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Cold War – Soviet Propaganda – Magda Stroinska
193 Plays10 months ago
Ep 047 – Nonfiction. What's it like to grow up surrounded by Soviet propaganda? What lessons can we learn today? Magda Stroinska, Professor of Linguistics at McMaster University, joins me to discuss her fascinating new memoir, "My Life in Propaganda: Language and Totalitarian Regimes.”
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Transcript
Reflecting on Communist Regime in Poland
00:00:00
Speaker
I personally, I don't think I actually met anyone who was truly a believer. I don't think I did. I mean, I knew that certain people said things that they had to say, for instance, in school. Well, maybe my history teacher in high school was indeed a believer. I don't know. But it wasn't like in, say,
00:00:30
Speaker
is Germany where there were people reporting on each other. I never had that experience. It's not the case that the generation of my parents didn't have that experience because after the war things were definitely much worse. But I lived in Poland through this last part of the regime when it was not really
00:00:58
Speaker
I don't think people really believed in it.
Introduction to Magda Strowinska
00:01:10
Speaker
Hi, everyone. This is AJ Woodhams, host of the War Books Podcast, where I interview today's best authors writing about war-related topics. Today, I am really excited to have on the show Magda Strowinska for her new book, My Life in Propaganda, a Memoir about Language in Totalitarian Regimes. Magda has been a professor of linguistics in German at McMaster University since 1988.
00:01:37
Speaker
Her major areas of research and publication include sociolinguistics, analysis of discourse in cross-cultural issues and pragmatics in cognition. Magda, how are you doing today? I'm doing very well. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me to the show. Absolutely. And we were talking just before we went on. I'm so excited to have you on because I was a linguistics undergraduate at Indiana University.
00:02:05
Speaker
and you're my first linguist that I've had on the show. We're talking about the internet. What's that? I'm surprised that I'm the first linguist that you have in the show because just like yourself, linguists go in very different directions after the university. Well, and you know, we'll get into this too later in the show, but language in war and propaganda in war,
00:02:32
Speaker
And you're not the first person to come on and talk about propaganda. I had an excellent guest on talking about the Russia-Ukraine conflict in the way that Russia is using propaganda. So hot topic.
00:02:50
Speaker
But it's really great to have a linguistics PhD joining me. But Magna, the first question that I like my guests to answer when they come on the show is, if in your own words, can you just say, what is your book about?
From Academic Work to Personal Memoir
00:03:06
Speaker
My book started as an academic attempt to talk about propaganda in communist countries and in the Nazi Germany. But very quickly, I cannot say I discovered, but I've noticed after 2001 that a lot of things that I thought about communist propaganda or totalitarian propaganda
00:03:34
Speaker
were not gone with the fall of the Berlin Wall and it became very difficult to continue my project as a purely academic project and this is why it became more a memoir of my own growing up
00:03:52
Speaker
with communist propaganda. So this academic project became a personal memoir because I thought that it was easier to write about my own experience with propaganda rather than trying to justify why propaganda in democratic countries became so much like propaganda that I experienced growing up in communist Poland.
00:04:17
Speaker
I'm so glad that you did make this more of a personal story because as somebody who's read several academic linguistics books, often they can be, I don't want to say they can be dry, but your book certainly added a lot of color to some of the things that are studied more academically. I was trying to do this, but I'm very happy that you think that that's how you read it.
00:04:44
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Well, let's talk about your family and your upbringing.
Growing Up in Communist Poland
00:04:50
Speaker
So you mentioned that you grew up in communist Poland, but just tell us a little bit about your childhood in the era that you grew up in. My parents were relatively old.
00:05:05
Speaker
as parents although these days that's probably not what we would think but because they were much older than regular parents they didn't really do very much with me and this is why I spent my childhood either alone or reading books and there were lots of adults in my life and when they talked they talked about
00:05:33
Speaker
their adult issues and historical issues. And I was an avid listener to those conversations. I was just talking to my daughter today that I don't really remember my parents ever telling me anything in the format of a lecture about history, but it was the everyday life that brought lessons about history. So for instance,
00:05:56
Speaker
there was a picture on the wall of my father's first wife and his two sons from that first marriage. So I was obviously interested in, well, what happened to my father's first wife. And this is how I learned about the Ribbentrop Molotov Pact that divided Poland in September 1939 and how my father's first wife and the two half-brothers I had
00:06:24
Speaker
were deported to Russia where she died and they found their way back to Poland, one by being adopted by Russians, the other with the Polish army of General Anders.
