Chewing on Baathist gum

Not a day passes without hearing echoes of the loathsome Baathist past in the statements, speeches, and correspondence of the new government. The ear still catches those wooden phrases: “We raise the highest expressions of thanks and appreciation to the martyrs.” Yet the martyrs, for the new authorities as for us, are not the sort that need our salutations; they are, as the Qur’an reminds us, alive with their Lord. 

Then there is the familiar language of the “wise leadership”, and the continuing existence of the “Special Units”, that notorious military formation whose name has survived intact. One must at least be thankful that the new order did not inherit an Air Force Intelligence branch as in the age of the “forever leader”. It has even been said that some security branches were numbered (Branch 251, etc.) simply to intimidate by giving the impression of their abundance.

Perhaps the continued use of Baathist language is simply the result of a poverty of expression or a lack of alternatives. It is as though the supposedly defunct era of the Assad family was never abolished at all, but remains the pioneer and the guide. 

A man may alter a coat by making it smaller, or a garment by enlarging it. But if a large man squeezes into a child’s coat, the result is comic. What then if he chews an old piece of gum bought from a market for second-hand goods? Does the secular Baathist gum still linger in the mouths of the new rulers?

Some figures in the new leadership have even observed a minute of silence for the souls of the martyrs. Yet this minute of silence was originally a secular Baathist import from overseas, designed to avoid the recitation of the Qur’anic Fatiha in accordance with Levantine traditions. The minute itself was sometimes shortened to thirty seconds — as befitted comrades exhausted from looting the belongings of the living and appropriating the honour of the dead. 

The new authorities have also retained within the army an office called “Moral Guidance”, just as under the Baath, when it was known as the Department of Moral Affairs. Meanwhile, we are told that the governorate of Homs has instructed its employees to dispense with the word “respected” in official correspondence — a perfectly honourable form of address against which there is no objection.

The state would do better to rid itself of strange bureaucratic expressions that are either meaningless or whose meaning has long been lost. Take the phrase “for study and verification in accordance with established procedures”. No one seems to know what those procedures actually are. Or consider the instruction “to implement the order with the utmost speed”, which reads less like administrative language and more like an unsolvable physics equation. Sometimes the phrase becomes “total speed”. 

The expression “referred to the competent authorities” has also survived, just as it was: a code name for the secret intelligence services that once hunted down Syrians in the jungles of opaque legislation.

Language, after all, is not merely a vehicle of expression but an instrument of power. Totalitarian regimes have always been careful to shape language to serve their vision of the world. Under Adolf Hitler, terms such as the Third Reich, the Aryan race, and Lebensraum entered everyday use. Euphemisms such as the “Final Solution” were deployed to conceal a project of genocide.

The German scholar Victor Klemperer observed this phenomenon in his book The Language of the Third Reich, showing how propaganda terms seeped into daily speech until people found themselves repeating the language of power without even realising it.

The Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin had its own vocabulary: the comrade, the bourgeoisie, enemies of the people, purges, and the five-year plan. These were not merely words. They were instruments that determined a person’s fate, his standing within the party — and sometimes his life.

Meanwhile the Syrian Revolution — which produced hundreds of thousands of martyrs — still finds its official newspaper called The Revolution, the same name as the Baath Party's mouthpiece. Only the adjective “Syrian” has been added, out of consideration for the Syrian reader, lest he confuse it with the Algerian or Vietnamese revolutions.

The poet Al-Mutanabi advised that whoever cannot honour others through deeds should compensate with gracious speech:

If you have no horses to gift, nor wealth to give,
Let your words at least bring joy when your circumstances cannot.

Islam itself once offered an example of linguistic renewal. Old words were given new meanings: Islam, jahiliyya, the caliphate, the public treasury, jihad, and martyrdom. New expressions also emerged: Commander of the Faithful, the abode of Islam, the abode of war, and the charitable waqf.

In truth, today’s Syrian army has moved closer to the Islamic lexicon in its terminology than the country’s media and administration — even if some inherited names, such as the Department of Moral Affairs, remain. This suggests that the new era has inherited not only the institutions of the Assad state, but some of its linguistic taqiyya as well.