[log in to unmask],.Internet writes:
>The
>eye is first caught by JH Prynne's dissection of Handke's dictum that
>"the
>first victim of war is language"
What first caught my eye in Nate's post is that Handke is revising or
perhaps without knowing it restating an earlier and to my mind more
precise truism: "The first causalty when war comes is truth." This is
the epigraph (credited to [U.S.] Senator Hiram Johnson, 1917) to
Phillip Knightley's _The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam:
The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker_ (NY:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), a book that I highly recommend.
Subsituting "language" for "truth" obscures things considerably.
Prynne's rejoinder is eloquent and apt, though I would hope to find--at
the outskirts of his argument with Handke--a recognition that "abuse of
language" is still a meaningful formulation. After all, even if "Human
language...is not some INNOCENT civilian victim," it is still a victim
at times. Civilians aren't the ONLY casualties in war! (Sorry for the
anthropomorphism, Henry. All creation mourns human stupidity. In
Hiroshima, even the soil was a victim of the bombing.)
Ben F.
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