This week, I attended a presentation at the Czech Embassy by Vladimir Dzuro, who had been one of the investigators into a war crimes that happened
there during the Bosnian wars of the 1990s. (Vladimir mentioned that
they had thought those were the last wars Europe would see and then
Ukraine happened, but he added that he was not allowed to talk about the
current war in Ukraine.) The talk was in English as were the visuals. Vladimir was promoting his book "The Investigator -- Demons of the
Balkan War" which was also in English.
One of the things he mentioned was that there was a graphic
novelization version of the story coming out in Czech next month. (I
asked him if there was an English version coming and he doesn't have a publisher yet). I'm flipping through the advanced copy. At
Michigan State University, my computer science classes fulfilled my
foreign language requirement. Except for some way distant classes in
French in junior high and spending most of my first 5 years of life in
the English-speaking section of Caracas, I've got zero exposure to
foreign languages. So I'm just looking at the pictures. It's nicely
illustrated by the Czech artist Zdeněk Ležák. But I was surprised to run into a panel which had the words "propaganda" and "fake news" in English on them.I
asked Vladimir about this and he said that the United States is
identified worldwide with the terms "propaganda" and "fake news" so when
they describe their own incidents of it, they often use the English
phrase.
I guess I couldn't disagree about the term "fake news." I don't really
consider the term "propaganda" to be strictly an American word -- I would think the Russian
or German word for it would be more universally known -- and it's actually derived from the Catholic Church in Italy. Now though, thanks to Alex Jones, the former child president, and
Faux News, I guess we're firmly identified with both concepts.
If a term in your language is universally recognized,
you're way too closely identified with that concept. If the English
word "diarrhea" was recognized worldwide, you'd know that your country
is universally seen as a shitty country. And that's where we are now
for "fake news" and "propaganda."
