Right Makes Might

     "War is peace: Freedom is slavery: Ignorance is strength!"

                              --Motto of Big Brother, putative ruler of Oceania, 
                                in George Orwell's 1984.

As for myself, I learned many years ago that "knowledge is power." And where does knowledge come from? From information, of course. So information is power. How, then, can ignorance be strength? Easy. Somebody else's ignorance can be your strength. For a government, this is doubly true. We have all seen how difficult it is for governments to operate in an atmosphere of citizens' awareness. Some governments have historically attempted to maintain their citizens in as complete an isolation as possible, even from each other; some governments merely try to keep their citizens ignorant of affairs outside their own countries.

A good example of the first is Zamenhof's own homeland, Tsarist Russia. It is difficult for Americans, living as we do in a relatively homogeneous society, to realize what a mish-mash of peoples, languages, religions and customs the Russian Empire was and the Soviet Union is. To maintain its hold over these disparate groups, the Tsarist government carried out a policy of divide et impera ("divide and rule," roughly translated). Zamenhof's home town of Bialystok was a test tube example of this policy.

Zamenhof was well aware of the fact that many governments prefer to operate in an atmosphere of ignorance; this may have been why he, in his lifetime of work for Esperanto, had little to do with governments. Only in his last years did he attempt to do anything to influence them in any way, in his "Letter to the Diplomats"; and even then, his contacts had nothing to do with Esperanto per se. Effectively, Esperanto was intended more as an end-run around governments than anything else; it was a way for people, individuals such as you or I, to communicate with our opposite numbers on the other side of the line drawn on a map.

I've already discussed one response on the part of governments: persecution (Stalin, Hitler, China during the Cultural Revolution, Salazar, etc.).(1) But some governments, in some places, at some times, have had a different reaction to Esperanto; they have decided to make use of it for their own purposes. In this chapter I'd like to talk a bit about that particular side of the story of Esperanto. In addition, I intend to do some editorializing, if only to fill up space; so please bear with me for the next dozen pages, if you will.

Several years ago, while burrowing around in the ELNA archives, I ran across a rather interesting sheaf of yellowed papers. What they were, it turned out, were single-sheet newspaper-size and -format daily bulletins, issued during the First World War by the German High Command. They were in Esperanto.

I don't know that much about the background in which these were produced; but I do know that during World War I the German government had no ideological qualms about Esperanto, unlike its World War II counterpart.(2) In fact, foreign Esperantists were represented at Zamenhof's funeral in Warsaw in 1917 by one of the occupying German officials, a Major Neubarth. Esperanto continued to function in Germany, as it did in Russia and the West, and here -- for a few months or years -- that government, portrayed by its contemporaries as a horde of barbaric Huns, was willing to make use, if only for its own purposes, of one of the latest social developments.

My own awareness of such use of Esperanto began, of course, when I became an Esperantist. For all intents and purposes, that was in 1959. The situation of Esperanto by the late 1950's was one of stagnation, largely due to the perception that the future of the world was being decided unilaterally by an English-speaking Western Europe and North America. A careful observer, however, could have detected the beginnings of a turnaround. The Soviet Union had demonstrated, with Sputnik and its successors, that the West had no monopoly on technology.(3) China had already slipped out of the Western camp, and Southeast Asia was on the way out. Castro was about to come down out of the Sierra Maestra, just a hop, skip and a jump away from Washington. And the relict overseas empires of Britain, Belgium, France and Portugal were on the verge of being lost.

One of the reasons for celebrating Zamenhof's centennial,(4) it seems to me looking back on it, was to try to get the Esperanto movement moving again. The World Esperanto Congress for that year was to be held in Warsaw, Poland, the city in which Zamenhof created Esperanto -- the first time it would go East of the so-called Iron Curtain since before that Curtain had come crashing down in the late 1940's. The Congress would also be the largest since the Second World War; 3300 Esperantists, many of them Eastern Europeans who had been isolated from the worldwide Esperanto movement since the beginning of the Great Silence, would be in attendance. The Congress had at its disposal one of Warsaw's biggest buildings, the phallicly monolithic Palace of Science and Culture, sometimes called the Cathedral of St. Josef after the Soviet ruler who had it built.

By a curious coincidence, then-vice-President of the United States Richard M. Nixon happened to be on a tour of the Soviet Union and Poland at the time the Congress was held. Some older readers may remember that trip; it resulted in the famous "Kitchen Debate" with then-Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev. Here is an anecdote about his visit to Warsaw which I have heard from people who were at the Congress. It may be apocryphal and it may not; given the sequel, I leave it for you to decide.

