First of all, I wanted to thank everyone who participated in my diary from a couple of days ago. It sparked more response than I ever would have anticipated, considering that a prior diary on the same subject drew far fewer replies. I firmly believe that the interchange that occurs in the comments improves the diary, so I am appreciative of all those who stopped in.
I wanted to let people know that, while I will go back to that diary to perform clean-up, tie up loose odds and ends, I’m participating more in other diaries. Meteor Blades and Dalbert created diaries which also have generated thoughtful and energetic discussion, and I suspect the time between my original diary and theirs permitted much of the heat to dissipate so that more grounded discussion could occur. (jaimehlers also shared a personal story that added depth to the conversation.)
Yosef 52 and Democratic Strategist also erected diaries, in opposition to mine. This is entirely their right; we’re engaged in free discussion. However, I will point out here that both of these diarists misrepresented my position, DS especially.
I didn’t venture into these spaces because it’s impossible to plug that many holes in the dam at once. Meteor Blades, completely unbidden, stepped in to correct the record. As I confided later in his comment section, it was like a Gish gallop on steroids. There was no point, because the mischaracterization was already set.
It’s fine to argue against acquiescence or a lack of action. Of course, I advocated for no such thing.
It’s fine to promote fire in the rank and file! But that can be done without incurring the cost of betraying our own ideals.
This is a site for progressives, yes; but when I was growing up the standard choices were liberal or conservative. I’ve identified as liberal ever since. (I don’t mind the label “leftist,” either.) The definition of liberal, at least one aspect, is that the ideology is free from bigotry. That’s its literal definition. So when I posted a request—an exhortation—for people here to eschew dehumanization, that’s the ethic in which my request was based. I was asking people to live up to their own professed values. (Someone mentioned that progressives are not liberals, and I acknowledge that difference in terms of labels, though our value systems are rather under the same umbrella.)
I spent the vast majority of that first day of the diary being up responding to an increasing number of pushback comments. I’m not here to complain about the fact that some people disagreed with the thrust of my argument. People are entitled to their opinion and they’re allowed to disagree openly, even vehemently. But no one should attempt to intimidate or entirely misconstrue someone utterly. I had people come to me, call me a racist, a fascist, not a minority and some other variation of being a race “fraud”, banish me to hell, tell me that I consort with the enemy, etc. All because I asked that we not use dehumanizing language to describe our political opponents.
One person even said that the main picture I had heading the diary was racist, which I explained that it was not, that it was merely a black-and-white photo. When I asked, after another go-round, if the commenter had another issue with the photo, the response was that all I was missing was putting Willie Horton’s name on it. (The comment is now in the hiddens.) So that happened.
I’m not here to litigate these accusations. I will say that for the better part of two years, I have written extensively on the dangers of MAGA specifically, as well as more broadly authoritarianism, totalitarianism, the GOP, cults and cult-like groups, sociopathy and psychopathy, racism, white Christian nationalism, sexism and misogyny, propaganda, right-wing media culture and more.
These concerns are longstanding and exist prior to my diary about dehumanizing language. It’s not accurate to say that I don’t see the danger breathing down on us. I’ve been highlighting those dangers for a long time. They did not pertain to the risks that inherently attach to dehumanization.
Dehumanization is the act of denying humanness to other human beings. A practical definition refers to it as the viewing and treatment of other persons as if they lack mental capacities that we enjoy as human beings. Here, every act or thought that treats a person as less than human is an act of dehumanization. Throughout history, dehumanization has been an essential ingredient in the perpetration of intergroup violence and atrocities.
(h/t to twingrace for providing this definition)
Dehumanization is more than just extra-spicy insult. In fact, there’s a difference between an insult and a slur. It’s a vital difference in how that language is operating, what it’s doing in the sentence. A slur is a speech act that puts the target beneath you, socially. It’s a derogation made possible through the very use of speech. So when that type of speech is used, that’s participating in the same hierarchy-building project in which authoritarians engage. It’s playing into the same structures of above/below, strong/weak, hard/soft, all the way down the line. It’s the same mindset, and it has the propensity to lead to the same tragic outcomes.
