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Employing a Language of Superlatives
by Henry A Giroux
George Orwell warns us in his dystopian novel 1984 that authoritarianism begins with language. In the novel, “newspeak” is language twisted to deceive, seduce and undermine the ability of people to think critically and freely.
Donald Trump’s unapologetic bigoted language made headlines again Thursday when it was reported he told lawmakers working on a new immigration policy that the United States shouldn’t accept people from “shithole countries” like Haiti. Given his support for white nationalism and his coded call to “Make America Great (White) Again,” Trump’s overt racist remarks reinforce echoes of white supremacy reminiscent of fascist dictators in the 1930s.
His remarks about accepting people from Norway smack of an appeal to the sordid discourse of racial purity. There is much more at work here than a politics of incivility. Behind Trump’s use of vulgarity and his disparagement of countries that are poor and non-white lies the terrifying discourse of white supremacy, ethnic cleansing and the politics of disposability. This is a vocabulary that considers some individuals and groups not only faceless and voiceless, but excess, redundant and subject to expulsion. The endpoint of the language of disposability is a form of social death, or even worse.
As authoritarianism gains strength, the formative cultures that give rise to dissent become more embattled, along with the public spaces and institutions that make conscious critical thought possible.
Words that speak to the truth to reveal injustices and provide informed critical analysis begin to disappear, making it all the more difficult, if not dangerous, to judge, think critically and hold dominant power accountable. Notions of virtue, honour, respect and compassion are policed, and those who advocate them are punished.
I think it’s fair to argue that Orwell’s nightmare vision of the future is no longer fiction in the United States. Under Trump, language is undergoing a shift: It now treats dissent, critical media coverage and scientific evidence as a species of “fake news.”
The Trump administration, in fact, views the critical media as the “enemy of the American people.” Trump has repeated this view of the media so often that almost a third of Americans now believe it and support government-imposed restrictions on the media, according to a Poynter survey.
Thought crimes and fake news
Trump’s cries of “fake news” work incessantly to set limits on what is thinkable. Reason, standards of evidence, consistency and logic no longer serve the truth, according to Trump, because the latter are crooked ideological devices used by enemies of the state. Orwell’s “thought crimes” are Trump’s “fake news.” Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth” is Trump’s “Ministry of Fake News.
The notion of truth is viewed by this president as a corrupt tool used by the critical media to question his dismissal of legal checks on his power, particularly his attacks on judges, courts and any other governing institutions that will not promise him complete and unchecked loyalty.
For Trump, intimidation takes the place of unquestioned loyalty when he does not get his way, revealing a view of the presidency that is more about winning than about governing.
One consequence is the myriad practices by which Trump gleefully humiliates and punishes his critics, wilfully engages in shameful acts of self-promotion and unapologetically enriches his financial coffers.
Under Trump, the language of civic literacy and democracy has become unmoored from critical reason, informed debate and the weight of scientific evidence, and is now being reconfigured and tied to pageantry, political theatre and a deep-seated anti-intellectualism.
One consequence, as language begins to function as a tool of state repression, is that matters of moral and political responsibility disappear and injustices proliferate.
Fascism starts with words
What is crucial to remember here, as authoritarianism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes, is that fascism starts with words. Trump’s use of language and his manipulative use of the media as political spectacle are disturbingly similar to earlier periods of propaganda, censorship and repression.
Under fascist regimes, the language of brutality and culture of cruelty was normalized through the proliferation of strident metaphors of war, battle, expulsion, racial purity and demonization.
As German historians such as Richard J. Evans and Victor Klemperer have made clear, dictators like Adolf Hitler did more than simply corrupt the language of a civilized society, they also banned words.
Soon afterwards, the Nazis banned books and the critical intellectuals who wrote them. They then imprisoned those individuals who challenged Nazi ideology and the state’s systemic violations of civil rights.
The end point was an all-embracing discourse of disposability — the emergence of concentration camps and genocide fuelled by a politics of racial purity and social cleansing.
Echoes of the formative stages of such actions are upon us now. An American-style neo-fascism appears to be engulfing the United States after simmering in the dark for years.
More than any other president, Trump has normalized the notion that the meaning of words no longer matters, nor do traditional sources of facts and evidence. In doing so, he has undermined the relationship between engaged citizenship and the truth, and has relegated matters of debate and critical assessment to a spectacle of bombast, threats, intimidation and sheer fakery.
This language of fascism does more than normalize falsehoods and ignorance. It also promotes a larger culture of short-term attention spans, immediacy and sensationalism. At the same time, it makes fear and anxiety the normalized currency of exchange and communication.
In a throwback to the language of fascism, Trump has repeatedly positioned himself as the only one who can save the masses — reproducing the tired script of the model of the saviour endemic to authoritarianism.