Nixon was being driven around Warsaw when he happened to pass the Palace of Science and Culture. His passage occured just after the closing of one of the major events of the Congress, and he was able to see several thousand people, most of them wearing tiny green star emblems on their lapels, thronging out of the building.

"Say," he said to the driver, "who are those several thousand people, most of them wearing tiny green star emblems on their lapels, who are thronging out of that (yech!) building?"

"Oh," said the driver nonchalantly, "those are the Esperantists. They are holding their World Congress here in Warsaw. They hold one every year."

"(Expletive deleted)!" said Nixon to himself. "The Communists are taking over Esperanto! We must do something about this!" And, upon returning to the Land of the Free, he initiated a series of Esperanto broadcasts from the Voice of America.

Whether Nixon was responsible or not, it was at this time that Voice of America began transmitting in Esperanto. In 1960 VOA transmitted twelve 30-minute programs in three series, and a fourth series was transmitted in early 1961. "In order to reach audiences in different parts of the world, each program was broadcast at different hours to several target areas. The October-November series, for instance, which was devoted to the American elections, went over a network of six shortwave stations." Target areas included Latin America, Europe and the Near East, Japan and Korea, and Southeast Asia -- very much the same set of areas today targetted by Radio Beijing in its Esperanto broadcasts. The first three series of broadcasts generated some 1230 responses from 72 countries, including those behind the Iron Curtain.(5) After the conclusion of the four series, Esperanto broadcasts continued for some time, but only on a sporadic basis, though VOA continued to report on significant Esperanto events such as international, national or regional Esperanto Congresses for some years.(6) But to my knowledge, the United States government has not attempted to make any use of Esperanto, effective or otherwise, for informational purposes during the past decade or two. About which, more later.

If America was not about to make use of Esperanto to present its case, others were -- others not particularly to our liking. Esperanto had already made its way into China early in the century, and Chinese Esperantists were to be found in fair numbers among the younger intellectuals of the twenties and thirties -- the same class from which Mao Tse-tung and Zhou En-lai emerged. Their sympathies were generally with the more "progressive" -- i.e., Communist -- forces. Chiang Kai-shek seems generally to have been more cautious with respect to resisting the Japanese incursions of the early and middle thirties -- what some call the true beginning of World War II -- than his Communist counterparts. Furthermore, the Japanese themselves often excused their continued intervention in China as being "anti-Communist" in purpose -- thus legitimizing the Communists in the eyes of patriotic Chinese young people, including young Chinese Esperantists.(7)

After the War and the Takeover / Liberation, few Esperantists crossed to Taiwan with the Kuomintang forces, and Esperanto has been little known, or perhaps discouraged, in that country to this day -- a Taiwanese Esperanto Association was finally founded only in 1990. Although during the "Reconstruction" period Esperanto was not given a high priority as something to be inculcated among the youth of China, it certainly had a role to play. That role was in external "information."(8)

In May, 1950, the magazine El Popola Ĉinio was founded. With one two-year hiatus in the mid-fifties, the magazine was to continue appearing regularly to the present. By and large, it was not like Esperanto magazines from European organizations; its purpose was not to laud the successes, and downplay the failures, of the Esperanto movement, but to laud the successes, and downplay the failures, of the Chinese government. In this, it was similar to China Reconstructs and a host of other magazines published by the Chinese in English, French, and a dozen other languages.(9) By the time I encountered it in the early sixties, it was a relatively thick monthly magazine with a colored cover and (if I remember correctly) several internal sections of color photos and art. It was, and remains today, a professional publication with a relatively large staff; its international distribution is handled by Guozi Shudian, China's central distributor for foreign language materials overseas, which has its own internal Esperanto section. El Popola Ĉinio exists for external distribution; it is largely available inside China only in those locations patronized by foreigners. Conversely, foreign Esperantists seldom get a chance to peruse the thirty to fifty Esperanto magazines published privately inside China -- not even the national Esperanto organ La Mondo.(10)

China also produced a few Esperanto books of its own in the fifties, although -- by present standards -- not many. Old-time Esperantists were pressed into service to convert these from Chinese into Esperanto, and generally they had to do with the people's successful war against the oppressors.