Lynne Tirrell, author of “Genocidal Language Games” (an essay I recommended many, many times over the last two days), shared this explanation:
The changing linguistic landscape of Rwanda in the early 1990s illustrates how linguistic practices eroded protective norms, and thus opened the door to previously prohibited actions. In this and other twentieth-century genocides, the majority population was made ready to kill their minority neighbors, first by getting them talking amongst themselves as if these neighbors were not really people at all, using derogatory terms for these others that spread fear and disgust. Then the derogatory terms were used openly and publicly, increasingly targeting individuals. As people get used to this new disregard, non-linguistic disregarding actions become more widely accepted. It is not a short route from derogating speech acts to murder, but it is crucial to understand the power of speech to facilitate the growth of both linguistic and broader social norms that make murder and mayhem come to be accepted.
It seems that some people didn’t realize that dehumanization was specifically about using terms that reduced a person to non-person status by equating them to vermin, disease, insects, etc. There still seemed to be some confusion. I just wanted to clear that up while the conversation is still active, because it’s important that we all are on the same page as to what this language includes (and, by extension, what it doesn’t include).
Some people felt I was unfairly singling out the author of the comment that I’d highlighted. The most I can say is that I could have hidden the author’s username. In fact, it had crossed my mind. Yet as I had planned to link directly to the comment itself and to the diary (of the same author), the username would have been discernible in any case. So it was never my intention to “call out” the author but rather to hold up an emblematic example of the type of speech to which I was referring. If I were to go back, I may indeed have obscured the name, but my point would still stand.
As for my dissection of the passage in question, I’ve written many diaries about the mechanics of language. You have to get down to the word level, even the phoneme or morpheme level (the aural pieces), in order to understand what is going on in political polemics or other pieces meant to persuade people at an emotional level. I contend that’s what that passage was doing. I have done many examinations of propaganda and other forms of crafted speech with just this type of deep scrutiny and analysis. I will do so again, because deconstruction is a completely legitimate way of understanding text. Indeed, in this postmodern era, it may be our best weapon against these types of attempts to persuade.
(Let me say here that I’m using the term ‘propaganda’ in a neutral fashion, describing any message meant to persuade. These days it has a negative connotation, but when the term was first introduced it did not have that coloring or spin; in fact, in the U.S. propaganda and commercial advertising share many aspects in common and were both known as propaganda at the turn of the 20th century. No disrespect is meant by my use of this term in this context. Some people took exception to that, too.)
As it stands, it appears that there were a handful of broad categories of people who disagreed with my diary.
- Some people want to keep using the term in question or want to be allowed to use it. Dehumanization may fulfill some personal need; hard to say.
- Some people DON’T want to be told what NOT to do. This seems to be a problem with the rule (or The Rules) existing at all.
- Some people don’t see what the big problem is—for them, dehumanization is just really edgy insult.
- Some people see the dehumanization and don’t care.
- Some see the dehumanization and believe that the other side deserves to be placed beneath them. This is a form of hierarchy-structuring, exactly how dehumanization works, by derogating people. I don’t know if these people have considered that such hierarchy by contempt is how authoritarianism flourishes.
- Some people think that, as engaging in hate speech is a deliberate disrespect of a person, the refraining of engaging in hate speech is the deliberate accordance of respect to the person. (This presumption is false. Not engaging in hate speech is simply neutral. It is not a form of respecting the other person at all. It’s standard. In this restructuring of veneration, the request that people not dehumanize others is seen as an active form of affirmation, which it is not! It is merely what regular people do in day-to-day life: not dehumanizing one another.)
I shared this list in Meteor Blades’ diary, and I admitted that I may be overlooking some reasoning, lumping some together, not intuiting, etc., but I do believe these are how those categories shook out as general concerns.
I’m profoundly surprised at the level of pushback I encountered. The intensity, too, was a shock. So many people want to be able to retain this as a weapon, or think that those in the MAGA movement brought it upon themselves for selecting a name that lent itself so easily to such a slur. (This is called blaming the victim, just to be clear.) I can only hope that the subsequent, vigorous discussion can help move all of this into the open so that we can consider these things.
You’ll forgive me, I hope, when I tell you that I consider that original diary that kicked off all of this discussion as a time capsule. As I said, I will go back to it to attend to whatever has transpired there in the last day or so. But I had to step away from all of that negativity and unwarranted attack. I’m only human.
If you’re one of the people who posted there and were waiting for me to respond to your substantive inquiry, please accept my apology for my absence. You’re free to post here, to contact me via Kosmail, to participate in any one of the currently active diaries, write a diary of your own, or anything else you wish. I mean to stress that I am available for discussion, if you are hoping to engage in that.