It is baffling yet interesting in equal measure to examine the reasons why migrant communities, such as Hispanic Americans, voted for MAGA candidate Donald Trump in the last US elections. Numerous commentators have analysed the reasons why a candidate who openly demonises migrants – Trump attacked Mexicans as drug dealers and rapists – would acquire political support among migrant communities.

During the first iteration of the Trump presidency, I wrote about the Iraqi Christians who voted for him, were then subject to the threat of mass deportations. Trump made no secret of his anti-immigrant agenda. In his most recent moves, the Trump MAGA cult invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to expel Venezuelan immigrants. This act has not been used since World War Two, and is invoked only in times of war.

At the time of writing, a federal judge has stopped this latest deportation. The 1798 act allows the US Congress to deport non-citizens, the latter unable to appeal the decision to an immigration or federal court judge.

The original legislation, passed by lawmakers worried about a potential war with France, has been used only rarely – during the war of 1812, for instance. This law has not been deployed since the end of World War 2.

Why is all this relevant to current circumstances?

Joan Walsh, writing in The Nation magazine, makes an important argument – do the Irish Catholics who supported Donald Trump realise they see the original enemy aliens? The Federalist party, at the time the equivalent of national conservatives, wanted a strong army, navy, economy, and intended to keep out enemy aliens.

The Irish Catholics, being of the same faith group as the French, were considered undesirable elements. The new American government, emerging from the war of independence, was concerned that French revolutionaries would infiltrate the nation, and bring their ideas with them.

The American patriots who rose up in the 1770s were certainly anti-British, but not politically revolutionary like the French Republicans. While expressing support for basic democratic demands, such as no taxation without representation, they were limited in their demands against the English monarchy. They made clear they were rebelling against the excessive impositions of the British crown. The French Jacobins demanded full equality without any geographic or time limitations.

Excluding the French was one thing; targeting the Irish Catholics for exclusion was particularly galling. Why? The American government, in a display of realpolitik, supported the failed 1798 Irish uprising against the British crown. That insurrection was led by Irish Catholics against the British-Anglican establishment. Having cynically supported the Irish rebels, the US government promptly closed the door on those Irish seeking asylum in the new nation.

Federalist politicians in Washington railed against the Irish, demonising them as wild, unruly pestilential elements, bound to disturb the tranquility of the American nation. Irish Catholic Republicans in the US were harassed and targeted as enemy agents, disloyal to the new republic.

Irish American republicans knew exactly what side they were on – in our own times, Irish left wing activists drew explicit links with the African American civil rights movement on a platform of antiracist solidarity. No doubt this caused consternation among conservative Irish.

Be that as it may, it is pertinent to ask if Irish Catholic MAGA supporters will now withdraw their support for the Trump administration. I am not holding my breath….. The MAGA cult, because that is exactly what it is, is not known for its logical thinking or interethnic solidarity.

Next time, think deeply about what you are voting for – decisions made by this administration are a predictable consequence of the political platform you supported at election time.

MAGA and military veterans

There is one electoral bloc that has consistently sided with the Republican Party down the years; military veterans. If that is going to change over the next four years, I do not know. There are already indications that US military top brass are unhappy with all the sackings of US generals and officers, only to be replaced by MAGA loyalists.

Be that as it may, there is no doubt that military veterans are a key base of support for the Trump administration. Seeing that is the case, let’s make a suggestion which will further solidify US military veteran loyalty to the MAGA club – or perhaps it won’t, you be the judge.

In World War 2, the US Army’s 761 tank battalion fought courageously in the European theatre of war. What is special about that unit? It was staffed completely by African Americans. The original ‘Black Panthers’, this all-black unit confronted the preeminent white supremacists in Europe, the Nazi army.

This group of soldiers were not allowed to interact or train with white soldiers. Indeed, white race riots broke out in Louisiana and other military compounds where these black troops were being trained. The US army was not officially desegregated until 1947, after World War Two had finished.