00:06:38
Speaker
going from Persia to Scotland. So those were... And just to situate the listener a little bit, so this is 1960s Poland. This is post-World War II. When I was growing up, it was the 19... I mean, I was born in the late 1950s, but my earliest memories go to 1960.
00:07:00
Speaker
And obviously, those personal family histories were not something that anybody could read about in the newspapers or learn about at school, because those were topics that were not covered. So as I say in the book, the ribbon-trap motif part was a secret when I was growing up.
00:07:22
Speaker
as it was in 1939. And people were not supposed to talk about it. It was assumed that if nobody talks about it in the media, then people won't know about it. But obviously, every family was touched by the war. And the fact that it wasn't just the war with Germany, but also the invasion
00:07:47
Speaker
in the East by the Soviet Union. So everybody really knew about it. It was just that my parents being much older, they never modified their conversations because I was listening. And I just absorbed history lessons by watching my family's history. Well, what? So here, I'm right outside of Washington, D.C. in America.
00:08:17
Speaker
I've learned, when I was a kid, we learned that America won World War II for everybody. I'm curious what, when you were a girl, what did you know about World War II?
00:08:33
Speaker
Well, I knew a lot about what was happening during the war in my native Warsaw, because when I was growing up, I was still surrounded by ruins. I mean, not like in 1945, but there were still ruins and everywhere you went, there were some forms of monuments,
00:08:59
Speaker
commemorating people who were killed in the streets of Warsaw. So that's what I knew. I knew about my father's history because his family came from what used to be Eastern Poland and is now Ukraine. My mother's family was from Warsaw. So there was the history of the Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland.
00:09:28
Speaker
there was the history of the war in Warsaw. My mother's brother was taken as a prisoner of war by the Germans and spent the whole war in an off-lag in Germany. So all this, as I said, was just absorbed by what people were talking about.
00:09:50
Speaker
when I was learning about the war in school it was mostly that it was the glorious Soviet army that won the war and Americans were hardly ever mentioned. So there was a history that you learned in school and there was history that you were told at home and they were two different histories and
00:10:15
Speaker
kind of didn't bother me at all that I knew those two histories. And I knew that what I'm being told at school was at best an incomplete version of the events. Isn't that so interesting? Isn't that so interesting too? So when I was growing up, I was taught that America won the war, hardly any mention of the Soviet Union.
00:10:43
Speaker
But if you look at the numbers, the casualties on the Soviet side and the German side, that's where most of the fighting happened. But it's so interesting that we're taught these different histories.
00:10:59
Speaker
It's very interesting that you say this because it just shows that we are all told a certain version of the events that is for whatever reason convenient at a time. And it took me a very long time to actually realize that both sides use some version of propaganda.
00:11:20
Speaker
I assume that because one side is using propaganda, then the other side must be telling the truth, but the world is more complicated than that.
Realizations and Propaganda Challenges
00:11:31
Speaker
When's the first time you remember seeing something as a child and realizing, oh, maybe that's not true. Maybe this is propaganda that I'm being told or reading in the newspaper is seeing on TV.
00:11:46
Speaker
I don't know when I first realized that something was untrue.
00:11:56
Speaker
I remember thinking, because I used to be told at school, not at home, that America is the enemy, that obviously the life in America is terrible and that people suffer and that the working class has to go on strikes, et cetera, et cetera. And I write about this in the book that I corresponded with
00:12:24
Speaker
with an American girl we were pen pals and she sent me some gifts and those gifts were so beautiful and they were colorful and they were packaged in colorful wrapping paper and I think it was the aesthetics of the west that was so different than the aesthetics of communist reality that was really
00:12:53
Speaker
ugly and gray and if one wanted to design it badly, it would probably be better than what we had around us. So I think that was the first moment when I thought, well,
00:13:08
Speaker
the country that can take care of the aesthetics of everyday things cannot be so bad. And the fact that everything around me was so ugly, it meant that it wasn't true that the regime really cared about the people. Yeah. Well, that's a very naive, naive version from child's perspective, but this, this aesthetic
00:13:39
Speaker
aspect of communism is something that I really always thought about and I had aspirations to become a graphic designer because my dream was when I was growing up was not to be an artist but to design things to make the world
00:14:03
Speaker
less ugly. And I naively thought that if you design things more beautifully, people will be better. I still believe that aesthetics is important in life. But that was obviously a very naive version of it.
00:14:18
Speaker
Well, I won't begrudge 10-year-old Magna for wanting to change the world through beautiful things. Let's talk about propaganda itself, which you define as language manipulation, actually. So you write that
00:14:39
Speaker
A person who has experienced language manipulations, whether at a personal level, having been cheated or lied to in a vicious way, will never be able to trust words again. First, what is language manipulation? And then talk a little bit about what you mean there.
