Watch the language work
Rats, cockroaches and other human animals
I’m writing to you through the slight queasiness of an arrested hangover. It doesn’t take much alcohol to make me either drunk or sick – and often sick before drunk – but last night’s martinis and the two rollies I scored off a smoker were punishments I wanted.
The occasion was the need to decompress in company that it felt safe to do it in.
It’s been a week of WT actual F.
I neither want to write about Israel’s unremitting, beyond-cruel ‘self-defence’ of bombing an area they have penned people into, or the West’s ‘manufactured consent’ of this three-eyes-for-an-eye response to the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, but nor do I want to write as though this is not the most consuming thing in the world right now.
I am preoccupied with the polarisation; with the manipulation of language; with the overlaps and departures of worldviews; with the muddle of political terminology and the muddiness of the propaganda. With the new bans which are old bans repurposed for different groups of people. With the forms in which excuses and justifications are delivered as self-evident, and accepted as reasonable. With the competitive, underlying definitions of what kind of person qualifies as human, and what kind of suffering qualifies as defensible.
[People] … are generally more easily provok’d than reconcil’d, more dispos’d to do Mischief to each other than to make Reparation, and much more easily deceiv’d than undeceiv’d.
(Benjamin Franklin)
There are ten stages in genocide ranging from classification (‘Make them wear yellow stars!’) to denial (‘What crime? I committed no crime!’)
Language plays a part at every stage, particularly at the dehumanisation point. This is when entire groups of people are called things like ‘rats’, ‘cockroaches’ or, in the past two weeks, ‘human animals’.
Once, I was trying to explain to a man how I believe that words and ways of speaking hold the potential of physical violence in them. The man said, ‘Bullshit!’ He said it again, louder.
‘Bullshit!’
The conversation had nowhere to go after that.
Imagine if we could reclaim ‘the public power of tender language’, as Pádraig Ó Tuama put it in his discussion of the poem ‘A Man in Love with Plants’ by Jenny Mitchell.
Small sanities
I’m reading Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. I haven’t read Dickens since I was a teenager. He is so funny! Here’s how he writes about the death of a very old woman: ‘Mr Wopsle’s great-aunt conquered a confirmed habit of living into which she had fallen.’
A sweet, sad love song in German that I heard while watching Babylon Berlin gives me goosebumps every time I listen to it. The video link here flashes to scenes from the series, which has been the best viewing experience of this year.
I am riveted to a new podcast called About a Boy: The Story of Vladimir Putin by the journalist Julia Ioffe.
Judith Butler’s ‘The Compass of Mourning’ provided some comfort this week.
I miss my poetry books all the time and this week would have reached for Adrienne Rich to make some sense of things of things for me. Then someone posted a poem of hers I hadn’t read and it hit the spot.
With love,
K.
I share your feelings. It's all consuming and I try my best to not feel overwhelmed by the feeling of "evil" that has overtaken the world again. I'm reading Mary Oliver and the biography of Tove Jansson as n reprieve, though she was born during the 1st WW lived through the Finnish civil wars and the WWII and made a lot of cartoons criticising the wars. So I'm reminded that people survive things and light comes through, although I'm also having a feeling that people never learn and history keeps repeating itself. I also thought back of the 90's in South Africa and how it took the leaders that we had with international pressure to make a decision and reach an agreement rather than go to war for longer. It could've gone the other way but people decided to not.People can decide to not. So the West's support for Israel ecomomically and (as you've written so well) with language they use is blood on their hands, because a lack of support could bring leaders to different decisions. It's also language being simplified that's exasperating the problem - one is trying to criticize a government's choice and then called anti-Semitic, which shuts down the conversation. It's been a hard week.
Gabe and I have been talking about this a lot in the last week, too. Having many Jewish friends and living in a largely Jewish suburb, and Gabe having a Jewish psychoanalyst, we feel unable to say anything on Facebook or in person. We even lower our voices if we’re discussing it at the shops or just postpone the chat until we get home.
Yesterday we met a Jewish friend for lunch and it was all she wanted to talk about but I had to keep shutting her down and changing the subject because neither of us share her opinion but we didn’t want to hurt her by engaging in what she would probably see as whataboutism. In an ideal world I would have given my opinion and told her it’s best we don’t continue talking about it but I knew that would leave her feeling more hurt than if we gave nothing away. But then I felt like shit for not trying to persuade her to see the other side.
I know so many people who feel the same. I appreciate you for being brave enough to speak publicly about this. (I know my comment is public but it’s not quite the same as posting on my own FB page.) I don’t have the energy to deal with the consequences of sticking my head above the parapet!