A Eulogy for Common Sense

In Late April, 2020, as the pandemic was ravaging the United States, Tesla founder Elon Musk—in a conference call--labelled shelter in place orders “fascist.” But as Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian of authoritarianism at New York University, has repeatedly explained, a fascist government has only one party, is led by a dictator who uses violence to eliminate all opposition, and suppresses the judiciary, the press and so-called “enemies of the state.”The lazy and irresponsible use of words is not just a matter of scolding by your Grade 7 English teacher. The breakdown of responsible discourse leads to serious deterioration in a culture’s ability to discern fact from fantasy, evidence from demagoguery. In his great essay, “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell discusses the political exploitation of language when it becomes distorted and manipulated.He writes: “It is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic cause…But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread…even among people who should and do know better.”Orwell’s great insight about cause and effect—that corrupted communication is usually predated by sloppy thinking, but then the misuse of words only exacerbates the problem—captures well our present dilemma. One of the more depressing aspects of contemporary life is the destruction of language and, with it, the exit of common sense. Words which originated in a very particular context and thus were meant to describe specific historical events of a certain weight and scale, have now been casually borrowed and then applied, at a whim, to absurdly inappropriate situations, as though some sort of analogy were possible. Perhaps the greatest victim, in this regard, is the Holocaust.It would seem beyond ludicrous to have to remind people that the Holocaust was a state sponsored and systematic genocide of the Jewish people. Using ghettoization, forced slave labour, deportations to concentration camps, mobile killing squads and gas chambers, the Nazis killed 6 million Jews, in addition to many millions of others. I could go into gory details but one would assume that this is not necessary.Or is it? Let’s look at how the Covid-19 era alone has upped the ante on the disgraceful misappropriation of Holocaust imagery and meaning.Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, called those people who are leading efforts to get all Americans vaccinated “medical brown shirts” (referencing the paramilitary organization that helped Hitler and the Nazi Party rise to power). She made those remarks after she visited the Holocaust Museum and apologized for previously comparing masking policies to Nazi practices. The Libertarian Party of Kentucky tweeted: “Are the vaccine passports going to be yellow, shaped like a star, and sewn on our clothes?" Maine Rep. Heidi Sampson, speaking at a rally opposing vaccine mandates for healthcare workers, compared Maine Governor Janet Mills to Josef Mengele. Demonstrators cheered.This led the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum to ultimately speak out against these noxious comparisons: “The deportation of Jews to their deaths by a totalitarian, racist, anti-Semitic regime stands as an unmatched horrific time in modern history.  To compare this to the efforts of our elected officials to attempt to balance our health and economic needs while under threat from a worldwide pandemic cheapens the sacrifice of the millions of Jews murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators.”Misuse of the Shoah far predates Covid. Years ago, PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) put out an ad entitled “Holocaust on Your Plate”, which depicts the world as seen through the slats of a truck. A voiceover urges: “They came for us at night. Beat us. We cried out in the darkness. With no food, no water, and barely air to breathe.” The ad’s conclusion? “Each age has its own atrocities. End the animals’ holocaust.”The Shoah has been continually used and reused as a point of comparison for everyone’s private and cultural agonies; there are holocaust analogies everywhere. The reason is simple, as Yaffa Eliach’s gruesome pun—"there’s no business like Shoah business”-- implies. It’s a standing icon, as instantly recognizable as any event in history. But how many outlandish comparisons before the Holocaust is just another mundane cultural artifact, stripped of its ability to shock, void of its capacity to silence?Raymond Carver, the wonderful American short story writer, who died at age 50 of lung cancer in 1988, once put it this way about being true in what we write, and I think, in how we live: “That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they can best say what they are meant to say.”In today’s world, we are not careful about the words we speak. And what we “punctuate”—in the sense of what we emphasize or accentuate—is often an attempt to play to the crowd rather than the more complex reality. But the consequences of a debased language threaten us all.Just ask George Orwell.