Manipulation through Propaganda Language
00:14:56
Speaker
I think propaganda is more than language manipulation, it also manipulates facts. And you don't necessarily have to manipulate language to lie, but
00:15:11
Speaker
I think it's not my discovery many people said the same, Klemperer, Orwell or Hayek. They all said that the best way to manipulate people's views is by twisting word meanings. We believe that we know what words mean and we rely on those established meanings.
00:15:33
Speaker
But it's quite easy to manipulate meanings. I usually give to my students the example of the word fun. And we are all fans of something. People are fans of certain soccer clubs or certain celebrities. But fun is a short version of fanatic or fanatical. And when we look at the word fanatical, well, we would probably say, no, no, I'm not fanatical. I'm just a fan.
00:16:03
Speaker
But we commit ourselves to something that we don't mean by using the word that really means something more than we think it does. So being fanatical is being more than just enthusiastic about something. It's this kind of
00:16:27
Speaker
sick form of enthusiasm or support for some ideas. So I believe that when you call something, for instance,
00:16:41
Speaker
social or people's democracy. You try to portray something as being good for all people, but there is the concept of weasel words in linguistics. So these are words that attach to other words and they empty them of the original meaning. And if you attach the word peoples to something like people's justice or people's democracy,
00:17:07
Speaker
then it stops being a democracy. People's democracy is not democracy. People's justice is usually not justice.
00:17:20
Speaker
I think the official name for China is the People's Republic of China. I think North Korea is something similar. So Poland used to be People's Republic of Poland. That's why that example comes to mind. In Germany, it was the addition of folk and the only word that survived the Nazi time and is still in use is obviously Volkswagen, which was meant as the people's car.
00:17:50
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I think I've read that national socialism too, obviously it's not socialism, but that also is like a way to, I guess, get people, you know, manipulate the word to get people going. Yeah, the word national can also be a weasel word. Yeah.
00:18:10
Speaker
Well, what are some of the hallmarks specifically of Soviet propaganda? We can talk about some of the hallmarks of propaganda in general, but for example, you write in your book that propaganda will often omit verbs and there are other features that propaganda will feature. What are some of the hallmarks?
00:18:32
Speaker
Well, omitting verbs is something very specific for propaganda slogans, but we can also probably see it in some advertising, because advertising takes certain elements of propaganda and uses it too.
00:18:50
Speaker
I was our Soviet style propaganda. For me, it was a creative way of talking about reality that was supposed to replace doing things by talking about things. So you could talk about, I don't know, marching towards peaceful future or producing or increasing the production of say refrigerators.
00:19:19
Speaker
And it created the feeling that something was being done, but well, what is marching towards peaceful future? Well, you know...
00:19:29
Speaker
Are we really marching? Or when we talk about increased production, we assume that something is being produced. If we increase, at least something must be being done. Well, in Soviet propaganda or Soviet style propaganda, it didn't mean that anything was being produced. It was much cheaper to talk about things than to actually do those things. So a lot of things were just happening on the level of language.
00:19:59
Speaker
And I think it was really interesting how that language didn't fit reality, that language could be detached from reality. I mentioned in the book
00:20:13
Speaker
another book that really influenced me a lot. It's not an academic book. It's a literary book, which I don't think has ever been translated into other languages. It's by a Polish writer, Kaczymiez Orwacz, and it's called the Depot, or the place where you store things. And that word, the Depot, was used by the alcoholics in a small town to call the drunk tank.
00:20:42
Speaker
And the whole book is written about alcoholics who are being taken advantage of in the drunk tongue and about problems of drinking, etc. But it's written in the language of the socialist newspapers.
00:21:00
Speaker
where you don't talk about someone being drunk but you talk about someone under influence and you don't talk about, I don't know, throwing up
00:21:14
Speaker
in the basement of a building, but about regurgitating the swallowed food in the lower part of the building. So the reality that was being described was something that was very well known to people.
00:21:35
Speaker
because that was the reality we all saw but the language was the language of the newspapers and that languages didn't fit that reality and it was a brilliant way of showing that what the newspapers were writing about had no relationship with the reality that we all saw so I thought that at one at one hand
00:21:59
Speaker
Twisting language or manipulating language can be used for propaganda reasons, but also language or demystifying language. Revealing the mechanisms is a very good way to demolish propaganda. Because once you start observing those things, you realize, well, it makes no sense. And you mentioned this idea of skipping verbs. And the example I use is about
00:22:28
Speaker
Leining in October was a very popular slogan at the time when there were anniversaries of the October Revolution. So the slogan Leining in October, most people knew it was about the revolution, but someone wrote underneath and cut in March.