The most famous of the black tank drivers was the late great Jackie Robinson, the first African American to play baseball in the major leagues. These veterans, after risking life and limb fighting racism in Europe, returned to a nation which rejected them. They knew exactly what they were fighting against.

Troops of the 761 battalion helped to liberate Gunskirchen concentration camp in Austria, in May 1945. The sight which confronted the African American soldiers was horrifying; inmates half starved, frozen, vermin-infested, barely able to walk, skin hanging off skeletons, weakened by malnutrition.

These troops, and their sacrifices for personal freedom (individual liberty being such a prized commodity in MAGA land), were all but ignored in the decades after 1945.

These military veterans should be commemorated and respected, especially when confronting racism today.

Translating articles or content into another language may seem like a straightforward task – just taking the words and finding their equivalents in a foreign language, surely? Since the dawn of Google Translate and now the Large Language Model (LLM) multilingual applications of artificial intelligence, translating a document from one language to another is pretty straightforward, isn’t it?

No, it is not.

Let’s start with one example of a translation, which will help us anchor this discussion.

Coors Light is an American brand of beer, popular around the world. Its advertising campaign was sophisticated, slick and ubiquitous. The accompanying slogan for their ad campaign was ‘turn it loose.’ Great, simple, concise phrase. Now translate that into Spanish; what is the result? In Spanish, their ad slogan was ‘you will suffer from diarrhoea.’ Not exactly the message the Coors Light brand wanted to convey.

How about when the Pepsi brand of soft drink was first introduced to mainland China, with the catchy slogan ‘Pepsi brings you back to life.’ The Chinese translation of that statement was ‘Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave.’ I am no marketing expert, but I doubt that sales of a food product would increase by associating it with the grave.

If I say, to an English speaking person, ‘finger-lickin good’, chances are they will understand it to be the famous advertising slogan of KFC. The equivalent in Chinese is ‘eat your fingers off.’ A touch of cannibalism thrown into food commercials is original, to say the least.

Let’s step away from the world of brands and marketing, and delve deeper into translations in the real world. I am certain that it is easier to translate everyday phrases and questions into other languages – ‘open the door’, ‘one coffee please’, and ‘my ankles are swollen’ do not contain any nuances or subtleties. What happens when we discuss wider sociopolitical and economic issues?

The big issue in the corporate-controlled media is the Russia Ukraine war. News regarding the casualties, attacks and fatalities is splashed and recycled across our tv screens and mobile devices. The Trump-Zelensky shouting match was the most recent iteration of the Ukraine-Russia news cycle.

There was extensive coverage of the screaming match, followed by the inevitable screaming and shouting on social media. Reams of commentary saturated the news coverage, along with a deluge of analysis by different commentators and organisations. Amidst all the tsunami of shouting and screaming, what gets lost is the crucial role of translation in bringing news and analysis about the conflict to the Anglophone audiences.

In every war, propaganda becomes a staple part of the news cycle diet, and the Russia-Ukraine war is no exception. Translation of articles from non-English sources inevitably has to tackle the propaganda aspect of war reporting.

When examining any overseas conflict, we in the Anglophone community necessarily rely on non-English speaking resources. On the socialist Left, respective socialist parties reach out to their ideological compatriots – comrades in the struggle – in the non-English speaking nations for news and analysis. The Russia-Ukraine war has generated inordinate amounts of analysis by socialist organisations and activists from different traditions.

Making sense of all this, in the midst of a propaganda barrage by our homegrown media behemoths, is a daunting enough task. Having to translate resources into English, maintaining the shared meanings and nuances of sociopolitical discussion only adds enormous complexity to the task.

This is why is say a big thank you to translators.

For instance, the following article here, regarding the latest developments in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, first appeared in a Portuguese socialist publication.

Thank you to the Portuguese comrades who wrote this article. Thank you to the translators for translating it.

