Anne Applebaum understands well the language of dehumanization. Extremists around the world have used it because they know it works. It allows ordinary people to become vicious killers. Even, in some circumstances genocidal killers.
This is how Applebaum described such language:
“This kind of language was not limited to Europe. Mao Zedong also described his political opponents as “poisonous weeds.” Pol Pot spoke of “cleansing” hundreds of thousands of his compatriots so that Cambodia would be “purified.”
In each of these very different societies, the purpose of this kind of rhetoric was the same. If you connect your opponents with disease, illness, and poisoned blood, if you dehumanize them as insects or animals, if you speak of squashing them or cleansing them as if they were pests or bacteria, then you can much more easily arrest them, deprive them of rights, exclude them, or even kill them. If they are parasites, they aren’t human. If they are vermin, they don’t get to enjoy freedom of speech, or freedoms of any kind. And if you squash them, you won’t be held accountable.
It is profoundly disappointing to see such dehumanizing language used by the former American President Donald Trump. It is even more disappointing to see such language electrify a large part of the American public. Until recently such language was not common in American politics, but ever since the arrival of Donald Trump on the scene it has become common.
Applebaum pointed out how George Wallace, whom she called a “notorious racists,” did not use such incendiary language when he advocated for “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” He never spoke about blacks as vermin. He did not say they “poisoned the blood of the nation.” No that is the language of Donald Trump.
Similarly, Franklin D. Roosevelt who sadly ordered the corralling of Japanese Americans into internment camps and he called them “enemy aliens” but never parasites or vermin. All of this changed with Donald Trump. As Applebaum said,
“In the 2024 campaign, that line has been crossed. Trump blurs the distinction between illegal immigrants and legal immigrants—the latter including his wife, his late ex-wife, the in-laws of his running mate, and many others. He has said of immigrants, “They’re poisoning the blood of our country” and “They’re destroying the blood of our country.” He has claimed that many have “bad genes.” He has also been more explicit: “They’re not humans; they’re animals”; they are “cold-blooded killers.” He refers more broadly to his opponents—American citizens, some of whom are elected officials—as “the enemy from within … sick people, radical-left lunatics.” Not only do they have no rights; they should be “handled by,” he has said, “if necessary, National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”
According to Applebaum the use of such dehumanizing language by the former president is no accident:
“In using this language, Trump knows exactly what he. Is doing. He understands which era and what kind of politics this language evokes. “I haven’t read Mein Kampf,” he declared, unprovoked, during one rally—an admission that he knows what Hitler’s manifesto contains, whether or not he has actually read it. “If you don’t use certain rhetoric,” he told an interviewer, “if you don’t use certain words, and maybe they’re not very nice words, nothing will happen.”
And if you do use such words too much happens!
Dehumanizing language is the language of hate. Its use by political leaders is sickening. Those who use it clearly belong in the “basket of deplorables.”