00:22:49
Speaker
Immediately, because you assume that the same verb would be used in both cases, you completely demolished the political slogan of Lenin in October. So on one hand, by skipping verbs, you are not really saying anything. You say the nation with the party. Well, what is the nation doing with the party? Supporting the party, fighting the party,
00:23:18
Speaker
by noticing those gaps, you are starting to think, well, what are they actually trying to say? It's empty. And we have the same in Canada. We have those slogans like working together for a better Ontario. Ontario is the province where I live. We used to have those slogans on the roads. Well, what are we
00:23:40
Speaker
Are we working? Are we planning to work? Who is we? Is it me, the viewer, or is it the government? So when you start the constructing those slogans, it just shows that it makes no sense. It's like, but new and improved in advertising.
00:24:00
Speaker
So when you were growing up, maybe a little bit later, we were talking about your childhood, but maybe teenager or a little bit later, I think you wrote you've spent 25 years in Poland.
Awareness of Propaganda Manipulation
00:24:15
Speaker
Did most people understand that they were being manipulated? Was it an open secret that what you read in the newspaper is a bunch of baloney? So at least people I interacted with
00:24:30
Speaker
I think most people were perfectly aware of it. I think it's actually much worse now when we still have a lot of propaganda in Poland and there are lots of people who believe one side or the other side and they are
00:24:49
Speaker
almost blind to facts. They are being so manipulated by propaganda. But I think because Poland after the war was pretty much invaded by the Soviet Union. So the communist was imposed and it wasn't something that Poles welcomed. My personal experience of living in Poland until 1984 was that
00:25:18
Speaker
I don't really know anyone who truly supported communism, maybe immediately after the war, but not in my generation. Those who supported it were usually people who had benefits from that support. So by joining the party, they could achieve certain things. But I personally, I don't think I actually met anyone.
00:25:46
Speaker
who was truly a believer. I don't think I did. I mean, I knew that certain people said things that they had to say, for instance, in school, well, maybe my history teacher in high school was indeed a believer, I don't know. But it wasn't like in say,
00:26:12
Speaker
is Germany where there were people reporting on each other. I never had that experience. It's not the case that the generation of my parents didn't have that experience because after the war things were definitely much worse. But I lived in Poland through this last part of the regime when it was not really
00:26:40
Speaker
I don't think people really believed in it.
00:26:43
Speaker
And I guess it should be noted too that Poland is probably famous for maybe being the most resistant to communism within the Eastern Bloc. Well, I'm curious, growing up and seeing, being around all this propaganda and seeing how language was used, what was it that made you want to study language as a profession?
Journey into Linguistics
00:27:13
Speaker
I went into linguistics not by choice. As I mentioned, I wanted to be a graphic designer and I wanted to make the world more beautiful. But I didn't get into the Academy of Fine Arts. And so I had to make a last minute decision. There were entrance exams to all universities.
00:27:38
Speaker
So I had to make a quick assessment of where could I possibly get in. And with what I prepared for, I decided that philologies were the choices. So it could be the Polish philology, the Russian philology or the German philology. Those were the three languages that I could potentially study.
00:28:03
Speaker
I dismissed Polish because I didn't see any point. I obviously dismissed Russian. I wouldn't go to study Russian. So I chose German. And after two years of studying German, I decided I liked the linguistic side of it more than the literature side. And I switched
00:28:24
Speaker
to applied linguistics. And so I became a linguist on a kind of convoluted route. I'm very happy that I did. But it wasn't that I really made a choice to go into linguistics because I was interested in it. And this is very often the case with my students these days, they go to university, they have never heard about linguistics. But when they say first, when they take first year linguistics,
00:28:54
Speaker
they all of a sudden opened their eyes and they said, whoa, that's really interesting. So language influences the way I think. People in different cultures think somewhat differently or they see the world differently.
00:29:09
Speaker
That was eye-opening for me and I just loved it and I'm very happy that I didn't get into this Academy of Fine Arts because I probably would have been a pretty lousy designer. The first time I ever even heard of linguistics was from when I was a teenager. I read this book by Dan Brown, the guy who wrote the Da Vinci Code. He wrote a book called Digital Fortress and the hero in this book is a linguist.
00:29:39
Speaker
A linguist who works at the NSA or something like that. And I was like, oh, what is linguistics? What is this? So yeah, it is maybe not something most people really know about so much.
