From Trump’s Speech to Israel-Gaza: The Politics of Language

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: As grief and anger cascade across Israel and Gaza, language can be weaponized to drive a further rift, spread propaganda and advance agendas. The war of words has also become a dividing line between the International Community in its efforts to respond to the crisis, and it doesn’t stop there. From the radical speeches of Donald Trump to the extreme rhetoric of Russia, language plays an often dangerous role in politics. Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss his new book, “The Politics of Language.”

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HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, thanks. Professor Jason Stanley. Welcome back to the program. You have a new book out called “The Politics of Language,” and it is happening and dropping at a time when there is so much language to be discussed. My first example that I want to pull up is Former President Donald Trump at a speech on Veterans Day. He said, “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections.” But tell me, when you see that, when you heard that, what went through your mind?

JASON STANLEY, AUTHOR, “THE POLITICS OF LANGUAGE” AND PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY, YALE UNIVERSITY: OK. There’s a bunch of stuff to unpack in that statement. Let’s begin with vermin and move to the claim that Joe Biden is a Marxist and a communist, essentially. So, when you speak, you attune people to certain things. So, you attune people to things in the world, in this case, rats, and you attune people to practices, in this case, things you do with rats. But this kind of hate speech, because that’s what it is, it attunes its audience to a practice of dealing with vermin. So, it is — the concept of genocide is complicated in this case, because it’s being applied to political opponents and not an ethnic group, but we have to remember that the Soviet Union intervened in the definition of genocide to make sure it didn’t apply to political opponents or else Stalin would have been accused of genocide. So, this is politicized, a politicized speech, and we can’t forget that. So now the second aspect of this is the overbroad use of Marxist and communist that one is familiar from the say, from the well-known writings of say, Hitler, where Hitler said essentially, any pro-democratic person, the social Democrats, any political opponent was a Marxist. So, this overbroad use of Marxist was used in the 1930s by the Nazi party to incarcerate anyone accused of this charge, which meant social Democrats, the political opponents of the conservatives and this — and we have to remember that in the 1930s until Kristallnacht in November 1938, the people who occupied the concentration camps were Hitler’s political opponents, the pro-democracy forces, who he falsely labeled as Marxists. And, you know, it’s absurd to say that there’s any kind of dramatic Marxist or communist movement in the United States today.

SREENIVASAN: What do you mean by politicidal?

STANLEY: Politicidal is targeting a class of political opponents for extermination. So, for example, in Indonesia in 1965, ’66, between 500,000 and 1.2 million communist party members were murdered by the government. That was a politicide. Stalin committed politicides against many millions of his political, what he perceived as his political opponents. So, it’s targeting political opponents rather than ethnic or religious groups.

SREENIVASAN: I do want to point out something else that he said later in the same speech. He said, “The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within.” Our threat is from within. What sort of actions do you think — you know, when you talk about attuning an audience, what does it do to an audience when they hear their leader say things like that?

STANLEY: So, it cleaves the audience into his supporters and the opponents. And the opponents are being said to be so destructive, such existential threat that nothing they say can be taken at face value, that you can’t trust anything they say, because, you know, in war, you can’t trust your opponent. If your opponent is telling the truth in war, saying something in war, they’re just doing it in order to deceive you. So, the idea here is to create a friend enemy distinction. And the — as we say in our book, the friend enemy distinction has a communicative consequence, and that communicative consequence is you shut out the voices of your political opponents. So, he is trying to create a wall between Democrats and him and saying to his supporters, look, this is not about discourse, this is about us versus them. They are an existential threat to the nation. Don’t talk to them, incarcerate them.

SREENIVASAN: So, in this context, your book, your new book, “The Politics of Language,” you’re really saying that so much of the conflicts that we are seeing around the world today have a pretty significant component where the language used to describe them, the opponents, and the framing either, what, is an accelerant or entrenches people onto one side? How would you describe it?

STANLEY: Well, as the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine said, you know, everything is mixed between world and language, separating out what language does and what world, what factuality is, is very difficult. So, there’s like a feedback loop, if you will, between the speech and the actions. And it’s certainly the talking strengthens the background ideology. The — you know, you talk about vermin, you link it to say, in this case, a stolen election and then you do a feedback loop. So, you repeat it, you link it to the background ideology. Germany in the 1931, according to Claudia Kunz, the scholar of Nazism, was the least antisemitic country in Europe. If you expected a genocide, you would have expected it, say, in France. But in Western Europe, that is. So — but by 1939, it’s the most antisemitic country and that’s because of this kind of feedback loop, this kind of repetitive linkages between vermin and the targeted people. And then, you have to link it back as the Nazis did, they linked this back to the Jews, Jewish — German Jews, or the world Jewish conspiracy, supposedly betraying the Germans in World War One, which as Timothy Snyder has pointed out is like the current situation. They’re saying that these hidden Marxist forces betrayed the country by stealing the election, and we need revenge.

SREENIVASAN: So, the more immediate conflict is raging right now between Israel and Gaza. And we have seen so many different examples of language, specific words being used with very different connotations and meaning by both sides in this. How do you make sense of something when you hear the word genocide being used maybe in different definitions or apartheid and whether they’re parallel or frankly, even the word cease fire and how political that word has become, which prior to this would have been a fairly innocuous, let’s just put down the guns for a second kind of comment?

