Authors: Project Itoh
The former scholar put his hand to his mouth before launching into a calm, deliberate lecture by way of explanation.
“The defense establishment wasn’t involved with my research at first. It was academic work, pure and simple. All the materials I was using were in the public domain. Archives from Nazi Germany, radio broadcasts, magazines, literature, military communications. I acquired all sorts of data from the Nazi era—prewar as well as wartime. Much of it was already digitized; I had my assistants convert the materials that only existed in hard copy. Then I parsed it all. Grammatical analysis, in layman’s terms.”
Research into Nazi rhetoric. I tried to imagine how it would relate to university work. Class 101: Fascist Communications—Discourse for Dummies. Don’t embarrass yourself in front of your fellow National Socialists by making a linguistic faux pas! All this was interesting enough, as an interdisciplinary elective that fell between the domains of linguistics and history. But I still didn’t see how that could be of such interest to the military.
“I published a thesis based on my work,” John Paul continued. “The MIT budget committee called me in not long after. The chairman coolly informed me that my research had been selected for funding by the National Military Establishment, so I needed to run along and present them with my research. I wasn’t wild about the idea at first—it would mean that any further research on the topic would be classified and impossible to publish—but when I realized how many perks there would be other than just the actual funding, I reluctantly accepted. After all, it meant full access to confidential CIA documents and to international traffic intercepted by the NSA. Everything from Pol Pot’s wireless transmissions to the Khmer Rouge to Rwandan radio broadcasts. The NME even arranged for me to have full access to the Russian archives on the Katyn Forest Massacre. Most valuable of all to my research, though, was the raw data from the traffic that the NSA and the CIA had intercepted.”
“And you discovered something from all this?”
“Yes. That there is a grammar to genocide.”
I didn’t understand.
John Paul saw my incomprehension and explained. “Whatever the country, the political climate, or the syntactical framework of the language used, the data always showed that there was one thing in common: a deep structure of the grammar of genocide. There were always certain patterns in the media of a society that was about to start committing genocide, present in its newspaper articles, radio and television broadcasts, even the novels and short stories published. We’re talking about at a deep structural level, not something noticeable in the surface structures that non-linguists are used to accepting at face value. In other words, only a trained linguist who was specifically looking for these patterns would ever have been able to find them.”
The grammar of genocide.
A predictor of atrocities to come.
I couldn’t believe it. “Language is something humans learn. It’s the result of acquired learning.
A posteriori
knowledge. It’s just language. It can’t affect people’s souls in such a fundamental way,” I said.
“Ah, the old
tabula rasa
canard. Touching to think that there are still people who believe it. The human mind is a blank slate? I suppose next you’ll be telling me that autism is caused by people not receiving enough love and affection when they were children.”
“Isn’t it?” I asked.
“Genetics predetermine most things about the way a person turns out, from their personality to any physical or mental handicaps, even down to their political leanings. Environmental factors play a marginal role at best. There are those who have tried to argue that human beings are purely a product of their environment, and that all people are essentially born equal. Well, I’m an egalitarian myself, and I believe that it’s a uniquely human trait to be able to transcend our genetics by creating this concept called ‘culture.’ But I can’t allow my belief in the potential of humanity to muddy the objective results of my scientific inquiry. All I’m saying is that every human action has a source, with perfectly good biological and neurological explanations. We need to start by acknowledging to ourselves that we are no more than bundles of flesh assembled according to a genetic code. Our livers and bowels and kidneys were made according to a predetermined genetic formula, so why should there be a special exemption for our minds or hearts, or anywhere else we choose to believe our mysterious spirit might reside?”
I thought of Lucia’s words that the human heart was a product of evolution.
Had she just been regurgitating John Paul’s philosophy?
The thought made me sick to the core.
“But the language that a child learns while growing up is the language spoken by the people around him,” I said. “It’s not as if babies are born with Esperanto carved into their brains or anything. Isn’t that what scholars mean when they call linguistics an
a posteriori
discipline?”
“No. Let me give you an example. Back when slavery was still legal, the old plantation owners could have cared less what sort of language their slaves spoke. The slaves had been abducted from all four corners of Africa and were just thrown together to work, regardless of whether they had any language or culture in common. Now, this state of affairs wasn’t going to last for long. Soon, the slaves started picking up fragments of their masters’ language—English. But their version of the language was much more simplistic than the original and grammatically all over the place, but at the same time much more rigid and restrictive than English. You couldn’t change word order in a sentence or collocate words easily, for example. In its first generation, this was called Pidgin English.”
John Paul took a deep breath, readying himself to continue his lecture.
“The children of those slaves grew up with Pidgin English as their mother tongue. When they interacted with other ‘native’ pidgin speakers, interesting things started happening: the language started shifting from the rigid original toward a much livelier and more fluid language. A more naturalistic grammar emerged. Grammatical rules that the parents had never used started coming into play, effectively invented by the children. This new language was based on English but was definitely not a language developed by people who had grown up listening to the original. Linguistically and grammatically speaking it was an entirely new language that developed out of a pale imitation of the original. Today it’s called Creole. The children, in other words, acquired a sophisticated grammar that eluded their parents. The only convincing explanation for this is that the human brain has an inherent ability to generate its own grammar out of the linguistic components it has on hand.”