I have already described my first encounter with Chinese political pamphlets in Esperanto.(11) It is generally believed in America today that the Chinese chose to close themselves off from the world after 1949. Nothing, it seems to me from my experiences, could be further from the truth; the Chinese went to great lengths to present their case and their philosophy to the outside, and were prevented from doing so only by outside forces. This is why, in the very depths of the Cultural Revolution, China's most nationalistic convulsion since the Communist accession, the same Chinese government that had been in power since 1949 jumped at the chance offered by Nixon and Kissinger to "open up to the outside." Zhou En-lai was not reversing a longtime Chinese policy; it was Nixon and Kissinger who were reversing a longtime American policy.(12)

It seems to me that the Chinese were discovering in Esperanto a tool that allowed them to "bypass" the artifical walls that had been constructed around them during the period 1949-1953, and these pamphlets were a manifestation of this discovery. Similar pamphlets were available in English, French, German, and perhaps other languages as well; but the Chinese, I think, had discovered something about Esperanto that other governments, including our own, might do well to heed. Let me explain.

We had moved to Sacramento, as I have said, in 1960, and one of the first things I did there was hunt up bookstores. I was surprised at the lack of books I found in Sacramento, the capitol city of California; compared to my former home in Oregon, the place seemed to be a literary desert. (I hasten to add that this is no longer true, and was no longer true as early as the early 1970's.) I could only find two bookstores in the entire city. One of these, down on "J" Street, near the telephone building, was the Capitol Bookstore, where I often went to buy used science-fiction books. Capitol Bookstore was run by what appeared to be one of the local Communists and iconoclasts, and there I ran across English copies of the same pamphlets that I was receiving at home in Esperanto.

Who bought those English-language pamphlets? The answer should be clear. Not the man on the street -- he couldn't have cared less about what the Chinese thought of John F. Kennedy or the causes of the Sino-Indian border war. Those pamphlets were for people who bought them to reinforce a conviction they had already reached -- that Communism was good, Communist China was the country of the future, American foreign policy was evil. I suspect the same to be true of those pamphlets in French and German. People read them only to reinforce conclusions that they had already reached. In effect, through those English-language pamphlets Communist China was preaching to the converted.

What about the Esperanto pamphlets that I received through the mail? Here there was a difference. English-speakers, French-speakers, German-speakers tend to take their language for granted until it is threatened;(13) Esperanto-speakers have a continual and abiding interest in the language. Not only would they read those pamphlets just because they were written in Esperanto; they were sure to feel at least a small amount of sympathy for a system that was showing itself willing to use Esperanto to present its case. In other words, through Esperanto China was preaching not to the converted but to the susceptible. It was a wise move on their part, and their continuing interest in Esperanto over the years indicates to me that it has paid dividends.

Chien Ming-chi has pointed out to me that many people in relatively high places in the Chinese government and the Chinese intelligentsia were themselves Esperantists or supporters of Esperanto, but I do not believe that this explains that government's willingness to allocate scarce resources to the production of materials in Esperanto. Had people such as Hu Yuzi had the clout to force the use of Esperanto in spite of a lack of results, they could also have encouraged the growth of an internal Esperanto movement -- something which did not happen until the late seventies, when such a movement began to develop at the grass-roots level.

China continued to use Esperanto for informational purposes even at the nadir of the Cultural Revolution. In the middle 1960's she started broadcasting from Radio Beijing in Esperanto, and today a staff of eight handles four Esperanto broadcasts a day from China to four different parts of the world.

I should mention that El Popola Ĉinio has over the years changed its appearance mightily and become much more effective as an instrument of information. In the good old days the magazine's color sections showed millions of identically dressed girls releasing balloons in the Tien An'men to welcome the arrival of some dour, uniformed Eastern European leader; the text was full of references to the "American running dogs" and "lackeys." Later, members of the "Soviet revisionist renegade clique" were added to the list of foreign bandits deserving of criticism. Today the magazine devotes itself to more positive information about China, and political allusions are usually hidden deep in articles about the (very early) history of China. This remains true even after the 1989 events in the Tian An'men.

I might also mention that both El Popola Ĉinio and Radio Beijing have increased their legitimacy among Esperantists by devoting much space and time, respectively, to the Esperanto movement itself -- not just in China, but throughout the world. This legitimacy is probably accidental rather than intentional; the people in charge of the content of both the magazine and the radio broadcasts have strong ties, professional and personal, to the Esperanto movement, and we may suppose that this partial concentration on the Esperanto movement developed from their initiative rather than that of the government. The pseudonymous Seimin (Xie Yuming), who is head of the Esperanto section at Radio Beijing, is also a member of the Academy of Esperanto, as is the equally pseudonymous Laŭlum (Li Shijun), who produces much of the literary material for El Popola Ĉinio. Interestingly, both Radio Beijing and Radio Warsaw regularly send reporters around the world (if necessary) to the annual World Esperanto Congress; which is why my friend Ming-chi's former classmate Xue Meixian was present in 1984 at both the Pacific Esperanto Congress in Portland and the World Esperanto Congress in Vancouver.(14)

China has not been the only Asian country to find Esperanto useful as a means of presenting its case. As you will remember, in 1954, following the collapse of French capability to fight its Southeast Asian war, an international conference outflanked the victorious Viet Minh by dividing French Indochina into three separate nations, one of which -- Vietnam -- was further divided along the 18th parallel. This latter division was originally intended for purposes of "regrouping" and was to be ended by free nationwide elections after 18 months; but for reasons I won't go into here the division was maintained and eventually led to the Vietnam War of bitter memory.