00:29:54
Speaker
Well, let's talk about once you actually, first, once you leave Poland, I think you're right, it's a little bit strange then for you to look back on Eastern Europe and see the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union collapse.
00:30:12
Speaker
Talk about kind of this period right after you leave Poland and specifically with the propaganda you're seeing. Maybe it's a lot easier to see it now as propaganda, but what was that experience like with you having immediately left Poland?
00:30:28
Speaker
I left Poland in 1984 and I went to Scotland and one of the first clashes between my experience in Poland and the new environment that I was in was
00:30:46
Speaker
that in Scotland there was a very different view of Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were very popular political figures in Poland because they spoke very
00:31:02
Speaker
against the martial law against the communist influences in Eastern Europe. And I was really surprised when all of a sudden I saw that all my
00:31:21
Speaker
new friends, all my instructors were actually laughing about Margaret Thatcher. That was the time of minor strikes in Scotland. So Margaret Thatcher was extremely unpopular there. And I remember seeing posters of Ronald Reagan carrying Margaret Thatcher in his arms
00:31:43
Speaker
that were the version of the Gone with the Wind poster. And it was really eye-opening that one can see the same
00:31:55
Speaker
person the same historical event from a completely different point of view. The other really surprising discovery that was more of a historical nature was that all of a sudden Napoleon Bonaparte was a villain. In Polish history he was a hero because he
00:32:16
Speaker
fought against those who divided Poland. So all the enemies of Poland. So he was the positive character while in England obviously it was Wellington rather than Napoleon. So that was the first time when I began to reevaluate what my,
00:32:41
Speaker
beliefs were about history. I don't think I had to revisit all the history that I knew but certainly certain things are black and white when you are in one place and then all of a sudden you start seeing them in a different light and that may not be a popular
00:33:06
Speaker
comparison, but this discovery that all of a sudden Napoleon could be seen as a villain and is seen as a villain by most of European countries, except for Poland. It made one realize that the fact that some Ukrainians were fighting on the side of Hitler was a bit like Poles following Napoleon, because that was a chance of regaining freedom.
00:33:36
Speaker
So, history is very grey, it's very rarely black and white, but we usually learn about it in black and white terms.
Evolution of War Propaganda
00:33:46
Speaker
That's so interesting that you say that. I remember once I visited Budapest and I was walking downtown and I saw a statue. I forget where I was exactly. It was just like a statue of a guy. I was like, oh, that's interesting. And like, I'm getting a little bit closer and like, I'm kind of disregarding the statue. And I think I'm like looking down to my right and the plaque says Ronald Reagan. And I look up and I'm like, oh yeah, I guess that's Ronald Reagan. That's a statue of Reagan here.
00:34:12
Speaker
And I didn't actually realize until then that, I mean, it makes sense obviously because he was very anti-communist, but yeah, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan are celebrated figures in Eastern Europe still to this day. I wonder if we can talk a little bit about the relationship between propaganda and war
00:34:38
Speaker
because I suppose I would frame this discussion we're having around the Cold War and Cold War propaganda.
00:34:47
Speaker
First, we've gotten human beings have gotten much more advanced in how we wage war and how we fight war and we've become more efficient in a lot of ways and how we do that. I wonder if you would say that propaganda has also evolved when it comes to war. Have we become better propagandists or
00:35:12
Speaker
More severe? Propagandas? How would you say propaganda has evolved as it relates to war?
00:35:18
Speaker
I don't know whether propaganda has evolved in linguistic terms. It definitely has evolved from the technological point of view. And I think social media are a very big tool of propaganda these days. But when I think about war and propaganda, I think that
00:35:43
Speaker
It used to be the case and it is still the case that propaganda prepares the war by dehumanizing the enemy and I think this was the case before and it is still the case. I recently looked at the war between Russia and Ukraine and or the Russian invasion and in some ways I think that war
00:36:10
Speaker
showed certain lack of preparation in terms of propaganda, in the sense that when you look about how Russians talked about Ukrainians before the war and how Ukrainians talked about Russians,
00:36:28
Speaker
There is no comparison to the way Germans talked about the Jews. I think there was so much interaction between the two countries. There were a lot of Russians living in Ukraine.
00:36:50
Speaker
there were lots of marriages between the two. There was a lot of cooperation in economy, so in many ways it was more difficult.
