Words, Words, Words

 

It is hardly a revelation to say that words have power. They can delight, inform, edify, inspire and destroy. Unfortunately, it is the the latter effect that we see all too frequently today. One only has to look at the various cesspools to be found on social media to see this in action, and the tragic results of depraved online bullying. No one is immune.

And what is true about the misuse of language by individuals is also true of countries. In her most recent column, Shree Paradkar points out how the Israel's insidious misuse seems designed to obscure its atrocities in Gaza.

Who are Palestinians in Gaza? The Israeli government and its supporters would have us believe they are anything but innocent civilians. 

This is important. Denying the innocence of the thousands killed during Israel’s onslaught allows its leaders to justify civilian deaths or to proffer a rationalization that “they brought it on themselves,” while blaming everything on Hamas. 

Conflating all Palestinians with the evil of Hamas allows for the dehumanization of all Gazans, essentially equating the citizens with terrorism.

Former Mossad chief Rami Igra told CNN's Anderson Cooper last month that “The ‘non-combatant population in the Gaza Strip’ is really a non-existent term. Because all of the Gazans voted for Hamas. And as we have seen on the 7th of October, most of the population on the Gaza Strip are Hamas.” 

Cooper didn’t push back, but this is blatantly untrue. There have been no elections in Gaza since 2006, when Hamas won with 44 per cent of the vote, and in no district did it win a majority. Today, nearly half the population of Gaza is under 18; they were either not born when Hamas came into power or not eligible to cast a ballot then. It means only a fraction of today's Gazans ever voted for Hamas. 

Such a tact means that Israel can justify all manner of war crimes.

It allowed for Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant to refer to Palestinians and Hamas militants as “human animals.” And for Israel’s ambassador to Berlin, Ron Prosor, to double down on those comments and say the western world must stand with Israel as it fights the “bloodthirsty animals” of Hamas, who are used interchangeably with Gazans.

Accepting that premise means that we should not care what happens to Gazans, thereby justifying

attacks on targets such as hospitals and schools that are protected by humanitarian law by claiming that they are in fact “military infrastructure.” Israeli evidence of Hamas using hospitals and schools as hideouts and bases has not been independently corroborated and remains contentious. But whatever the truth, Israel and its supporters use these claims to absolve themselves of any responsibility for civilian casualties.

All who accept such premises really become complicit in the ongoing slaughter, and no clever linguistic nuances or semantics can change that fact.

George Orwell many years ago warned us about the political use of language. Sadly, it would seem that whatever lessons he tried to impart are long forgotten today.

 

UPDATED: Words Are Important

Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

- Excerpt from George Orwell's Politics and the English Language

As a reader, writer and retired English teacher, words have always been important to me. Words rarely exist in a vacuum; they are almost always laden with context, either implicit or carefully spelled out. They have the power to convey meaning and truth, but they also have tremendous power to either help to heal or to destroy. Words need to be respected.

It is within this context that I was very happy to see ThinkProgress offer this note from its editors:

You can learn everything you need to know about the “alt-right” by looking at the man who popularized its name. Credit goes to Richard Spencer, head of the white supremacist National Policy Institute (NPI), and one of the country’s leading contemporary advocates of ideological racism.

The weekend before Thanksgiving, Spencer keynoted an NPI conference in Washington, D.C. Over the course of his speech, he approvingly quoted Nazi propaganda, said that the United States is meant to be a “white country,” and suggested that many political commentators are “soulless golem” controlled by Jewish media interests.

... ThinkProgress will no longer treat “alt-right” as an accurate descriptor of either a movement or its members. We will only use the name when quoting others. When appending our own description to men like Spencer and groups like NPI, we will use terms we consider more accurate, such as “white nationalist” or “white supremacist.”

We will describe people and movements as neo-Nazis only when they identify as such, or adopt important aspects of Nazi rhetoric and iconography.

The point here is not to call people names, but simply to describe them as they are. We won’t do racists’ public relations work for them. Nor should other news outlets.

An article by Lindy West in The Guardian makes a similar point:

In my column last week, I wrote: “One defining aspect of alt-right white supremacy is that it vehemently denies its own existence … This erosion of language is an authoritarian tactic designed to stifle dissent. If you cannot call something by its name, then how can you fight it?”

So I was heartened yesterday when KUOW, a public radio station in Seattle, released a statement announcing that they will be substituting “white supremacy” or “white nationalism” for “alt-right”. The reasoning, laid out in a memo to staff: “‘Alt right’ doesn’t mean anything, and normalises something that is far from normal. So we need to plain-speak it.”

Such measures as described above are all to the good. As I wrote in a recent post, New Yorker writer David Remnick points out the fact that the media are now beginning to 'normalize' Donald Trump and his ilk. This must not be allowed to continue, and it is to be hoped that more news agencies will find the courage and integrity to tell things as they are, not the way their corporate masters and Trump racists want us to believe.

I leave you with one final warning from Orwell:

Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

UPDATE: At noon, CBC's Ontario Today had a show about words that hurt. It is painful to listen to, but also a sobering reminder that Canada is hardly free from racism.