Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand. — Judges 12:6
Last week in this space, I noted early stages of the creation of a new shibboleth among the political class. Namely, you must refer to the detention camps for migrants and asylum-seekers at America’s southern border as “concentration camps.” It’s progressed, with increasingly absurd claims in tow, as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-Instagram, tweeted out one of the articles behind the campaign and used the phrase “never again.”
Wyoming Republican Rep. Liz Cheney went after Ocasio-Cortez and said, in part, “Do us all a favor and spend a few minutes learning some actual history. 6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust.” You wouldn’t think that last sentence was a contentious statement in 2019, unless you know Twitter.
So now we get responses such as the one from Cheney’s fellow political dynast, the CNN anchor Chris Cuomo: “Exterminated? We use that for pests, not people.” And from policeman and former spy Patrick Skinner: “Humans aren’t exterminated. They are murdered. Rule of thumb for basic dignity: Don’t use the terms of the murderers when speaking of the murdered.” Am I crazy? Why are people making this oddly specific, baseless claim that nobody ever said before this week in lockstep? Ah, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who said, “The fact that you employed the horrifying word ‘exterminated’ here (co-opting the language of the oppressor) tells us that it’s you who needs to brush up on your reading.”
Thing is, the Oxford English Dictionary lists the following definition of exterminate: “To destroy utterly, put an end to (persons or animals); now only, to root out, extirpate (species, races, populations, sects, hence opinions, etc).” (Emphasis mine.) It’s used that way in sources going back to the 1500s and in the writing of Thomas Hobbes and in the Bible. Pest control vans now use it too, because it’s what they do — kill all of something.
Someone else who “co-opts” the very same “language of the oppressor” is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, whose website helpfully answers the common question, “Why were Jews singled out for extermination?” Because of course they do. Nobody has ever thought the word extermination isn’t an accurate way to describe what Hitler was doing to world Jewry, including much of one side of my family. It’s painful, but not offensive, to say so. It’s historically accurate. Don’t believe the gaslighting from people who tell you it isn’t. This claim about “exterminated” being an evil utterance about the Holocaust is a new taboo, made up out of whole cloth and repeated by credulous people for the covering of political asses. It’s like watching a new island born from lava as it surfaces from the depths of the sea, only instead of boiling molten earth, it’s boiling molten stupidity.
