… war seems to have descended on the irrevocable downward path towards metaphor and then cliché. The use of the term is dishonest in intent. Often, it is a marketing tool for pre-packaged, manufactured outrage, and deserves an Orwell mention for its falsification of emotion for political ends. For the marketers who invent these buzzwords (or buzzphrases, in this case) it is a manipulative way to herd people into mobs, so that they will stampede to the ballot box, or tweet an avalanche of angry messages, or fill comment sections with group thinking and group emotions, or send emails to their congressmen and congresswomen, or call television advertisers and cancel subscriptions.
Wednesday, April 04, 2012
A very good idea …
… Orwell Watch #19: End the war. | The Book Haven.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Some valid points, but also a bit reactionary. While I agree that it seems silly to be judgmental of people who are being judgmental, in an endless cycle of name-calling, where do you stop?
ReplyDeleteAt some point you have call a bully a bully and refuse to accept their lies as truth. I don't think calling a bully a bully, or for that matter calling people on their hate, is perpetuating the hate. It reminds me most of Orwell himself saying that the emperor has no clothes. If you stop calling people on their hate, then you have to stop doing investigative journalism.
Often, I find no "hate" has been expressed, merely an opinion that is unpleasant to the speaker.
ReplyDeleteCalling someone a "hater" a way not of reasoning or starting a dialogue, but of shaming and silencing opposition. And yes, it is usually also a way of expressing hatred and contempt for one's opposition.
That's why I object to it.
Really? Having been often on the receiving end of blatant hate, I often find "hate" has very much been expressed. Having seen Westboro Baptist Church people picket the funeral of a Marine because in their minds he died serving an evil country, namely ours, I'd call that hate. Having been marching in a Gay Pride parade and had people yell from the curbs that "All faggots should die!" I'd call that hate speech. Having been on a radio talk show as a guest when some religious nut called in to basically say that all gays and lesbians are evil people, should kill themselves, and then go to hell, I'd call that hating. Having attended a couple of funerals of young people who killed themselves because they were being severely bullied for being different, gay, purple, whatever, I'd call that hate.
ReplyDeleteMaybe you had to be there.
You can argue all you want to about the style of the rhetoric, and what words mean in what contexts, and even about what "hate" is and is not, but I often find that genuine "hate" is in fact being expressed in those circumstances, in those situations.
Are we just supposed to shut up and take it? Not call a bully a bully? Not speak out against injustice when it's in your face?
So while I appreciate your position, as far as it seems to go, I stand by my previous comments, and by these new ones, as well.
It seems to me that if somebody hits me in the head with a baseball bat, I can pretty fairly assume that he doesn't like me. Whether his dislike rises to the level of hatred is irrelevant. It ought to be irrelevant to eh law as well. The perp should simply bee prosecuted to the flu extent of the law prohibiting aggravated assault. Who cares about the psyche of the criminal in a case where grievous bodily harm is done to someone. As for billies, the last one I dealt with — which was not so long ago, actually — backed off quite quickly when I made it plain I was not amused by his antics.
ReplyDeleteAnd I stand by mine: "Often, I find no 'hate' has been expressed, merely an opinion that is unpleasant to the speaker."
ReplyDeleteI am not talking about the kinds of egregious hate speech you cite (though I'm not sure screaming "hater" back would help there, either). The term is more commonly flung at people or groups of people one has never met face to face, whose attitudes one is assuming based on media accounts, hearsay, or whatever.
Frank, that's the usual argument against hate speech laws in a nutshell.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, the major hole in that argument, which otherwise makes some valid points, is that the law has *always* taken intent and mental state into consideration. That's the very basis of the mental incompetence and insanity defenses. Granted, those can be taken to silly extremes, too, for example in the famous "Twinkie defense" that was used to defend the man who assassinated Harvey Milk and George Moscone. hate speech laws can seem silly, but they do serve a purpose, which is to expose prejudice where it resides. That includes bullying and racism as forms of prejudice. That doesn't mean that the perp doesn't get prosecuted to the full extent of the law merely for bopping you on the head with a baseball bat—aggravated assault, in other words—and it does mean that if it can be proven that he was motivated by hatred of you as a class or type, there can be additional charges. Additional charges mean the perp is less likely to get off, which I'm all for. Hate speech laws merely formalize penalties where appropriate, using the same class of legal reasoning about state of mind that insanity defenses use.
I do meanwhile agree that a lot of the "war on whatever" rhetoric does silly. I am merely trying to point out that hatred isn't virtual or merely semantic in many cases, it's quite real. (Ask any Holocaust survivor.) Everything being a "war" all the time is a sad result of our contemporary cultural mindset, which has been using the rhetoric of war for a continuous century now, which has gotten so used to war going on all the time that we don't know when to stop. Or how. I agree that needs to change. But don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Thanks for the clarification, Cynthia. I wish that had been clearer from the start. I don't see much of the category of non-hate speech you're talking about, but then, I don't watch much TV political commentary or news. I do see a lot of genuine hate being expressed on a regular basis, in real life. Again, I just want to be clear we don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
ReplyDelete1. I don't quite see how Susan Sontag on the hijackers quite fits in, but of course she is right. The same point was made by Chesterton probably 80 years before that, on writers reaching for "cowardly" because they had lost the assurance to say "wicked"; of course it is worth making again.
ReplyDelete2. Has "haters" really broken out of its vernacular meaning of "the envious"?
3. Wasn't Korea the "police action"?
4. I wonder about Orwell. A great deal of murder and oppression is compatible with plain speaking, and a degree of rhetoric works well enough for the liberators. Was Burke less rhetorical that the man (Clive? Hastings?) who said "When I consider my opportunities, I am astonished at my moderation."? I think that Hugh Kenner's essay "The Politics of the Plain Style" is worth a look, or if you find him too conservative, Stanley Fish has had a word to say.