STANLEY: Let’s begin with ceasefire. OK. So, cease, what is the expression ceasefire is trying to do? I think ceasefire tries to put a kind of equivalence between sides. It tries to — it suggests that there’s kind of a bargaining moment. And each side thinks that the other side is like a genocidal threat. And so, ceasefire kind of suggests emotionally a break in hostilities of the sort that occurred in World War I where it wasn’t really clear who the right side and who the wrong side was. You know, a ceasefire with the Nazis is hard to imagine, right? So, ceasefire has the emotional effect of toning the emotions down. Let’s move to the word genocide. This is a word fraught with historical associations. Now, I think we can talk. We can talk about the factuality of the word genocide. In our work, we emphasize again and again that speech is more than just about factuality. Here, it’s particularly horrific to accuse Israel of genocide because the very word genocide, historically, it originates with Lemkin and it’s connected to the Holocaust. So, when you cast that against Israel, Israel’s actions, whether it’s factually apt or not, it carries an extra knife edge. Now, the other direction, when Israel or various forces in Israel accuse Hamas of genocide, they’re trying to connect Hamas to the Nazis. Now, Hamas is a violent terrorist, genocidal, murderous organization that in no sense should be equated with Palestinians, but this sort of grows and this is what you’re finding the Israeli government or portions of the Israeli government saying — they’re saying, well, the allies bombed Germany into submission, killed a lot of civilians. That’s what we’re doing to target Hamas because that situation is exactly like the Nazis because they tried to commit genocide against us. How is it that they feel OK using that term, genocide, against a very weak — a much weaker opponent, Hamas, and the combined forces of Hamas are strong and terrifying and a threat, but it’s not like Nazi Germany. Nazi Germany was an overwhelming power that threatened the world and targeted Jews for no reason whatsoever. There’s a long history here. So, what’s happening in Gaza is not Nazi Germany. I mean, that’s absurd. There’s a long history here. But by saying that Hamas is perpetrating genocide, and it’s like the allied war attack invasion of Germany, they’re reaching back into history to try to make these historical connections. Again, it’s not factuality, it’s history.

SREENIVASAN: You know, in the wake of the horrendous attack by Hamas, just two days after, there was the defense minister of Israel, and he said, you know, we are fighting against human animals, and we are acting accordingly. Given the context of what we’ve been talking about, what you’ve been writing about, what went through your head when you started to hear things like that?

STANLEY: There’s been too much genocidal speech on these — on both sides, really. But that’s both sidering (ph) it. In this case, Israel is the stronger power. It was horrific what Hamas did. I think it is warranted and indeed required to call Hamas a terrorist organization because their acts were terrorists. But when you call Palestinians human animals your — you are saying they don’t have any rights. You can kill their children. You’re justifying it. You’re saying you don’t have to apply the laws of just war. You don’t have to treat them. You can treat children as a non-human animal. You are saying you don’t have to treat them like humans. And, you know, you need to treat everyone like humans. And I think, you know, it’s a simple moral dictum, don’t kill children.

SREENIVASAN: What is language that you can use when two sides think that the other ones are acting like Nazis and being genocidal?

STANLEY: Yes. It’s very important to switch vocabulary in these cases when we’re dealing with fraught historical associations. And other times it’s necessary to use the fraught historical vocabulary. I think it’s necessary to point out that Trump is speaking like a Nazi. He’s not speaking antisematically. There’s no antisemitism there, although anti-Semites will hear it that way. But, you know, it’s important to use the historical resonances. Now you’re asking, when it’s important to back away from the historical resonances, from terms that are loaded, to calm things down, how do we do that? And I think, you know, my colleagues at Yale, who work on climate change, they — they’ve made advances on this problem. They go to communities in — that tend to — when they hear the expression, human caused climate change or climate change, they tend to think that’s the opponents, that’s the people I shouldn’t trust, that’s vocabulary. You know, that means they’re Democrats, you know, they’re Democrats. And they try to point them to actual circumstances in their communities that are actually the consequences of climate change but things that the local community sees. We’re losing sand on the beach, let’s do something about that. Let’s protect their shoreline. So, you switch the vocabulary up to avoid the expressions that are connected with polarization. And the goal of — one goal of politics, a political strategy, is to infuse more and more words with this kind of identity. So, as soon as your political opponent uses one of those words, in this case, climate change, people’s minds shut off. So, they group people into groups and people don’t listen to the arguments. They’re just like, OK, that’s my opponent.

SREENIVASAN: You know, one of the examples you talk about is the phrase super predator and how successful that myth became. I mean, it was back, what, in the ’80s and Donald Trump even accused Joe Biden of using that phrase. And while there is no record of that, but there is record of, at the time, First Lady Hillary Clinton using it. What were the ripple effects of that? And why did that stick so much?

STANLEY: Yes. So, super predator comes from the mid-’90s, and that’s important because violent crime in the United States starts dropping in 1991. Super predator theory comes after this drop in violent crime. So, John DiIulio, it’s sort of formulator sets, begins his — I think 1995 paper, “My Black Crime Problem, and Yours — or Ours” with — violent crime has been dropping, but hold the champagne — don’t pop the champagne quirks yet. And he predicts that there’s going to be a new group of people, super predators, and most of them are young black men, he says. And they can kill, maim and rape without remorse, never explaining why they would do that if they have no emotions. And so, he predicts that violent crime will shoot up. And of course, violent crime continued to sink so that 2010 to 2012 we’re looking at the lowest rates of violent crime and recorded in modern U.S. history. So, it was wildly wrong. But the vocabulary affected policy. In particular, it affected policies in many states adopted laws to charge juveniles as adults. And so, what happened — so, there was no justification for this. The super predator thing was a myth. It was a complete myth. But like the vermin vocabulary, it justified treating children in terrible ways. So, we know from U.S. history that this way of describing people leads to treatments like locking kids up for sentencing to life in prison. So, we can just imagine what will happen with the contemporary vocabulary.

SREENIVASAN: Professor Jason Stanley from Yale, the author of a new book called “The Politics of Language,” thanks so much.

STANLEY: Thank you so much, Hari.