There is more at work here than an oversized ego. Trump’s authoritarianism is also fuelled by braggadocio and misdirected rage as he undermines the bonds of solidarity, abolishes institutions meant to protect the vulnerable and launches a full-fledged assault on the environment.
Trump is also the master of manufactured illiteracy, and his obsessive tweeting and public relations machine aggressively engages in the theatre of self-promotion and distractions. Both of these are designed to whitewash any version of a history that might expose the close alignment between his own language and policies and the dark elements of a fascist past.
Trump also revels in an unchecked mode of self-congratulation bolstered by a limited vocabulary filled with words like “historic,” “best,” “the greatest,” “tremendous” and “beautiful.”
Those exaggerations suggest more than hyperbole or the self-indulgent use of language. When he claims he “knows more about ISIS than the generals,” “knows more about renewables than any human being on Earth” or that nobody knows the U.S. system of government better than he does, he’s using the rhetoric of fascism.
As the aforementioned historian Richard J. Evans writes in The Third Reich in Power:
“The German language became a language of superlatives, so that everything the regime did became the best and the greatest, its achievements unprecedented, unique, historic and incomparable …. The language used about Hitler … was shot through and through with religious metaphors; people ‘believed in him,’ he was the redeemer, the savior, the instrument of Providence, his spirit lived in and through the German nation…. Nazi institutions domesticated themselves [through the use of a language] that became an unthinking part of everyday life.”
Sound familiar?
Under the Trump regime, memories inconvenient to his authoritarianism are now demolished in the domesticated language of superlatives so the future can be shaped to become indifferent to the crimes of the past.
Trump’s endless daily tweets, his recklessness, his adolescent disdain for a measured response, his unfaltering anti-intellectualism and his utter ignorance of history work in the United States. Why? Because they not only cater to what historian Brian Klaas refers to as“the tens of millions of Americans who have authoritarian or fascist leanings,” they also enable what he calls Trump’s attempt at “mainstreaming fascism.”
The language of fascism revels in forms of theatre that mobilize fear, hatred and violence. Author Sasha Abramsky is on target in claiming that Trump’s words amount to more than empty slogans.
Instead, his language comes “with consequences, and they legitimize bigotries and hatreds long harbored by many but, for the most part, kept under wraps by the broader society.”
Surely, the increase in hate crimes during Trump’s first year of his presidency testifies to the truth of Abramsky’s argument.
Fighting Trump’s fascist language
The history of fascism teaches us that language operates in the service of violence, desperation and troubling landscapes of hatred, and carries the potential for inhabiting the darkest moments of history.
It erodes our humanity, and makes too many people numb and silent in the face of ideologies and practices that are hideous acts of ethical atrocity.
Trump’s language, like that of older fascist regimes, mutilates contemporary politics, empathy and serious moral and political criticism, and makes it more difficult to criticize dominant relations of power.
His fascistic language also fuels the rhetoric of war, toxic masculinity, white supremacy, anti-intellectualism and racism. But it’s not his alone.
It is the language of a nascent fascism that has been brewing in the United States for some time. It is a language that is comfortable viewing the world as a combat zone, a world that exists to be plundered and a view of those deemed different as a threat to be feared, if not eliminated.
A new language aimed at fighting Trump’s romance with fascism must make power visible, uncover the truth, contest falsehoods and create a formative and critical culture that can nurture and sustain collective resistance to the oppression that has overtaken the United States, and increasingly many other countries.
No form of oppression can be overlooked. And with that critical gaze must emerge a critical language, a new narrative and a different story about what a socialist democracy will look like in the United States.
Reclaiming language as a force for good
There is also a need to strengthen and expand the reach and power of established public spheres, such as higher education and the critical media, as sites of critical learning.
We must encourage artists, intellectuals, academics and other cultural workers to talk, educate, make oppression visible and challenge the common-sense vocabulary of casino capitalism, white supremacy and fascism.
Language is not simply an instrument of fear, violence and intimidation; it is also a vehicle for critique, civic courage and resistance.
A critical language can guide us in our thinking about the relationship between older elements of fascism and how such practices are emerging in new forms.
Without a faith in intelligence, critical education and the power to resist, humanity will be powerless to challenge the threat that fascism and right-wing populism pose to the world.
Those of us willing to fight for a just political and economic society need to formulate a new language and fresh narratives about freedom, the power of collective struggle, empathy, solidarity and the promise of a real socialist democracy.
We would do well to heed the words of the great Nobel Prize-winning novelist, J.M. Coetzee, who states in a work of fiction that “there will come a day when you and I will need to be told the truth, the real truth ….no matter how hard it may be.”
Democracy, indeed, can only survive with a critically informed and engaged public attentive to a language in which truth, rather than lies, become the currency of citizenship.
