I wrote here two weeks ago about the Guardian changing its style guide to suggest replacing “climate change” with “climate emergency/crisis” and “climate skeptic” with “climate science denialist.” The thinking is that if you use melodramatic words, people will care more and think differently about a political issue. To change the world, change the language. Limit the language. This kind of lexical activism assumes the barriers to action are in our words, not in our ideas.
It’s not limited to climate change. Sunday’s L.A. Times opinion page carried an illiterate article by Jonathan M. Katz bearing a headline in line with this newfangled newspeak: “Call immigration detention centers what they really are: concentration camps.”
I loathe the term concentration camp, because it is almost always used to evoke the moral gravity of the places where the Nazis brought Jews, Gypsies, gays, and others to be murdered. Let’s be clear; Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Ebensee, Buchenwald, Dachau, and the rest were not concentration camps. They were death camps. I am not in the habit of repeating Nazi propaganda, and neither should you be.
Katz is actually aware of the term’s history as propagandistic wordplay: “The term ‘concentration camp’ is itself a euphemism. It was invented by a Spanish official to paper over his relocation of millions of rural families into squalid garrison towns where they would starve during Cuba’s 1895 independence war. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered Japanese Americans into prisons during World War II, he initially called them concentration camps. Americans ended up using more benign names, like ‘Manzanar Relocation Center.’”
So, he says it’s a euphemism, it’s used by dictators to cover up killing people, and using it has not in the past stopped Americans from perpetrating ethnic injustice. And yet he claims that we must call immigration detention centers concentration camps as a sort of rectification of names:
“If we call them what they are — a growing system of American concentration camps — we will be more likely to give them the attention they deserve. We need to know their names: Port Isabel, Dilley, Adelanto, Hutto and on and on. With constant, unrelenting attention, it is possible we might alleviate the plight of the people inside, and stop the crisis from getting worse. Maybe people won’t be able to disappear so easily into the iceboxes. Maybe it will be harder for authorities to lie about children’s deaths.”
Wait, didn’t he just say that FDR’s concentration camps were obscured by using their names? Anyway, whatever. Don’t think about it too hard. Apparently this purely linguistic change will stop the Trump administration from doing what it’s doing by subjecting it to obloquy. Shame really seems to work on President Trump, right? Right?