“And that’s what you mean by deep structure—our innate grammatical potential?” I asked.
“Yes, an ability seared into our brains by our genetic code. An organ that gives birth to language.”
A built-in organ inside our brain that gives birth to language.
The organ that contains the portents of massacres.
I was starting to understand. “So DARPA was interested in your research because they figured that if there was a hidden grammatical code inside the human mind that led to chaos and disorder, then they might be able to preempt outbreaks of genocide by monitoring and analyzing communications in countries that were already known to be politically and ethnically unstable.”
John Paul nodded. “As my research progressed, I soon became able to identify omens of escalating violence in patterns of language that people used to communicate with each other. It wasn’t something that you could identify from individual conversations, but rather something that happened at the structural level of a society. You could even see it in the language used by the society’s victims. You can see it in the discourse of the Jews who lived in the Third Reich, for example. And to get a true picture you need to perform frequency analysis on an entire region. What you end up seeing is an outbreak of a particular type of change inside the minds of people who’ve been subjected to this discourse over an extended period of time. Specifically, the part of the brain that makes certain value judgments becomes inhibited. That thing that we have come to call ‘conscience’ becomes twisted. Biased, if you will, in a certain direction.”
John Paul had said enough. The horrific logical conclusion to his story was now looming before me.
I wondered when he had experienced his “eureka” moment. When he lost his wife and child? Or when he was with Lucia replaying that initial report of the news from Sarajevo over and over?
After a pause, I timidly ventured my conclusion. John Paul’s conclusion.
“So you wondered which came first, the chicken or the egg …”
John Paul smiled. “Just so.”
Genocide could be predicted by the frequency of certain types of deep grammatical structures used within a country’s discourse.
So what would happen if you took a stable country where no such discourse was happening and somehow deliberately increased the frequency of this type of deep grammatical structure?
What would happen to a region when its people started speaking with the grammar of genocide?
You’d have to be a lunatic even to consider it
, I thought. It was an idea that might crop up during the course of research—a whimsical hypothesis, a joke almost. But you wouldn’t actually try it out. How could you, for starters? As John Paul had said, this wasn’t a hypothesis that manifested itself on an individual level, only at the level of a whole society. You’d need to be able to influence public discourse on a massive scale—the logistics were mind-boggling.
And yet …
“So you experimented? With a Third World country?”
“Why do you think I joined a public relations firm?” John Paul said. “The perfect opportunity to embed myself in the core of a country’s propaganda machine. All I had to do was influence the national media broadcasters, sign off on the head of state’s speeches, tell the cabinet ministers what to say, and make sure that no government announcement went out without being checked by me first. It was easy. I had left MIT by then and my government funding had dried up, but I already knew everything I needed to know. And sure enough, the experiment proved successful.”
“But what about the other countries?” I said. “They didn’t give you the same level of access to influence the core of their government communications.”
“And they didn’t have to,” John Paul said. “A little judicious application of SNDGA and it was easy enough to work out which branches of communication I needed to focus on to yield maximal returns. Not so different from you guys, right?”
“SNDGA?”
“Not your field, perhaps? SNDGA stands for Social Network Directed Graph Analysis. It’s what your bosses use to work out which target you need to kill next in order to have the biggest chance of suppressing the violence in a region.”
He’s Public Enemy Number One. The leader who is causing the massacres, fanning the flames of chaos, bringing about death and destruction to his society. That’s why he’s your target. You need to kill him for the greater good.
The sort of thing I had always been told on a pre-mission briefing. Same with Williams, Alex, Leland.
Well, I suppose someone in Washington or Fort Mead must have had a way of identifying our targets.
John Paul seemed to have seen something in my momentarily blank expression because he squatted down next to me and looked straight into my eyes as if he were talking to a crawling toddler.
“Have you ever heard of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon?” he asked me. “A party game named after an old movie star.”
Footloose
was one of my guilty pleasures.
“You take two actors who’ve never been in a movie together and try and connect them in as few steps as possible,” John Paul continued. “If there’s an actor they’ve both been in a movie with, that’s one degree of separation. If the first actor has been in a movie with an actor who in turn has been in a movie with an actor who has been in a movie with the second, then that’s two degrees of separation, and so on. Virtually every actor ever known can reach Kevin Bacon within three degrees of separation. In other words, the game is about personal networks.”
“Thanks for the explanation, but I doubt there’s an American alive who hasn’t heard of the Kevin Bacon game.”
“Do excuse me. I wasn’t trying to patronize you. It’s just a useful analogy for explaining graph theory. The study of analyzing networks made up of these sorts of links. The NSA, the Center for Counterterrorism, and DARPA all poured money into the field of graph theory once it became clear that the new type of terrorist threat was decentralized and not tied down to a specific geographical location. Graph theory became a subject of interdisciplinary military research, just like my field. Graph theorists would study data intercepted at Echelon and observe the interactions between different people in different regions—how data were exchanged. It wasn’t the contents of the data as such that was important, but the flow: how information dispersed and which channels would cause it to disseminate most effectively. All this can be ascertained through network analysis.”
That made sense. I supposed that was indeed how the powers that be chose our targets.
“But how do you know all of this?” I asked.