00:37:03
Speaker
I believe, for Russians to see Ukrainians as not human. And at the beginning of the war, I thought that because there was not that much hatred, linguistic hatred by name calling, that a peace was a possibility, but very quickly the brutality of the Russian invasion really
00:37:31
Speaker
changed that perception and my son surprisingly went to Ukraine last
00:37:39
Speaker
summer. He is dating a Ukrainian girl and she wanted to visit her parents and he said that the perception is well the only good Russian is a dead Russian. It's a horrible thing to say but it just shows that what at the beginning could have been perhaps taken back and there was still a possibility of some kind of
00:38:10
Speaker
reconciliation, I think it's gone now. And it's a horrible thing because those two nations will be neighbors for the foreseeable future. They will have to leave next to each other when the war is over.
00:38:25
Speaker
And how will they be able to do it unless they find a common narrative? Because at the moment, they have two different versions of history. And I think what I'm interested in in linguistics, for instance, is the idea of apology.
00:38:44
Speaker
for the two sides to be able to reconcile that there has to be an apology and I cannot imagine at the moment Russia apologizing to Ukraine because they would have to admit to what they have done because part of apology is the statement of what it is that we have done wrongly. So I don't see from the linguistic point of view the possibility of
00:39:09
Speaker
communication between the two sides, unless they agree on a common narrative and unless they apologize. And if you look about the
00:39:21
Speaker
The relationship between Poland and Germany, that has happened in the 1970s. There was an apology, there was reconciliation between West Germany and Poland. There was never one between East Germany and Poland, because East Germans were painted as good Germans, so they had nothing to apologize for. Obviously, the dividing line between the two countries didn't divide
00:39:49
Speaker
Germany into Nazis and not Nazis. So I think the relationship between Poland and East Germany has always been very suspicious. But between Poland and West Germany was surprisingly much better because Willy Brand came to Poland and
00:40:08
Speaker
he kneeled in front of the ghetto monument and he apologized. So unless something like this happens in Ukraine, there is no possibility of resolving the conflict. So my feeling is that from linguistic point of view, the propaganda hasn't changed that much, but the technological possibilities are much improved.
00:40:35
Speaker
Now, speaking of Russia and Ukraine, do you see a lot of similarities from when you were growing up under communism? Do you see those propaganda strategies being deployed by Russia today with the Russia-Ukraine war?
00:40:53
Speaker
Well, I think I never lived through wartime. So, you know, it cannot be compared. In Ukraine now, people are just dying. It's an actual war. I lived through cold war. And there were people dying from police brutality, but it wasn't
00:41:15
Speaker
that anyone was dropping bombs on Poland. So I don't think I can compare the two. And I feel that definitely
00:41:31
Speaker
You know, this is something that I probably cannot say much about because I just don't know enough about it. But people who say that Russians are brainwashed by Putin's propaganda, that they believe what the TV says. Well, we were being brainwashed by communist propaganda, but people just didn't believe it.
00:41:58
Speaker
I don't know, maybe because we saw communist propaganda as an imposed propaganda.
Comparing Russian and Polish Propaganda
00:42:05
Speaker
I mean, the communists in Poland were Polish, but the communism itself was imported from the Soviet Union. But maybe Russians see the war as their own war because it's them fighting Ukraine. But I just don't believe that
00:42:27
Speaker
You cannot get proper information if you want to, even in Russia today. I just don't believe it. I don't buy it. Do you think that kind of maybe talking out a little bit larger than the example of just Russia and Ukraine, thinking about propaganda today, I suppose, what would you say are some of the more troubling trends that you are seeing when it comes to propaganda around the globe?
00:42:56
Speaker
From the linguistic point of view, I find the concept of enemy.
00:43:03
Speaker
always very worrisome. And there are elements of portraying someone as enemy that have not changed. Even when the current Polish government came into power, they run their election campaign
00:43:28
Speaker
choosing as enemy the refugees and the immigrants. And they were using the same expressions that Hitler used in Mein Kampf, talking about dirty immigrants bringing diseases. This is the kind of dehumanizing language where you compare human beings to vermin or to parasites. And then the cleansing
00:43:58
Speaker
becomes the issue of hygiene rather than morality. When you try to portray the other side as less than human or something that endangers
00:44:11
Speaker
people in terms of their health or their existence. It's very easy to make people think, well, yeah, we have to protect ourselves. The funny thing about the immigrants and Poland was there were no particular immigrants who wanted to come to Poland.
00:44:31
Speaker
they maybe wanted to come to Poland to move on to other European countries but Poles should have been more sensitive because there were huge waves of
00:44:47
Speaker
immigration to other countries from Poland over centuries and I would think that Poles, more than most other nations, should be sensitive to the problems of immigrants.
00:45:04
Speaker
but even in terms of language used not just in Poland but in the West in general, you as a linguist will hopefully appreciate it. We very often
00:45:19
Speaker
I don't know if I call myself a linguist, but I do have a linguistics degree that is true.