Translation is one hell of a difficult job; while Google translator is all well and good, translating the meaning of an article takes dedicated cognitive effort. Automated translators talk like machines – they churn out words and sentences, but not the meaning of the original article.

Translating a text on a difficult and controversial topic such as the Russia Ukraine war is fraught with complications. Conveying the meaning of solidarity and political analysis is not easy between languages. Decoding the war propaganda, locating blame for the conflict on the large NATO powers, fighting off accusations of Putin apologism, is no easy task. So a big thank you to the translators of the article above, who no doubt spent countless hours agonising over the correct words and meanings.

Translation necessarily involves immersing yourself in another language, culture and idioms. The origins, complexity and richness of language is still being debated by linguists, psychologists and anthropologists. It is daunting enough for new migrants to understand the language of their adopted homeland.

Ethnic communities in Australia have largely settled for insularity, retreating into the safety of their own language communities. That is an unfortunate strategy when dealing with issues of multiculturalism and assimilation. This makes cross cultural awareness and understanding of each other’s diverse political opinions and struggles that much more difficult.

How about we all start by realising that translating involves trans creating – if there is such a word. It is not just a mechanical, machine-driven process of finding the equivalent words, but an invisible yet powerful bridge crossing the cultural-linguistic divide. How about we understand this concept – Gemeinschaftsgefühl. Introduced by psychologist Alfred Adler, there is no direct English translation.

The rough English translation is ‘a community of equals working and maintaining social interest.’ The collective good is a concise way of summarising his concept. Translation is the bridge that can help us maintain a collective sense of community welfare, rather than only thinking about our own narrow insular groups.

When one hears the phrase German philosophy, our minds go to the past; a topic explored by intellectual-heavyweight dead guys in the nineteenth century. When we mention German philosophers, the immediate image we recall is of old, white haired, bearded men, with grizzled features poring over obscure texts – Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche (ok, Nietzsche died at 44, and sported a heavy moustache minus the beard).

Let’s park this stereotype for the moment, and return to our own times.

A contemporary German philosopher we need to learn from is Byung-Chul Han. Wait a minute – what was that name again? South Korean born, Swiss-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han (1959 -) examines, among other things, the impact of digital technologies on human society. He has lived and worked in Germany since the age of 22.

In Germany, he found his spiritual home, dedicating himself to philosophy. He has elaborated how our digitally-dominated culture has come to influence how we work and view our lives.

Neoliberalism drives us to work ever harder for mass consumption, and has converted us into consumers. The social media age has elevated narcissism into a product – we live on social media not to connect with others, but to circulate an image of our successful selves to influence others.

Narration has become indistinguishable from marketing; social media has converted every story into an SEO advertisement. Politicians sell themselves, slick advertising has replaced substantive policy discussions. The sound bite is all important.

The reward of instantaneous publicity, offered by social media, is reinforced by celebrity culture. Your storytelling becomes an SEO-driven marketing package. Collective reflection is replaced by repetitive social exposure.

Texting versus conversation

Texting has become the go-to method of communicating with each other. Facebook messaging, WhatsApp, mobile phone texting, Skype – digital texting has replaced face-to-face communication in business, education and social life. Texting is in fact influencing our conversation.

Texting enables us to communicate over vast distances, sharing our ideas with geographically disparate people. We can stay in touch with friends and relatives who have moved away, share documentation and photos across the distance, and ask technological assistants such as Alexa or Cortana for their answers. Anything from how to copy and paste, to what the weather forecast is, is at the tip of our fingers, reducing the need for human interaction.

Texting has come a long way since the first SMS in 1992. Two Vodafone colleagues texted each other, in December 1992, with a simple message ‘Merry Christmas.’ Since then, we have emojis, emoticons, GIF files, Facebook reacts – a kind of modernised hieroglyphics. It is almost its own language – digilect, in the words of Ágnes Veszelszki, a professor of communications and linguistics in Budapest, Hungary.

