tim's experiment

Strange feeling of daja vu while I was reading Michael Chugani’s column this morning. Mr Chugani was complaining, with some justice, that the complaints about “white terror” from democrat enthusiasts seemed a bit overblown. Three of them had received razor blades through the mail. Mr Chugani thought this was pushing the language a bit, and so perhaps it is. Certainly I had read somewhere that someone else thought the same thing.
Then the penny dropped. Mr Chugani’s supporter of the day before was … Mr Chugani. In his column in the Standard, “Brush up your English” Mr Chugani had claimed that the word had been misused, gave some examples of correct use, castigated one of the razor blade recipients and finished up with an attack on Mrs Anson Chan. Well if you can’t agree with yourself, how can you expect anyone else to?
I do not question the merits, or the ethics, of using the same idea for columns in two competing newspapers. Freelancers do this all the time, I understand. Nor do I question Mr Chugani’s right to exercise his critical faculties mainly on language use by the pro-democracy camp. Mr Chugani’s feelings about democracy look increasingly like the average Hongkong millionaire’s feelings about marital fidelity: he’s vocally in favour of it but unwilling to take any practical action to bring it about.
What I do question is whether it is acceptable, in a column aimed mainly at people wishing to improve their English, to provide instead a piece of flagrant political propaganda. If Mr Chugani found a school teacher of English urging his students to Occupy Central he would be outraged.
There are two other dangers to this. One is that the unwary reader may be hoodwinked into supposing that linguistic virtue and political virtue are the same thing, which is clearly nonsense. The second is that elementary linguistic points may be overlooked in the rush to make a political point. White terror should not properly be used for attempts to victimise pro-democrats, not because the attempts are not very serious, but because white terror is only white if it is instigated by or on behalf of conservative or reactionary regimes. The correct term for terror inflicted by communist parties, governments and their supporters is “red terror”. There are plenty of Chinese examples, which Mr Chugani will no doubt get round to next week.