You learn what a sentence looks like by reading the sentences of others. A verdict, presumably, which it would be of no earthly use to pass on to them, since of the five words which comprise it, they would recognise only one.There is a vital connection between reading and writing. After years of fiddling with the handsets of their PlayStations when they’re home, and ticking boxes when they’re at school, they do not know where to start with an essay, do not grasp the concept of an essay, do not begin to comprehend what is expected to happen in an essay, and because they have never been encouraged to follow anyone else’s train of thought, have not the first idea how to find let alone follow their own.In the words of one of the Fellows of the scheme, their work is marked by “lexical nullity and syntactical bankruptcy”. Hilary Spurling is reporting on the experience of 130 writers who, under a Fellowship scheme launched by the Royal Literary Fund in 1999, have been working in British universities with the aim of offering students assistance in such arcane skills as composing an e-mail, sending off a job application and setting out a CV – that last requiring minimal skill, you would have thought, given the career history of most of the undergraduates in question – so many hours sleeping, so many hours sending and receiving text messages, so many hours committing acts of cut-and-paste plagiarism from the internet.As for what happens when students are confronted with the task of writing an essay – reader, it is even more desperate than we all thought. “Many, if not most, contemporary British undergraduates,” she says, “lack the basic ability to express themselves in writing.” Undergraduates, notice, not fourth-formers with their noses in Harry Potter, not toddlers with Thomas the Tank Engine in their noses, but undergraduates – people working towards a degree!And note what it is they lack – not the stylistic aplomb of Henry James, not the innovative linguistic genius of James Joyce, but, dear God, “the basic ability to express themselves in writing”.These are findings, not opinions. He who believed in “great” books was a lickspittle of the ruling elite, governing through the undergrowth of language.
Henceforth, all children would be the authors of their own grammar of the emotions, would be alert to the hegemonic structure of every word they used, even if that led to their abandoning some words altogether, and would read whatever literature it suited to them read, regardless of whether that meant they never read any at all, literature being an arbitrary concept anyway.And the result? A generation of blithering idiots, I would like to say, but Hilary Spurling, delivering a lecture to the Royal Academy of Literature, puts it less stridently.

Ditto the canon of literature through which a capitalistic, patriarchal, racist, colonial, misogynistic, Anglocentric, heterophile, hebephobic culture imposed its values. Since there was no apolitical gauge of what constituted literature, teachers had no right to tell pupils what they should or shouldn’t read, or what was or was not exemplary. Burden the young with rules, we said, and that was the end of their creativity Expression was the thing. Between the true self of a child and its expression stood centuries of regulation and custom. Bring those walls tumbling down and the young would sing to us like poets or, even better, like canaries. It seemed a good idea, way back in the old revolutionary 20th century, to free children from the stifling autocracy of grammar and spelling.

Interesting, how often movements of liberation end up enslaving us. And even during their worst ordeals, as they waited for the doorbell to ring and the Gestapo to arrive to search their Dresden home and notify them of their fate, Klemperer was able to write in his diary a sentence which every journalist and historian should learn by heart: “There is no remedy against the truth of language.”

More from Robert Fisk. So the couple took off their Jewish stars and wandered Germany as refugees without papers until they found salvation after the Nazi surrender.Just before their rescue, they showed compassion to three distraught German soldiers who were lost in the forests of their homeland. All record of the Klemperers’ existence was turned to ash, like the Jews who preceded them to Auschwitz. Israeli academic researchers have themselves proved that no such radio broadcasts were ever made, that the Palestinians fled – victims of what we would today call ethnic cleansing – after a series of massacres by Israeli forces, especially in the village of Deir Yassin, just outside Jerusalem.So what is there to learn from the second volume of Klemperer’s diaries? Just after he received word from the Gestapo that he and Eva were to be transported east to their deaths, the RAF raided Dresden and, amid the tens of thousands of civilians which the February 1945 firestorm consumed, the Gestapo archives also went up in flames. But Yashayaie’s letter was drawing a different kind of parallel: the pain that the denial of history causes to the survivors.I have heard Israelis deny their army’s involvement in the Sabra and Chatila massacres – despite Israel’s own official enquiry which proved that Ariel Sharon sent the murderers into the camps – and I remember how the CIA initially urged US embassies to blame Iran for the gassings at Halabja.Indeed, it is easy to find examples of one of the most egregious lies uttered against the 750,000 Palestinians who fled their land in 1948: that they were ordered by Arab radio stations to flee their homes until the Jews had been “driven into the sea” – when they would return to take back their property.

“The Holocaust is not a myth any more than the genocide imposed by Saddam (Hussein) on Halabja or the massacre by (Ariel) Sharon of Palestinians and Lebanese in the camps of Sabra and Chatila,” Yashayaie – who represents Iran’s 25,000 Jews – said.Note here how there is no attempt to enumerate the comparisons. Six million murdered Jews is a numerically far greater crime than the thousands of Kurds gassed at Halabja or the 1,700 Palestinians murdered by Israel’s Lebanese Phalangist allies at Sabra and Chatila in 1982. The awesome, wickedness of the Holocaust lies in the fact that the victims were human beings – just like you and me.How do we then persuade the Muslims of the Middle East of this simple truth? I thought that the letter which the head of the Iranian Jewish Committee, Haroun Yashayaie, wrote to Ahmadinejad provided part of the answer. “The death of even one Jew is a crime,” Khatami said, thus destroying in one sentence the lie that his successor was trying to propagate.Indeed, his words symbolised something more important: that the importance and the evil of the Holocaust do not depend on the Jewish identity of the victims. “To me,” he writes in June of 1934, “the Zionists, who want to go back to the Jewish state of AD70 .. are just as offensive as the Nazis. With their nosing after blood, their ancient ‘cultural roots’, their partly canting, partly obtuse winding back of the world they are altogether a match for the National Socialists…”Yet Klemperer’s day-by-day account of the Holocaust, the cruelty of the local Dresden Gestapo, the suicide of Jews as they are ordered to join the transports east, his early knowledge of Auschwitz – Klemperer got word of this most infamous of extermination camps as early as March 1942, although he did not realise the scale of the mass murders there until the closing months of the war – fill one with rage that anyone could still deny the reality of the Jewish genocide.Reading these diaries as the RER train takes me out to Charles de Gaulle airport – through the 1930s art deco architecture of Drancy station where French Jews were taken by their own police force before transportation to Auschwitz – I wish President Ahmadinejad of Iran could travel with me.For Ahmadinejad it was who called the Jewish Holocaust a “myth”, who ostentatiously called for a conference – in Tehran, of course – to find out the truth about the genocide of six million Jews, which any sane historian acknowledges to be one of the terrible realities of the 20th century, along, of course, with the Holocaust of one and a half million Armenians in 1915.The best reply to Ahmadinejad’s childish nonsense came from ex-president Khatami of Iran, the only honourable Middle East leader of our time, whose refusal to countenance violence by his own supporters inevitably and sadly led to the demise of his “civil society” at the hands of more ruthless clerical opponents.