South Vietnam had access to the entire Western world through America's informational apparatus -- not only governmental, but also our private news services. North Vietnam's only real outlets were through China and the Soviet Union, and news services such as Xinhua and TASS seem to lose much of their effect at the borders of those two countries. So North Vietnam at some point decided to add Esperanto to its arsenal of informational weapons. The result was a series of books in Esperanto of all types -- geographical descriptions, histories, novels, collections of short stories, and, of course, polemics. There was also a North Vietnamese Esperanto magazine, Vjetnamio Antaŭenmarŝas.

This flood of information from North Vietnam was enough to sway the sympathies of many speakers of Esperanto, especially since South Vietnamese information, which -- filtered through the American informational apparatus -- was mostly American information and was mostly in English, seemed to consist mainly of reports on how much better we were at killing people than they were. As I may have suggested earlier, this is an argument that does not especially appeal to Esperanto-speakers, especially when they are aware that, in the long-range scheme of things, they might themselves be on the list of those to be killed.

Vietnam differed from China in that the use of Esperanto for political information trailed off after the end of the war; the Vietnamese government had used it for a particular purpose, during a particular period, and saw no need to follow through. There are today many Esperantists in Vietnam, but the government makes little use of the language. It is worth noting, however, that over the past dozen years the official Vietnamese press has published a few books in Esperanto, and in 1990 they began publishing a quarterly Esperanto version of the color magazine Vjetnamio.

Unlike China or Vietnam, the Soviet Union has in the past made little use of Esperanto. That situation, however, seems to be changing in this decade. Early in the 1980's the government started to include an occasional Esperanto section in the English-language Moscow News for distribution to foreigners. Not much later Novosti Press began publishing political pamphlets, usually reprints of speeches by the current General Secretary of the Communist Party, in Esperanto. Under Gorbachev the tempo has increased slightly, as has the size of the pamphlets; his Report to the 27th Party Congress in Esperanto translation is well over a hundred pages long. The Soviet Union also recently published a large, colored pamphlet, Kio Estas USSR? ("What Is the USSR?"), which more closely resembles an oversized tourist prospectus than a piece of political information, and a similar piece of anti-nuclear material.

More recently, the national foreign-language publishing house Progress has begun publishing material in Esperanto for distribution abroad as well as to Esperantists in the USSR. There is not yet, however, a national Esperanto magazine equivalent to El Popola Ĉinio, Vjetnamio, or Hungara Vivo (see below). Soviet Esperanto magazines, representing a wide range of different interests, also seem to represent a wide range of different viewpoints; Sovetia Esperantisto ("Soviet Esperantist"), published in Baku, to some degree represents the forces of Azeri nationalism, and similarly with Informoj de la Estonia Esperanto-Asocio ("Information from the Estonian Esperanto Association"). An interesting counterweight to the professionally-composed and printed Azerbaidjani monthly, incidentally, is an occasional broadside printed and distributed worldwide by a shadowy Armenian Esperanto Association in Erevan.

In 1989 the Soviet government produced one trial issue of an Esperanto version of Moscow News. Plans to produce it monthly, however, apparently foundered on the reef of the ongoing paper shortage -- which since 1989 has only gotten worse.(15)

One interesting magazine which barely touched the fringe of the Esperanto movement was the multilingual monthly Soviet Uzbekistan (as of 1991 Uzbekiston Contact), published in Tashkent in the Republic of Uzbekistan. This magazine, which appears (or appeared) in some dozen languages, including (speaking charitably) very indifferent English, began a bimonthly Esperanto column at the instigation of Mr. Yevgeni Perevertajlo in the mid-80s. The results have been striking. By the end of the eighties, some ten to twenty percent of the names that appear in the magazine's regular "Interlocutor" column belong to Esperanto-speakers; contrast this with the (semi-official) proportion of Esperantists to non-Esperantists in the world, at last count four one hundredths of one percent.(16) In late 1990 and early 1991, two issues carried long interviews with foreign visitors to Uzbekistan: both were Esperantists. Such figures should be of interest to those considering the use of Esperanto for informational purposes.

