Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity | Language

Practices of genocide and crimes against humanity emerge from and depend upon a language of genocide and crimes against humanity. Language itself is inseparable from power, and language can facilitate the most violent exercise of power against a people. Linguistic violence directed against a people leads to physical violence against a people. In genocide, such linguistic violence is institutionally sanctioned, and the ensuing physical violence is lethal and aims to be total.

The meanings of terms within semiological systems are based upon the oppositions among the signs. A non-linguistic example is the use of red, yellow, and green lights in traffic signals. In relation to classifications of peoples, many social groups use binary oppositions of an "us-them" type, such as Greeks and barbarians, freedom fighters and terrorists, and culture bearers and culture destroyers. The last example enters the realm of the language of genocide. In a 1988 article, "Language and Genocide," Berel Lang has shown the close connection between this language and the slaughter of millions in the Holocaust. Practices of genocide and crimes against humanity begin with a classification that divides people into two groups, one viewed positively and the other as subhuman or unworthy of existence. The use of condemnatory terms prepares a social group to practice atrocities and is used to perpetuate these atrocities throughout their duration.

Since the 1960s, Anglo-American theory has been strongly influenced by the work of John Austin, particularly his 1962 book, How to Do Things with Words. This approach often describes one set of language statements in terms of speech acts. A speech-act of language, for example, can be used to distinguish peoples who speak different languages. Such a speech-act can go beyond merely differentiating to also judging, such as designating Tutsis as "inyenzi" (a slang epithet meaning cockroaches) in the years preceding the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. A similar effect is achieved by Nazi references to Jews as "bacillus," and even by neo-Nazi calls to "kill faggots" beyond the million "queers" massacred by Hitler until all homosexual "scum" are "wiped out." Raphael Lemkin's coinage of the term genocide in 1943 can also be considered a speech act when it carries a condemnatory tone against and a branding of perpetrators of a practice that aims to kill an entire people. Lemkin suggested ethnocide as another term with the same meaning. Language, however, often relies on euphemisms that mask the reality of persecution, such as using "ethnic cleansing," instead of "ethnocide," to describe slaughters and forcible relocation like the ones that occurred in Bosnia in the 1990s.

Since the 1920s, continental theory, following the lead of Ferdinand de Saussure's 1916 Course in General Linguistics, distinguishes between the established sign system (la langue) and speaking (la parole). The established sign system reigns (synchronic immutability), but over time speaking alters that system (diachronic change). Persons with political power can speak in distinctive ways that become part of the official language, which shapes how citizens think and behave.

Beyond primarily referring to killing of an entire people, genocide is used in at least two other colloquial senses, namely, in reference to linguistic genocide and genocidal weapons. The usage differs from the strictly legal meaning of genocide. By suppressing or even eliminating the language of a people, linguistic genocide destroys a culture but it does not necessarily lead to the slaughter of a people. By contrast, "genocidal" weapons, such as strategic nuclear weapons targeted against cities, are intended to achieve the large-scale or even total killing of a people, although this slaughter could occur within an entire nation rather than being directed against a specific type of people. In principle, although not yet in fact, beyond nuclear weapons, some other weapons of mass destruction, especially biological ones, could be genocidal. However, one characteristic of such weapons is the prospect that their use may not be controllable and could therefore inflict death on the perpetrator along with the intended victims.

In showing the connection of language and power, Friedrich Nietzsche went so far as to say, in his 1887 Genealogy of Morals, that the "right of bestowing names" is a fundamental expression of political power. Governments that seek absolute power over the groups they control use language as a principal support, because they believe that by changing terminology and definitions they can alter the ways individuals and groups think and act. In 1991, in his book Totalitarian Language: Orwell's Newspeak and Its Nazi and Communist Antecedents, John Wesley Young reports that even in the extremes of totalitarian language found in Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet gulags, significant numbers of individuals avoided being fully brainwashed by constructing alternative words and discourses that eluded the understanding of their oppressors. Nevertheless, the one who controls the politics of definition controls the political agenda, and the step from the linguistic dehumanization of a people to their slaughter is rather small. So one important step in the prevention of genocide is the elimination of the names that are used in the perpetration of genocide. However, writing in 1999 on "The Language of War and Peace," William Gay has noted that the elimination of such names may be necessary, but it is not sufficient to achieve the desired results, and may result in a situation that is more like negative peace (the mere absence of war) than positive peace (the presence of justice as well). In this case the difference is between a temporary suspension of name-calling that does not remove the prejudicial attitudes that lie behind it and a permanent removal of any intent or desire to eradicate a people and the achievement of a genuine embracing of the appropriate diversity among peoples.

SEE ALSO Hate Speech; Lemkin, Raphael; Linguistic Genocide; Propaganda

William Gay