Impact of Subtle Language Changes
00:45:24
Speaker
But when we talk about people trying to enter countries, we now very often use the word migrant rather than immigrant.
00:45:35
Speaker
Just by cutting off this prefix in, when you talk about migrants, they are not people who are escaping war or starvation. They are people just moving between countries for no good reason. And I think by just cutting off this in in immigrant and forming the word migrant, you are just taking away the humanity of those people. You are taking away the only thing they can
00:46:03
Speaker
have to ask for compassion and I find it really troublesome how by just doing this we change the perception and that was something that really
00:46:19
Speaker
made me rethink the whole book when after 9-11 the war on terrorism became the war on terror. It was just cutting off the suffix but terrorism is something that we can define. It's the activities of certain people who want to dismantle the world order or whatever or destabilize something. But terror! What is terror? How can we have a war on terror?
00:46:49
Speaker
How can we win a war on terror? It becomes meaningless. But then it becomes this abstract idea, this very vague idea, and we can continue this war on terror forever because we'll never win in it. So those little linguistic things are really meaningful. The other example was the Patriot Act.
00:47:13
Speaker
And I can never remember what the full name of it is, but it cannot be a coincidence that it forms the acronym PATRIOT when it's the act of preventing whatever. You know, those little things that it is your patriotic duty to submit yourself to security checks. Well,
00:47:38
Speaker
Your privacy is not a matter of patriotism. There are certain things that I want to keep private, not because I'm afraid that I'm doing something wrong, but it's just private.
00:47:52
Speaker
What would you say, thinking about, again, because this was a memoir and kind of putting your own life under the microscope, thinking about propaganda 40 years ago as opposed to propaganda now, what do you think has changed?
Distorted Reality in Contemporary Propaganda
00:48:10
Speaker
When I was teaching interpersonal communication class, one of the courses I used to teach,
00:48:20
Speaker
I used to ask my students to write a fear diary. So for three weeks they were supposed to observe the language use around them and note every day if they have seen anything that they thought was supposed to instill fear in them. And the last time I was teaching that class, for the first time ever, I had a number of students reporting that they no longer know what's real and what's true.
00:48:49
Speaker
And I think this is the biggest change that I may have been very naive in my evaluation of propaganda. Naive in the sense that I thought everything that TV says is
00:49:04
Speaker
untrue and everything that Radio 3 Europe says is true. Well, neither was the case. Some things were true in Polish papers, some things were not, maybe not untrue but biased in Western
00:49:20
Speaker
media, but at least I could tell what the reality was. And these days, young people very often don't know what the reality is, what's real, what's fake, and how to notice the difference.
00:49:39
Speaker
And I see it even in people of my generation. I have some of my family on social media. And without using names, one of my family members posted something about George Soros.
00:49:59
Speaker
that there was a picture of George Soros in a Wehrmacht uniform and it was a big discovery that George Soros was in Nazi army and I said
00:50:14
Speaker
Well, if you just fact-checked, he was I think 15 when the war ended, he couldn't have been in Wehrmacht, and also he was Jewish. He wouldn't be in Wehrmacht. So a little bit of fact-checking would be enough to know, but people are just becoming, I don't know, lazy or they accept what they see, and there is this confirmation bias they only read
00:50:41
Speaker
what they already know or agree with. So I think propaganda is much more powerful today than it ever was. Would you say because of that attitude now, maybe people are more open to being influenced by propaganda?
00:51:01
Speaker
possibly. It's a very scary, scary thought. I must say that when I started, it took me very long to publish the book, because I always did projects with other people. And that was just my project. So it was always a bad burner. But
00:51:21
Speaker
I thought for a long time that that book would only have some historical value because the world has changed, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was a lot of optimism that now the worst is behind us. But I think these days, it's probably more important than ever to be really vigilant about how we are being manipulated.
00:51:49
Speaker
and maybe manipulation through advertising is less nefarious. But many people say, oh, I can see through it, I really cannot be influenced. And I'm afraid those are the people who usually
00:52:11
Speaker
let their guard down and they are quite at risk of being influenced just because they don't think it can happen to them.
Memoir's Impact and Worldview
00:52:31
Speaker
again because this is a memoir in thinking about you yourself personally. Now you did mention this book took you a little bit longer than maybe you had first anticipated to finish, but I wonder how you changed personally from when you started this book to when you finished this book. It's a memoir, you're looking back on your life, you're putting things into a perspective maybe you haven't either considered in a long time or
00:52:57
Speaker
or had never considered, but how would you say you changed personally once this book was finished?