The medium certainly influences the type of message being conveyed. Digilect is a product of computer-mediated talking – talking to each other through machines, and talking to machines.

Think of all the internet acronyms and digitally inspired words that have made it into our conversational lexicon – hashtag, troll, meme, facepalm.

But is this digital communication strictly speaking a language? It is an approximation of a language – digilect – but not a distinct language.

Nonverbal communication

Have we all forgotten that an indispensable component and stage of language is nonverbal communication? Our bodily cues convey information just as important as our words. Hand gestures, tone of voice, the impact of sound – all these elements of nonverbal communication contribute to making connections and memories that digilect never could.

Indeed, the emergence of language was not a singular, explosive event, but rather the product of numerous steps and stages, one of which was nonverbal communication. In fact, until today, human communication consists of the interplay between verbal and nonverbal communication. No, nonverbal stages of language are not primitive or regressive, just different.

Let’s address an implicit, underlying yet important assumption here which will change how we think about computers and digital technologies. The brain is not a computer. That’s right, the brain does not have hardware, software, RAM, a central processing unit, an operating system, DOS, encoders, decoders – the brain is not a computer.

The analogy of the brain as a computer is very powerful. It has enabled neuroscientists to make deep insightful discoveries about the operation and mechanics of the brain and central nervous system. Analogies are just that – metaphors. They do not encapsulate the real thing. Analogies between brain and technology are nothing new.

A newborn infant’s brain has inbuilt reflexes. He/she can suck, swallow, blink their eyes, vocalise infant sounds, grasping objects in their tiny hands. No, the brain is not a computer. The baby is not born with algorithms, data, subroutines or programmable software. The baby brain does not process information.

Every technological age brings with it multiple analogies to dig into questions we have about the human brain and psyche. Rene Descartes, impressed by the burgeoning field of hydraulics, envisioned the brain as a system of hydraulic pumps and values. Isaac Newton surmised the brain is an interlocking system of mechanical clocks.

The advent of electricity and switches brought with it an array of brain metaphors as an interconnected electrical system. Helmholtz proposed that the human brain was analogous to a telegraphic system.

The rise of computers gave birth of to a whole new series of brain analogies – the computer network. It is a very seductive analogy – what could be more impressive than a network of computers, each with its processing power, sending and receiving information at the speed of light?

The seemingly awesome power of AI today is based upon decades of data retention, software development by developers, and increasingly powerful computer chips that require ever greater power to process AI chatbot requests. Why do I say this?

Deep Blue

May 11, 1997 – yes I was alive that year. That date was momentous. Gary Kasparov, world chess champion, victor in thousands of chess matches and tournaments, was beaten by Deep Blue, an IBM supercomputer specifically designed to tackle chess. Surely this is proof – a machine outsmarted a human in chess, and a chess grandmaster at that.

There was an entire team of human software developers, analysing Kasparov’s matches and chess tactics, programming Deep Blue to calculate countermoves. Deep Blue’s predecessors, which were no slouches in the computer world, were pitted against Kasparov. The latter defeated his computer opponents as easily as a person swats a fly.

Over the years, as IBM programmers learned more about chess and the strategies used by grandmasters like Kasparov, they added calculated plays to outmanoeuvre Kasparov.

Even Deep Blue, in its initial matches in 1997, was easily defeated by Kasparov. IBM’s software development team returned to the drawing board, and programmed their supercomputer to cater for the grandmaster’s tactics. It was an ever-evolving system.

They added ever-greater processing power capabilities to Deep Blue. The latter could research 200 million chess scenarios per second. Kasparov was basically worn down. Interestingly, after the 1997 win, once Deep Blue had shown it could defeat Kasparov, and gain IBM publicity to strengthen its corporate position, Deep Blue was rapidly dismantled; sorry, I meant retired.

Behind the apparent triumph of AI, there was vast and collaborative human input.

Every once in a while, look up from your mobile device.