The foregoing essay first appeared in The Conversation, January 10, 2018 . It is reprinted here with permission.
About the author:
Henry A. Giroux is University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest and Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy at McMaster University. He is the author of numerous books, including “America at War With Itself” and “Dangerous Thinking in the Age of the New Authoritarianism.” For more information, please see About Us.
To Henry A Giroux:
George Orwell’s “newspeak” was about changing the meaning of words, such as good becomes evil and vice versa, NOT using words with their real meanings as truth, which seems to cause you, Sir, to curl up like a little girl. Using a word to describe WHAT IS, is not evil; in this politically correct sissy world, it is courageous. And that is sad—that using words as truth is now called bad.
Many in America have formed their opinions on myths. Yes, opinions. Just because a lie goes around the world, doesn’t mean it isn’t a lie. Our immigration policy is not based on: hey, you’re from a country where the powers pocket all the money and leave their own people living in garbage and economic turmoil: COME ON IN!!! –that is not what our immigration policy IS. Immigration is mostly about enriching America. Not ruining America. And if you are so hip to taking in UNSKILLED people who are often sick with disease, and/or drug dealers or criminals, why don’t you take some into your home, Sir?
It was Ted Kennedy, the guy who murdered Mary Jo Kopechne and got away with it, who decided that people from Europe were not needed anymore. There were immigrants when I grew up, but they integrated themselves. They had respect for our values and culture. Our morals. They didn’t have an entitlement attitude. They had to be sponsored. They had to have jobs. They didn’t just show up and go on welfare and food stamps and medical insurance, while BORN-Americans sometimes don’t have medical insurance. They didn’t DRAIN our system. They enhanced, added to in a cultural, economic way to our country.
And I am going to say it. Some countries ARE shitholes. And if you think I’m bigoted, I don’t care. Truth is now a dirty word in this world. If you don’t think some countries are shitholes, you go and live there. Or if they are not shitholes, why are so many of their people coming to America? If they are not shitholes, why are most of their population starving to death? Why are most of their population living with no clean water? Should I go on? Why do some of these countries stone women to death, throw acid in their faces, force them to have clitorectomies, and with dirty razors? Why do some of these countries want all Americans, Jews and Christians to die or convert to Islam? You must be suicidal to want some of this coming to America. I am not saying, of course, that each and every person in Haiti is unskilled or a criminal. I am not saying that each and every person from Somalia or Yemen etc. want to kill Jews and Christians. Man, I surely must clarify that, so your head doesn’t explode denying the truth on a technicality.
Your point about banning books—over in France they are bringing back books that encouraged the annihilation of my people. Part of this is because the French president refuses to admit that they have brought in bad people.
Here is what is going on in France. Jews are now leaving for their own safety. Malmo, Sweden has just about gone Juden-free because of immigrants from “shithole” countries. From the Gatestone Institute:
“Recently, France’s prestigious publishing house, Gallimard, asked to republish the anti-Semitic writings of Louis Ferdinand Celine, a French admirer of Nazi Germany and a strong supporter of the extermination of Europe’s Jews during France’s Vichy regime. French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said he was in favor of republishing it, and stressed that one cannot deny Celine’s “central position in French literature.” Famous Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld replied that the writings that sent his parents to their deaths “must not be made available again.” Gallimard postponed the publication temporarily.”
So, when you write that Trump is Nazi-ish, get your facts straight. Saying the truth is not being a Nazi. Being a Nazi or a Nazi sympathizer, THAT is a Nazi.
To extend it further, do you think that each neighborhood in America is equal to all the other neighborhoods? So, if you do, I have a tip for you. Go live in the South Bronx, Longwood section and see if you don’t, after one day, call it a shithole. See if you don’t go running back to whatever sweet neighborhood you now live in.
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So many Americans are so dense and lazy and uneducated about history, they actually believe that the poem by Emma Lazarus is our immigration policy. It is a POEM. There is no document in our Constitution or in our legal system that states: Give me your tired, your poor….IT IS A POEM. It is metaphorical.
You stated that Trump’s slogan: Make America Great Again has a secret meaning of Make America White Again. Why? Because YOU say so. And by you conflating this, you are really saying that YOU think that whites are equal to the word, “great”, or why would you even think that?
Just because you are a professor means nothing. I had a professor in university who said there was no sex in Shakespeare. I had a professor who said that Freud never, at first, said that there is no such thing as incest. Professors are not G-ds. Professors are subject to their own issues and prejudices and political leanings. I could be a professor if I wanted to take out more student loans. Your professorship does not give you might is right privilege. And this leads me to a much larger issue than what you are whining about. Professors all over this country are allowing moslem students to threaten to kill Jews right on campus. Professors are pushing Islam. Professors are teaching BDS against Israel. Professors are teaching that Israel is an evil country. So if you want to talk and whine about “shithole countries”, condoning and telling lies about Jews and Israel, telling their classes that Jews should be killed, is to me, the real Nazi ideology coming back. And if you are a professor, surely you must know that ISLAM in the form of Al Husseini, was in cahoots with Hitler for the Final Solution for Jews.
