Ours is a time when it has often become impossible to distinguish between legitimate news and information and the products of scam artists, mind f..kers and PR saboteurs who use all the tricks of propaganda to deceive, frighten or confuse. It’s gotten so bad, we hardly trust the meaning of actual words anymore.
That’s one of the reasons why it was such a revelation to read Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” and to see the film “Origin” about its composition. For Wilkerson, words still have precise and trustworthy meanings that describe realities and distinguish between the actual and the mirage.
Her use of the word “caste” has revolutionized how I see racism, prejudice, segregation, even genocide, and all other forms of negative bias against groups of people here and around the world. Caste is the underlying structure of them all. Simply put, a caste system is an unalterable hierarchy in which some people are deemed inherently superior and others inherently inferior. Unlike class, one cannot move though the various strata of the hierarchy. They are fixed. It usually ends up that the so-called superiors feel they have an inherent license to manipulate, abuse, enslave and even exterminate those they consider inherently inferior to them — Jews in Nazi Germany, indigenous peoples, Asians and African Americans in our country. The first and most insidious caste hierarchy everywhere in the world is gender based, with men in an undeserved superior position to women.
Wilkerson’s use of language is so precise and useful it stands in stark contrast to the coercive gibberish that spans the current state of discourse in the modern information age. She shows us how fudging on the actual meaning of words is the trademark of propagandists.
Former President Trump, for instance, is a magician using various sleights of mind to change the meaning of words. In two of the four criminal cases currently against him, ones that charge him with trying to overthrow the 2020 elections, Trump’s wordplay is astounding. Both cases rest, in part, on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment which forbids persons from holding “any office,” if they, “having previously taken an oath … to support the Constitution of the United State, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same ….” Working to violently or coercively to overthrow an election, in violation of your oath of office, is as clearly unconstitutional as you can get.
One of Trump’s more audacious verbal strategies is to deny he took an oath to “support” the Constitution at all, especially an oath in which he promised to “preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution. He wants us to think that supporting the Constitution is not preserving, protecting or defending it. The argument is so arcane and arbitrary it’s hard to write about. But it’s the perfect example of thinking like a propagandist and using language as an instrument of confusion rather than of clarity and precision.
Recently there have been arguments over the use of the word “genocide” to describe the activities of the Netanyahu government of Israel against the Palestinian population in Gaza. In their efforts to retaliate against the October surprise terrorist attack by Hamas, the brutal anti-semitic defacto governing body of Gaza, Israeli forces have flattened most inhabited areas and Palestinians have taken heavy loses. Hamas’s organizing manifesto is avowedly genocidal, calling for the “obliteration” of Israel and killing of all the “Jews.” If Hamas could commit genocide, it seems certain it would. Israel can and, from all appearances, is.
I’ve spent days lately looking at war photographs taken in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Baghdad, and in Hamas-destroyed Israeli kibbutism. Rubbled streets, buildings reduced to mountains of trash, bandaged children gray with dust, families huddled, wounded and wailing, corpses blood-soaked black. War is war. It is the most terrible thing humans do.
Genocide is genocide. It is not a useless word, nor an ambiguous one. It means annihilating an “inferior caste” of people without moral condemnation. Genocide is a word not only associated with the Holocaust, but with the near extermination of Armenians, the slaughter of some 9 million indigenous people in North America, and now it is being associated with the horrendous desolation in Gaza, where the UN estimates about 100,000 people have been killed and their urban habitats permanently wiped out. Such mass murders, crimes against humanity and slaughter of innocents are all intolerably monstrous, as are all wars of aggression. Modern wars are wars against noncombatants who are described as belonging to a readily invented caste of inferiors who do not deserve respect as human beings and are deemed morally beneath the people who murder them. To use the word genocide to describe such devastation is, from my perspective, not an imprecision of language.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
This column means more to me than any you have written, V.B. Language can be our most precise way of communicating with and understanding one another, or twisted to confuse. Both Hamas and Israel have genocidal intentions with regard to those they are fighting, and Israel has the power to turn those intentions into full-fledged genocide. Ilan Pappé, professor of history at Exeter University in Great Britain, believes the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians will ultimately lead to the demise of the Jewish state. As a poet, I am deeply committed to the precision of language. In every place and circumstance, we must take it back so we can speak to one another truthfully.
Thanks so much for your praise for Wilkerson’s precision of language. She is a serious scholar historian. Her other work, THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS, was a great favorite of my book club, as it portrayed the great internal immigration of six million African Americans to other places in our country.
Your remarks about genocide made me think of my late husband, Dr. Ira Cohen. He was a secular Jew who had foreseen this mass murder by Israel, and what it would mean as we had to reconsider our definition of genocide to include destruction of habitat. He would be angry and heartbroken, as I am.