Opinion: Get it right

Online Poster

Online Poster

By David Johnson

One of my biggest pet peeves is people misusing emotionally charged words. This reprehensible crime is worsened when this fumbling is deliberately manipulative, and worse still when taking the form of a slur. A piece that appeared a few weeks ago on these very pages bearing superfluous use of the word “genocide” really got under my fingernails.

A common utterance is that Israel is guilty of genocide against Palestinians. As a Jew, the term genocide is something I take seriously, and I don’t much care for it being thrown around carelessly. If someone uses the words “Israel” and “genocide” in the same sentence, the alarm bells in your head should ring. Similarly, if someone tries to explain that Yasser Arafat was anything less than the red-handed father of modern terrorism – responsible for endless suffering on the part of Muslims, Jews and Christians alike – you should raise your most suspicious eyebrow.

In order to accept such claims, you would need to ignore that the charter of Arafat’s group, the Palestine Liberation Organization, openly calls for the removal of all Jews from Israel. Never mind that in its 56-year existence, Israel has not only allowed the Palestinian population to grow fivefold, but also granted full citizenship to all Palestinians who lived within its borders at the nation’s inception (these Israeli-Arabs being some of the only Arabs in the Middle East with full democratic rights). It would seem that the supposedly strongest army in the Middle East (an army composed of Jews, Christians, Muslims and Druze) is doing a pretty lousy job of genocide.

Genocide is the systematic elimination of a specific ethnic group. When the Muslim-Arab-Sudanese government ethnically cleanses black Christians and Animists, and when Christian Serbs rape and slaughter Muslim Bosnians, we are dealing with genocide. If you can’t use the word properly, don’t use it. If you throw the term around loosely, you are either 1) diminishing its meaning or 2) dishonestly hoping to appeal to people’s emotional sense in order to persuade them.

But “genocide” isn’t the only dubious platitude being carelessly tossed about. These past four years brought about much discussion of the Orwellian nightmare this nation is slipping into: the birth of a new fascist state. Never mind that President Bush set out to remove one of the last remaining actual fascists in the world: Saddam Hussein (history lesson: Saddam’s Ba’ath party was created by Hitler’s Nazis in Syria during World War II). Never mind that fascism – like its close cousin National Socialism (Nazism) – calls for centralization of power, a steeply progressive income tax and government control of industry. The Bush administration clearly advocates the opposite of these.

Get The Daily Illini in your inbox!

  • Catch the latest on University of Illinois news, sports, and more. Delivered every weekday.
  • Stay up to date on all things Illini sports. Delivered every Monday.
Thank you for subscribing!

Condemn the Bush administration to your heart’s content, but please do so accurately! Is his foreign policy na‹ve or destructive? Is his economic policy leading our markets toward ruin? Maybe so. But Bush is no fascist, even considering the unfortunately named USA PATRIOT Act (which was passed by a bipartisan Congress, of course).

I’ve only dissected a few buzzwords used loosely on college campuses. To be fair of course, there are hundreds more. After all, there’s no better way of ending an argument than by calling someone a “racist.”

Why do people use these words so loosely? Is it mere intellectual laziness or something more sinister? What these words all share are strong emotional connotations in one way or another. By injecting them into a debate, dissidents hope to trigger an emotional reaction to lead people to irrational conclusions. The end result is a dishonest argument, wherein facts and reality can be trumped by emotional prejudice.

As a result, two of the nations who have done the most to combat genocide and fascism over the past half century somehow wind up defending themselves from accusations of these very things. It’s not the mere misuse of language that frosts my cookie – it’s the complete perversion of reality and morality.

David Johnson is a senior in business. His column runs Thursdays. He can be reached at [email protected].