00:53:03
Speaker
I don't know, quite honestly. I don't know whether, I'm very happy that the book came out. It was a coincidence that I, well, I met the publisher of the book many years ago when she was still at McMaster University. And then I did translate a little Ukrainian book that she published
00:53:31
Speaker
as a charitable action to collect money for Ukraine. And I asked her, well, where could I take my book? Because I had the manuscript and I didn't know how to go about publishing it because I know what to do with academic books, but I knew it wasn't an academic book. So I'm very happy that the book finally was published.
00:53:55
Speaker
But I think I became more pessimistic about the world and I never thought that we'll be in a situation like the one today. I was always afraid of a war with Russia and I was afraid, but I hoped it will never happen. And the fact that the war between Ukraine and Russia started last year,
00:54:24
Speaker
It's something that really made me very sad and very very pessimistic because it's not a war that can easily end and I am very much afraid for the world.
00:54:39
Speaker
I wish I wouldn't, but I don't see an easy solution. And I see several more generations of young people being affected by this war and traumatized by this war.
00:54:56
Speaker
both in Ukraine and in Russia, and there are other conflicts going on in the world. And collective trauma is something that doesn't go away.
Post-Communism Societal Trauma
00:55:07
Speaker
I must say that many things about me, I only realized when I started to study trauma for academic reasons. And I think societies in post-communist countries are traumatized societies.
00:55:23
Speaker
And some don't know it. And most of them don't think that they can benefit from counseling. But I think without counseling, and by counseling, I mean really orchestrated attempts to heal that trauma. I don't see a solution because part of the trauma is hate.
00:55:47
Speaker
and hatred and there's so much hatred. One of my interests in the last years is hate speech and it's really just devastating to read comments in
00:56:06
Speaker
legitimate papers, not just on social media, where people attack others at persona, where there's just so much toxicity that I don't know what we will do with it, how we will heal.
00:56:24
Speaker
the next generations from it. I think in the States and in Canada, we are quite far away from it, but it doesn't mean that there is no hate. And I see, I'm very lucky to be living in Canada. I love Canada. I feel very patriotic about Canada, but I wouldn't want to die for it, but I want to work for it.
00:56:50
Speaker
But I'm just really afraid of what's going to happen to the world.
Hope for Understanding Democracy's Importance
00:56:57
Speaker
Well, Magna, first Magna, first this has been an excellent interview and I've loved your answers to my questions. My last question for you is, what are you hoping that readers take away from your book after they read it?
00:57:13
Speaker
I think it depends on the reader. One type of readers that I had in mind were my children and people like my children. So children of people who left Poland or children of people of my generation. And I want them to understand what we grew up with because it explains a lot of things about us.
00:57:37
Speaker
And just to give an example, I think that lots of people coming from Eastern Europe are not very fun, very, very supportive of Halloween.
00:57:53
Speaker
And children usually don't understand why parents don't like Halloween. I always liked Halloween, so I'm not one of those. But if you grow up in a country where whenever you dig for the foundation for a new building,
00:58:10
Speaker
you find bones from previous wars. The idea of having bones sticking out of grass in front of your house. It's not funny. And it's not just that it's not funny, but it just strikes very wrong chords. So I think we have associations because of our upbringing. And so I hope that my children will understand me a little bit better.
00:58:39
Speaker
I hope that other people will understand that communism is not a great system where there were just errors in execution. It's just a wrong system that cannot be run in a better way.
00:58:59
Speaker
I also want people to understand that democracy cannot be taken for granted. That we have to actively defend it and that we have to stand up for things. And that includes if you see a graffiti that promotes something that you disagree with.
00:59:21
Speaker
you can paint it over or you can go to the janitor and ask them to remove it, but there is no excuse for not standing up for what we believe in. And I believe that nobody has the right to force us to do things that we feel are wrong.
00:59:44
Speaker
And this is not obvious that we have the right to do what we feel is right. And we have to stand up for it and defend it because it's very easily lost.
00:59:59
Speaker
Oh, well, a powerful message to end on Magda. If folks want to stay in touch with what you're working on or the types of work you're putting out, are you on social media? How can people stay in touch with your work? I'm on social media. I mostly post photography because that's what I do for pleasure. But you can read more of my
01:00:27
Speaker
papers on academia and on a research gate. Pretty much most of my papers are there. Great. Well, Magda Strowinska, My Life in Propaganda, a memoir about language and totalitarian regimes. Go buy a coffee, go check it out from the library. What a fascinating tale. And Magda, thanks again for your time today. Thank you very much, Anthony.