This professor at UC Berkeley–Dr. Hatem Bazian— mocks Jews and lies about Jews stealing “Palestinian” land.
The tweets mocked Hassidic Jews, with one saying “Mom, look! I is chosen! I can now kill, rape, smuggle organs and steal the land of Palestinians ‘Yay’ #Ashke-Nazi.” Another had an image of North Korea’s leader wearing a yarmulke with the words “God chose me,” “101 Judaism we teach it,” and the message: “I just converted all of North Korea to Judaism. Donald Tlump (sic): Now my nukes are legal and I can annex South Korea and you need to start paying me 34 billion a year in welfare.”
How much mendacity can be believed? Jewish doctors treat “Palestinians” who then go on to kill or attempt to kill Jews. Jews supply “Palestinians” with electricity. All the money the world sends to “Palestine” is used for weapons against Jews. So, “Palestine”: do not go to Jewish doctors. Do not use Jewish electricity. And your lie about organs is equal to the old Christian lie that Jews used Christian blood to make matzah. Man, if everyone is going to complicit, I have had enough. ENOUGH!
I would like to know if that is not the EPITOME of newspeak. Palestine was never at any time a country. It was a British Mandated territory. And Palestinian as a WORD was INVENTED in 1967 by Arafat. This sick and lying narrative, this hoax as taquiyya ( a main tenant of Islam that tells Moslems to lie to the infidel) is the real NEWSPEAK and the West bought the lie all the way. Even if “one” is too lazy to read history, surely “one” must know that Jews came first, then Christians and then Moslems. The new BIG NEWSPEAK if that Jews have no ties to Israel. If this is not NEWSPEAK as NAZISM, what is, Sir? Surely Trump calling countries shitholes pales in comparison to the STEALING of Jewish heritage and land and bringing about more hatred toward Jews based on LIES. The invented people also have organizations on campuses tied to Hamas and the Moslem Brotherhood and CAIR, all organizations who, with no shame of secrecy, ON CAMPUSES, call for the murder of Jews and some professors go along. So, do not EVER dare to talk about Nazism, when the real Nazis are right on college campuses.
You are right on this point: Language is undergoing a shift. For sure. No one knows grammar anymore. People have terribly lacking vocabularies. I am a writer, and I notice that the word “F.ck” is used over and over instead of using metaphor, simile, etc.
I understand, on a small level, that some are offended by the truth, or offended by using the word, “shithole”, but all over America, people are saying the same thing. Perhaps the President should have said: We don’t want people who won’t enrich us. Instead of his raw language. But once in a while, raw language sure makes the point.
Now, go make a home in Haiti. I’m sure you will love the ambiance, the lack of just about everything. Go. I don’t care.
bio:
Nanette Rayman, poetry books, Shana Linda Pretty Pretty, Project: Butterflies, two-time Pushcart nominee, included in Best of the Net 2007, DZANC Best of the Web 2010, winner Glass Woman Prize Publications include The Worcester Review, and many others. She performed in many plays off off Broadway. She studied at Circle in the Square and with Gene Frankel. She graduated from The New School.
Rather than reply to Nanette’s feverish, bigoted and ill-informed diatribe, let me change the subject.
She seems to be a victim of fake news, but so aren’t we all? How many Americans knew or cared that mainstream media election coverage slanted toward Hillary? Liberals outraged at Fox News didn’t seem to mind the reverse spin from WaPo and NYT, plus the networks. In my opinion, most news having to do with economics and foreign policy is to some degree fake. It is spun to put a good face on establishment policies and how capital is accumulated and allocated. For that we have a broad spectrum of think tanks that lean centrist to libertarian (few others exist, actually) and the deep state itself, By that I mean the insinuation of invisible government agents over the course of 70 years into mass and now social media institutions. Agents who deftly guide editorial policy, should it be necessary. It usually isn’t because the owners of media corporations have been intimately, if sometimes only socially, hooked into the deep state. This is why any opinions left of say Bernie Sanders are unavailable, even on public media. The left has been frozen out, only to be replaced by smarmy voices of neoliberalism or hate-fueled ones of ur-conservatives. Thankfully, online publications such as Ragazine (there are many more, mostly all struggling for survival) are needed to inject real news into the fake substrate that either one accepts or rejects, but fact-based alternative sources of information that don’t manipulate language are desperately needed. Thank you Henry Giroux. See you on CounterPunch.