I have a great and abiding disdain — and you should to, if you have self-respect — for social engineers who assume for themselves the moral prerogative to dictate what terms are allowed to be uttered in public or prohibited, on a rolling and arbitrary basis, forever.
English is not their language; they didn’t build it; they have no right to distort it by fiat.
I won’t heed any linguistic commandments, and you shouldn’t either.
Related: WATCH: British State Media Hack Does Migrant Propaganda, Polish MEP Immediately Slaps Her Down
Reading the below screed from The Intercept, if one had been dropped off into the stratosphere from Mars and didn’t have any context, one would assume the term “migrant” emerged straight out of some Holocaust propaganda production — and not where it actually came from, which is the neoliberal international NGO class itself, which facilitates mass migration to drown the West in cultural eradication.
The entire article should rightly come with a giant “Citation Needed” affixation; not one time is there any hard evidence presented that “migrant” is used in a racist manner by racists. It’s very long on innuendo and short on facts.
Via The Intercept (emphasis added):
“Consider the word “migrant.” Today, it’s the term of art from both the right and the left…
It used to be fairly rare to call human beings migrants. From the 16th to 19th centuries, the word mostly referred to birds and other animals that moved back and forth between different climates and terrains every year, not from desire or planning but from pure, immutable instinct…
Now, everyone who leaves a poor or troubled country and comes north to the United States is a “migrant.”…
The word “migrant” implies that they’re traveling around unsettled: rolling stones with no intention of gathering moss and no right to land in one place.”
Naturally, no Social Justice™ manifesto would be complete without a reference to the Nazis, who notoriously pinned “migrant” stickers of shame on the Jews while corralling them into the trains… or something.
Continuing:
“As Al Jazeera has commented, “migrant” has “evolved from its dictionary definitions into a tool that dehumanizes and distances, a blunt pejorative.”…
The philologist Victor Klemperer wrote about these kinds of subtle language shifts under the Nazi regime. In his definitive study, “The Language of the Third Reich,” Klemperer, who himself narrowly avoided death at the hands of the Nazis, was less interested in the obvious language shifts — the kind of thing any antifascist would have recognized. Instead, he focused on the unnoticed changes, the ones that slipped by almost everyone; he called it “the language of hysteria” and “the language which writes and thinks for you.””
The article goes on — and on and on — claiming that, in addition to calling them “migrants,” making illegal aliens wait five years before handing them citizenship is racist, that wanting border control is racist, etc.
Continuing:
“[Kamala Harris’] speech at the Democratic National Convention repeated these dark saws and worse. She promised to bring back a bipartisan immigration legislation that gives immigrants nothing, and which Harris dubbed the “toughest border control bill in decades.” It calls for “more border security” when border security is nothing more than border security theater: a true Klemperer lexeme. As for her platform, the only thing Harris offers to immigrants is “an earned pathway to citizenship.”
That might sound hopeful at first glance, but a portent of what “earned pathway to citizenship” actually means comes from a bipartisan House bill co-sponsored by Reps. Maria Elvira Salazar, R-Fla., and Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, who’s from the U.S.-Mexico border city El Paso and is a co-chair of the Harris campaign.
The bill would offer immigrants without documentation who have lived in the United States for at least five years a four-year, quasi-legal status possibly leading to a green card — but only if they accede to the implication that they’ve robbed Americans and should be fined for it. To enroll, applicants must pay $5,000. They must also agree to have 1.5 percent of their wages garnished for years. All that money would go to a fund to compensate American workers for the jobs they’ve supposedly lost to immigrants. The bill calls immigrants “aliens.” And “migrants.””
Related: Irony? State Department Bigots Issue ‘Do Not Travel’ Haiti Advisory
Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
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