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Trump takes another step

Trump takes another step

by digby

“You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people, these are animals, and we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before. — Donald Trump, May 2018

Tyranny, oppression, moral degeneration, persecution and mass killing have always and everywhere started with the pollution of the language, making it sound clean and decent where it should have been base and violent (‘the new order’, ‘final solution’, ‘temporary measures’, ‘limited restrictions’) or else with making the language sound coarse and bestial where it should have been humane and delicate (‘parasites’, insects’, ‘germs’, etc.) I said the writer ought to be a smoke detector, if not a fire brigade, within his or her own language because wherever a human being is referred to as a parasite or a germ, there follow, sooner or later, death squads and exterminations.

Wherever war is called peace, where oppression and persecution are referred to a security, and assassination is called liberation, the defilement of the language precedes and prepares the defilement of life and dignity. In the end, the state, the regime, the class, or the idea remain intact where human life is shattered. Integrity prevails over fields of scatter bodies.   — Amos Oz, 1985

h/t to @helengravesnyc on twitter

Published inUncategorized