English language and the political class

When I read the story about the Head of Iran’s intelligence services being an alleged double agent for Israel’s Mossad, my first thought was, ”Wow, his language skills must be beyond impressive if he can avoid detection in the nest of vipers.” You’re likely familiar with a shibboleth – the word or a custom that can give you away as a foreigner. One wrong sound and you’re dead. Talk about pressure. Then again, for someone raised in a multilingual environment, these things come naturally.

We all know why English continues to be the lingua franca. The international language. Love it, hate it, be indifferent to it, that’s how it is. Great Britain, by the way, is a great example that a nation can be a relatively small island and still have a global empire. Well, had, but you get the point.

Someone wrote on X, ”Netanyahu speaks English with a Philadelphia accent, and I have always thought there is a lot of Philadelphia about him.”

For Israel, having top government officials who are fluent in English is crucial.

As someone with an extensive background in English teaching, my ear is attuned to hearing English around me, especially when in Poland where, hello captain obvious, most people speak Polish.

What about the Polish political class, then? What’s their English like? Well, I’ll be diplomatic. Inadequate. I can name three politicians off the top of my head who are fluent. Polish Foreign Minister – Radosław Sikorski (his wife is Anne Applebaum, an American, so he gets to practice English with an educated native for free), the mayor of Warsaw – Rafał Trzaskowski, and our Prime Minister – Donald Tusk.

Their politics aside, they can communicate on a global stage with ease. We need more politicians who don’t rely on interpreters following them around. Interpreters who sometimes are criminally underpaid and it’s a tough, and extremely responsible, job. Particularly when you dealt with people such as Vladimir Putin, and others.

Top politicians must be adept at conveying the finer nuances of the language, the finer shades of meaning, face-to-face. It’s vital. When people say, ”Oh, come on, they can ask language experts to help them,” when it comes to top-level politicians, I disagree. Their English must be fluent. All the other personality traits, connections, donors, whatever, that comes after. When there’s another person in the room, no matter how discreet and no matter how many non-disclosure agreements he or she signs, it just isn’t the same. So yes, of course, a top politician snaps his fingers and there’s a line of interpreters waiting with bated breath, but that’s not the point.

Lower-level officials don’t need to always be fluent, because they aren’t nearly as exposed to international pressure, intrigues and so on, as the top-level guys (officially, anyway) who decide the shape of the world we live in.

Sure, if you’re the leader of a global power such as China, I can understand not having the need to learn English. You know people around the world are learning Mandarin because they know it’s an increasingly useful and vital language.

Empires have their own sets of rules. Empires can do more. Empires get away with more. It’s sad, it’s bad, but that’s how it’s always been and likely that’s how it’s always going to be, in spite of idealists hoping for a unified Earth exploring space together, and so on. If you want to effectively punish an empire, you need to reduce its status to non-imperial first.

Call it a special puppetization operation.

When you struggle to string two sentences together, sorry, you’re not fluent in English, or any other language, for that matter. That’s self-delusion. A private citizen can afford it. A top politician – can’t.

It’s a matter of national security. To be clear, I’m not saying they must recite Shakespeare’s Sonnets in Original Pronunciation. Shakespeare likely sounded kind of American, by the way, or, rather, American English preserved the features found in British English centuries ago. Makes sense. Some linguists say the Shakespeare claim is nonsense. What else is new.

My double in another dimension must now learn Korean. There but for the grace of God.

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Adam Borowski, Author at the Kyiv Post