This year, 2025, is the 100th anniversary of T. S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men, first published in 1925. World War I had ended seven years earlier, in 1918. The next year, the Treaty of Versailles was signed, and in it were planted the seeds of the Second World War, so harsh was its treatment of Germany.
At the Versailles Peace Conference, none other than Ho Chi Minh petitioned the assembled world leaders to grant Vietnam self-determination, freedom of the press and the release of political prisoners (Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam being French colonies at the time). The petition was rejected by the peace conference.
Richard Conville
Ho Chi Minh, more determined than ever that his country be free, returned to Vietnam and engineered the ungraceful exit of the French in 1954 and the Americans in 1975. This brief layman’s history is, of course, much more complicated than these 150 words allow.
Nevertheless, it captures the context out of which Eliot’s poem came. The Hollow Men reflects the roiling tensions of the period. Eliot’s depiction of his fellow human beings is not a pretty picture. Were he here today, I suspect he would write the same words, so fraught are our times. The poem begins:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our died voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
So, Eliot seems to be saying, the people of his era were mere scarecrows with straw-filled heads, no inner substance and whose words carried no weight.
A bronze sculpture by Albert Gyorgy used to rest in a small park beside Lake Geneva in Switzerland. It is titled Melancholy and is believed by some to depict the deep grief the sculptor experienced over the loss of his wife. Indeed, the sculpture depicts a great void where the man’s heart and other vital organs otherwise would be. The sculpture, which now has been moved to an unknown location, is a fitting illustration of the hollow men of Eliot’s poem.
And, sadly, I see many Americans today who are similarly hollow: well-meaning citizens who have a great void (or perhaps a wound) in their lives and who eagerly invite the tyrant to fill their emptiness with his words.
When that happens, the tyrant has captured their language and made his language theirs. The problem is that his language is mostly “meaningless as wind in dry grass” and, as often, full of hate. And it creates division, not unity.
“Don’t let your language be captured by the tyrant, for he will try to make your language the same as his.”
In Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, lesson No. 9 is “Be kind to our language.” This is Snyder’s way of saying, “Don’t let your language be captured by the tyrant, for he will try to make your language the same as his.”
The would-be tyrant does this in two ways.
First, he knows from years of experience the news media will use his language when reporting the news; and as the news cascades across the networks and social media platforms, his words are repeated … and repeated … and repeated. This poisons the pool of language available for reporting the news — in favor of the tyrant.
An obvious example is the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” recently passed by Congress. Even those who believed it was anything but beautiful found themselves using that name for it — which of course prevents thorough analysis and evaluation. Synder observes, “When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework.” Without a larger view of the world than the would-be tyrant’s language provides, valid critique and dissent are more difficult to mount.
Second, the would-be tyrant limits the people’s vocabulary by removing narratives that are contrary to his own. Sadly, examples abound: Removing graphic depictions of slavery from the Smithsonian museums, removing references to our nation’s murderous treatment of Native peoples from our national parks, and threats to silence dissenting media.
The would-be tyrant wants our voices to be “meaningless as wind in dry grass.” He wants to capture our language. Don’t let him! Speak your own language to talk about and to the administration.
For example, those anonymous ICE agents grabbing men and women off the street are not arresting “the worst of the worst,” as the president has called them. Portland is not “war torn,” as the president has declared. Washington, D.C., is not a “hell hole,” reporter’s questions are not “stupid,” and there’s nothing “Christian” about the president’s actions.
Richard Conville is professor emeritus of communication studies and service learning at the University of Southern Mississippi and is a long-time resident of Hattiesburg, where he is a member of University Baptist Church.