Abuse of Loaded Terms
Avoiding Linguistic Genocide
In my continuing battle for truth, justice and better arguments, I turn to yet another problem — the abuse of terms loaded with all sorts of emotive baggage — terms which weigh down public discourse, generating more heat and hysteria than useful debate.
A report was released some time back (but before COVID blew everything else off the front pages) to considerable media furor on the sad circumstances surrounding missing and murdered indigenous women and girls. In this government funded report the Canadian State is blithely accused of genocide.
Final Report Canada’s indigenous schools policy was ‘cultural genocide’, says report
Genocide has a very specific meaning in political history. It refers to the deliberate efforts of a state to stigmatize and then eliminate a particular group for political or ideological purposes, usually the manipulation of the remainder of a body politic to gain or preserve power. This group could be a class (Russian Kulaks in 1930s Ukraine); or a race (Jews in Nazi Germany). In the 1980’s the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia set out with great purpose and deliberation to murder everyone in the country’s middle class on the assumption that they were too tainted by education to ever join in to the planned Communist Perfection they were working to create. They even murdered people wearing glasses on the assumption that spectacle-wearers had to be educated members of that middle class. You can safely use the term genocide for this lovely piece of history. The forced relocation of a People can be genocide if the government doing it is well aware that many of them are going to die either in transit or within their new environment (eastern Siberia). Stalin’s murder of virtually every officer in the Polish Army in 1940 qualifies for the use of the term. State indifference to starvation or death by rampant disease is only genocide if it it is used as a deliberate tool to force submission or eliminate a troublesome minority. Genocide is not state stupidity, it requires malign intent.
Here is what is not genocide — misguided efforts at cultural assimilation during a period when governments and the majority of their citizens actually believed certain civilizations (and religions) were superior to others. Botched public policy with reasonably benign intent that boomerangs and creates unintended suffering. Police indifference to the fact that many aboriginal women were being killed and kidnapped while engaging in the sex trade — that is a serious moral failing, but it is not genocide.
The essence of the aboriginal policy problem is fairly clear but too politically incorrect to receive much candid debate. When a primitive hunter-gatherer culture comes into contact with a richer, more sophisticated, technically advanced civilization, the former is fundamentally changed at point of contact forever after. The aboriginal population living in remote reserves as if to preserve a 5000-year old pre-contact existence are living in a shadow-land — they can’t go home again and probably don’t want to with some exceptions. There they live their liminal lives, sometimes hunting seals, sometimes eating TV dinners, engaging in traditional sweating ceremonies and watching Friends on their screens, dying of the worst aspects of the western diet (potato chips are cheaper to ship north than broccoli), riddled with alcoholism and drug abuse, depressed and too far away from effective help. Governments will never spend enough money to make these places lovable, it is prohibitive, everybody knows it, no one will say it. Indigenous issues are largely absent from election our campaigns.
That is not to say that aboriginals can’t maintain a special relationship with the Land; but they have to shake hands with the devil, exploit their resources, make deals, develop businesses and, well, join the dominant culture to a degree. Yes cultural assimilation is a form of distancing, a kind of walking away, perhaps unwillingly, from age old ways of life. Is this genocide? I suggest that we need to reserve a term for the outer reaches of state-sponsored human depravity and genocide is the term we have for this. What has happened, and is still happening to aboriginal peoples all around the world may be horrific; but by the definition I am using, even the massive die off of natives in Spain’s New World Empire caused by the spread of European infectious diseases to communities with no immunity was not genocide. The Spaniards may have wanted to enslave the natives, they certainly wanted to convert them; but there is no credible historical evidence that they set out to kill them all.
One might retort that this pedantic plea for a restricted use of terms doesn’t matter when the actors in the story either die or disappear culturally. I must disagree. Civilized discourse is already hard enough — when the meaning of important political terms is bastardized to create media hype, it becomes very difficult indeed.
When someone says, “It’s time to end the war on Christmas.” I have a choice, I can complain that the hyperbolic use of the word ‘war’ diminishes the horror of actual war; or I can challenge the person to tell me how their right to celebrate Christmas is being unfairly limited. Too often clutching at pearls over language misdirects conversation away from the debate worth having. Hilary Clinton’s ‘despicables’ outrage ignores her comments that many Donald Trump supporters have legitimate concerns. Barack Obama’s ‘you didn’t build that’ outcry dismisses his comments about us all depending on infrastructure that government builds and maintains. Language evolves over time without even any misuse, but by associations. So, imbecile, moron, idiot and retarded go from being clinical terms to disparagement. I can bemoan when someone says, “I literally died last night”, or I can recognize that hyperbole exists across language as a rhetorical device including ways that I use. Of course words matter, but so does context. We will always have bumper sticker slogans like “End hallway medicine”. The challenge is to debate the premise not the words.
I believe we have to be especially understanding when issues involve disadvantaged or struggling people. If ‘cultural genocide’ helps Indigenous Peoples tell their story — that’s important. If a woman cat calls a guy, I think the double standard is fine — men have properly lost the right to do the same — especially with the power imbalance that exists. ‘Legally blind’ means something somewhat different than many people understand it to mean. Our ‘job’ as communicators is not to correct some perceived misuse, but to ensure we understand one another.
So, if we need to say that Armenia, for example, was an ‘actual’ genocide with all the horror that entails so be it. We can’t fix everything, and we can’t always admit that, but we can focus on what’s important and work to make it better. Focusing too much on the ‘war of the words’ is just engaging in a different type of hyperbole.