One other Eastern European country that deserves mention for its use of Esperanto over the years is Hungary. The Hungarian Esperanto Association developed and nourished very good relations with the pre-1990 Hungarian government. One of the results of this was Hungara Vivo, a magazine in some ways similar to El Popola Ĉinio; a bimonthly, it contained articles about Hungary, Hungarian literature, jokes, puzzles, and, of course, a correspondence column. Like EPÇ, HV was read all over the world by Esperantists; its major purpose was not to promote Esperanto, but to promote an understanding of Hungary abroad, through the use of Esperanto. It was, unfortunately, a product strictly of the Hungarian Esperanto Association, and with the onset of privatization and the loss of government subsidies it met its untimely end. The last issue that I have seen was double number 1990/5-6. There is now some hope that when Hungary overcomes its current economic problems some subsidies will be restored, and perhaps at that time Hungara Vivo will return to life; failing that, one of the new privatized Esperanto organizations in the country may eventually decide to revive the magazine.

The success of Hungara Vivo, El Popola Ĉinio and Radio Beijing may be explained, I believe, by the fact that they have been administered by Esperantists, not by non-Esperantist bureaucrats. The Esperanto movement is an important, although quantitatively minor, part of the magazine, just as in the case of EPĈ. This was not true in Vietnam or the USSR in the past; although in both cases material was translated or provided by Esperantists, decisions on content appeared to be made by non-Esperantist governmental appointees. This could explain why official use of Esperanto in Vietnam trailed off after the war. A growing involvement on the part of committed Esperantists in the "informational" field in both countries indicates a brighter future for attempts to use the language for this purpose -- other factors (chiefly economic) being equal, of course. Incidentally, the staff of the Esperanto section at Radio Warsaw, too, is made up of enthusiastic Esperantists who devote much of their time, energy and material to the Esperanto movement -- which may also go far to explain the success of this well-known series of broadcasts.

In the West, most ventures into the field of using Esperanto for informational purposes have been restricted to tourism, and lack any kind of philosophical or informational content. In this field, the United States has been particularly remiss; so far as I can tell, except for that one minor foray by the Voice of America we have never attempted to use Esperanto to promote our point of view, either in general or about any particular question.(17)

I would like to reiterate here a point I made above with respect to the Chinese (and, by extension, the Vietnamese) experience. When you publish a magazine -- let us call it U.S.A. -- in English, or in the language of a country you want to penetrate with information about the United States, the people who buy and/or read that magazine are going to be people with an interest in the United States; and, generally, they will be people who already have some sympathy for the American viewpoint. To a great degree, you will be preaching to the converted.

On the other hand, your magazine Usono,(18) printed in Esperanto, will be snatched up by people who are interested not so much in the United States as in the language itself. That they learn something about America, about life here, about our political philosophy, about our hopes and dreams, about the fact that there is more to us than money and silicon and napalm -- this may well be a side effect, but it will be an effect. In learning that the Constitution of the United States is exactly 100 years older than Esperanto, they'll also learn something about that Constitution, about the purposes of its framers, about the ways in which it's been implemented and how it's affected their own world. In learning that the first major organization to show interest in Esperanto was an American one, they'll also learn something about that organization and its founder, Benjamin Franklin. In reading about the activities of the Esperanto Society of New England, they can also find out something about life in that part of the United States. And so on.(19)

I do not consider this likely is to happen. Past experience suggests that it is not at all likely. In 1987, the year Esperanto celebrated its hundredth birthday, when at least nine nations issued postage stamps to commemorate the occurrence, the Board of Governors of the U.S. Postal Service refused to follow suit; their agenda was already occupied by Sinclair Lewis and the deer mouse.(20) I have already speculated upon the reasons for this disinterest in Esperanto.(21)

I would, however, like to see the United States take at least a tentative step toward the use of Esperanto in promoting its own viewpoint in the world at large. We could start with a relatively modest effort: a 32 or 40 page quarterly magazine with perhaps four pages of color pictures, and a once or twice weekly broadcast from VOA to selected parts of the world. The magazine could be distributed through the normal Esperanto-movement outlets that handle such as El Popola Ĉinio; the broadcast would not need special handling. After a year or so the government could decide, based on international response, whether to continue the operation, enlarge it, or cancel it.

Based on the Chinese, Hungarian and Polish experiences, I suspect that enlargement would be the most likely result. But we will never know if we don't try, will we.

Don Harlow <donh@donh.best.vwh.net>