(
"Israel's oldest daily, Haaretz," which was was sanctioned by the Israeli government on Nov. 24, 2024
Daniel Blatman, Opinion, August 24, 2026: From Armenia to Gaza: The Language of Denial That Makes Atrocities Possible
From Nazi 'language rules' to the American military's 'collateral damage' and Israel's 'voluntary migration' policy for Gaza, euphemisms do more than conceal crimes. They allow ordinary people to live with them
Added: Against the Drowning Noise of Other Words, CCCV: "headlines"
headline after headline
of situation, event
and incident ...
body parts on the blood-stained floor
of a half-flattened classroom
Added: Against the Drowning Noise of Other Words, CCCVI: "neu-tra-li-za-tion"
neu-tra-li-za-tion
a new recruit mouths
with a middle finger —
a gray-haired Gazan's back
pockmarked with bullets
FYI: Below is a relevant excerpt:
In 1947, two years after the collapse of the regime that had threatened his life, the German Jewish philologist Victor Klemperer published a short book titled "The Language of the Third Reich" ("Lingua Tertii Imperii"). Klemperer, who escaped extermination because he was married to a non-Jewish woman, did not write about extermination camps or SS death squads. He wrote about words.
Nazism, he argued, penetrated society not only through speeches and posters in the streets, but primarily through expressions that people unwittingly internalized, like tiny doses of poison entering the bloodstream. Individual words, expressions and syntactic patterns were imposed on the masses through millions of repetitions, then adopted mechanically and unconsciously. The poison, he wrote, does not act immediately. It accumulates....
The Israeli media now has a complete, efficient and polished lexicon designed to implant euphemistic descriptions of the state's crimes in the minds of Israelis. Mass killing in Gaza falls under the heading of "operational activity." The destruction of entire neighborhoods becomes "mowing the lawn" or "flattening," images borrowed from gardening and construction. A targeted airstrike that kills dozens of innocent people is described as a "thwarting" or "neutralization," terms from the world of intelligence that imply the prevention of some greater evil. An area that continues to be bombed, such as Al-Mawasi in southern Gaza, is called a "humanitarian zone." And when it becomes clear that uninvolved civilians, including children, have been killed, passive formulations take over: "were killed during an operation," "lost their lives," "fatalities were reported." ...
This is precisely what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu meant by "symbolic violence." It is not a lie that someone decided to sell or an instruction handed down from above, but a set of categories of thought internalized so deeply that both the person doing the classifying and the person being classified accept them as natural. A news editor who writes "hikers" or "terrorists" does not feel that they are choosing a word. They feel that they are describing reality. That is the power of symbolic violence. It requires no administrative enforcement because it is already embedded in our vocabulary.
)
a child's hand
outside the car window
to touch
the first summer rain ...
bumper to bumper to Exit
Added:
a midnight moon
glints in the skylight
turning once more
I listen to her breathing
as the night stretches on
Added:
packing
and unpacking my suitcases
for three hours —
this life without my love
yet still within my love
Added:
we all move on
then the story carries us —
still I stand still
at the bend of her street
hearing her door close
Added:
home from vacation
it takes three moonless nights
for my heart and mind
to adjust to living
in a room of my echoes
No comments:
Post a Comment