of his poetry and some of his prose is written under the heavy influence of Joyce, and his letters to his old friend, the poet Robert Lax, use a bewildering macaronic style, bursting with puns and allusions and intricate wordplays. It is one of the ways in which he obeys his own injunction to be “laborious”. He can even say that, on top of the obligation to write “disciplined prose”, a writer has “the duty of first writing nonsense … to let loose what is hidden in our depths, to expand rather than to condense prematurely”.
South Vietnamese troops, joined by US advisers, rest after a tense night, 40 miles east of Saigon. Photograph: Horst Faas/AP The paradox that Merton is asserting is that, in order to be honest, the writer sometimes has to be difficult; and the problem facing any writer who acknowledges this is how to distinguish between necessary or salutary difficulty and self-serving obfuscation of the kind both he and Orwell identify as a tool of power. I doubt whether there is a neat answer to this. But I suspect that the essential criterion is to do with whether a writer’s language – “straightforward” or not – invites response. Both Merton and Orwell concentrate on a particular kind of bureaucratic redescription of reality, language that is designed to be no one’s in particular, the language of countless contemporary manifestos, mission statements and regulatory policies, the language that dominates so much of our public life, from health service to higher education. In its more malign forms, this is also the language of commercial interests defending tax evasion in a developing country, or worse, governments dealing with challenges to human rights violations, or worst of all (it’s in all our minds just now) of terrorists who have mastered so effectively the art of saying nothing true or humane as part of their techniques of intimidation. In contrast, the difficulty of good writing is a difficulty meant to make the reader pause and rethink. It insists that the world is larger than the reader thought, and invites the reader to find new ways of speaking: it may in the short term draw attention to its own complexity, but it does so in order that the reader may move away from the text to think about what it is in the world around that prompts such complexity. Bad writing is politically poisonous; good writing is politically liberating – and this is true even when that good writing comes from sources that are ideologically hostile to good politics (however defined). The crucial question is whether the writing is directed to making the reader see, feel and know less or more. And the paradox is that, even faced with systems that stifle good writing and honest imagining, the good writer doesn’t respond in kind but goes on trying to fathom what the terrorist and the bigot are saying, to make sense of people who don’t want to make sense of him or her. Failing to do that condemns us to bad writing and bad politics, to the language of total conflict and radical dehumanisation.
Our current panics about causing “offence” are, at their best and most generous, an acknowledgement of how language can encode and enact power relations (my freedom of “offending” speech may be your humiliation, a confirmation of your exclusion from ordinary public discourse). But at its worst, it is a patronising and infantilising worry about protecting individuals from challenge; the inevitable end of that road is a far worse entrenching of unquestionable power, the power of a discourse that is never open to reply. Debates about international issues such as Israel and Palestine, or issues of social and personal morals – abortion, gender and sexuality, end-of-life questions – are regularly shadowed by anxiety, even panic, about what must not be said in public, and also by the sometimes startlingly coercive insistence on the “rational” and canonical status of one perspective only. On both sides of all such debates, there can be a deep unwillingness to have things said or shown that might profoundly challenge someone’s starting assumptions. If there is an answer to this curious contemporary neurosis, it is surely not to be found in the silencing of disagreement but rather in the education of speech: how is unwelcome truth to be told in ways that do not humiliate or disable? And the answer to that question is inseparable from learning to argue – from the actual practice of open exchange, in the most literal sense “civil” disagreement, the debate appropriate to citizens who have dignity and liberty to discuss their shared world and its organisation and who are able to learn what their words sound like in the difficult business of staying with such a debate as it unfolds.
Thomas Merton. Photograph: Everett Collection Historical Of all the various lessons to be learned from Merton and Orwell as analysts of linguistic decadence, the most obvious is that literature and drama are not a luxury in society. Politics can’t avoid the drift towards the twin abysses of totalitarianism and triviality if it refuses to face the perils of this decadence. Good writing is many things. For Orwell it is primarily to do with the capacity for reasoned prose and the sustained personal narratives of classical fiction. For Merton, it includes some wilder elements, the freedom for wordplay and the absurd, as well as poetic experimentation. But it is always writing that declines to close down either perception or argument. This is how good writing defends us from absolute power or – which comes to much the same thing – absolute social stasis. It leaves a trail to be followed and asks questions that require an answer: it pushes towards a future. This obviously doesn’t mean – recalling Orwell’s observation – that good writing is “progressive”; only that it is aware of being between past and future, living in time. And Merton, with another theological twist that Orwell would probably not have much appreciated, also implies that if our fundamental human problem is “Prometheanism”, wanting to steal divinity from God rather than labouring at being human, then good writing, with its inbuilt ironies and its awareness of its own conditions, is one of the things that stop us imagining we are more than human.
Perhaps that’s as good a definition of good writing as we’re going to find. Destructive politics is inevitably bound up with forgetfulness of our humanity, in one way or another – the organised inhumanity of tyranny, the messianic aspirations of communism, the passion for control on the part of managerial modernity, the naked and brutal murderousness of terrorism. But Merton explicitly, and Orwell implicitly, remind us that this is not just about bad governance or oppression. If we talk and write badly, dishonestly, unanswerably, what we are actually doing is getting ready for war. The habits of mind that make war inevitable are the habits of bad language – that is to say, the habits that grow from uncritical attitudes to power and privilege: contempt towards the powerless, towards minorities, towards the stranger, the longing for an end to human complexity and difference. Orwell explicitly and (perhaps) Merton implicitly are trying to identify the all-important possibility that we may passionately quarrel, even that we may fight to defend ourselves against political evil in one way or another, without simply buying into various kinds of totalitarianism, overt or covert. Orwell has an almost medieval sense of what is involved in battling to the death to defend yourself against an enemy for whom you retain a degree of human respect, in that you do not seek to dehumanise them, to put them once and for all outside the boundaries of human discourse and exchange.
However we pursue that fight (not exactly an academic question today; and Orwell and Merton would disagree sharply here, I think, given Merton’s near pacifism), the central moral question is whether we are going to use the language of tautology and self-justification – one that gives us alone the right to be called reasonable and human – or whether we labour to discover other ways of speaking and imagining. If we settle for the former, we are already planning the next round of violence. The latter is hard and counterintuitive because it does not promise what most of us are secretly longing for: a simple end to conflict and complication. But it is the very opposite of resignation, because it summons the writer to work, to the constant creation and re-creation of an authentically shared culture – the pattern of free and civil exchange that is neither bland nor violent. The “small blue capsule of indignation” – in Merton’s words – has to be punctured again and again. And if he is right, that means the writer needs rather more than just ideas; she or he needs something of the contemplative liberty to sift out the motivation towards bad writing that comes from the terrors and ambitions of the ego, and to find the liberty to allow words, both fresh and puzzling, to arrive. It’s easy to imagine Orwell’s raised eyebrows at the thought of his contemplative vocation, but if this brief attempt at staging an encounter between these two passionate and contentious writers has come anywhere near the truth, that’s what might have to be said about the calling not only of Orwell but of any writer worth reading. • This is an edited extract of the 2015 Orwell lecture: theorwellprize.co.uk/.
