(The Nationalist, 22 March 2002)
Do you remember the Balkan wars of some years ago? First, Serbia attacked Slovenia when it seceded from the Yugoslav Federation. (Everyone has forgotten that war.) Then it attacked Croatia, then Bosna-Herzegovina, and, finally, Kossova, then a region of Serbia. In the case of the latter three wars, all of which Serbia lost, it was the policy of the Serbian government to drive non-Serbs out of some of the areas they captured. To describe and to justify this process, they invented the term “ethnic cleansing”.
Just think about that for a moment. Ethnic means racial. Alright, that describes the process well enough. But “cleansing”? To cleanse means to remove dirt, to clean up a mess. The Serbs used that term to describe the process of driving people from their homes, killing some of them, raping women systematically in camps set up for that purpose, and burning down villages. They called that “cleansing”. Non-Serbs were dirt to be got rid of.
I can understand Serbs creating this term because they wanted to whitewash what they were doing. What I don’t understand is that the Western media took it up and used it, first with inverted commas, then without. “Ethnic expulsion” would have been a factual description, but the use of the term ethnic cleansing gives a measure of approval. By now it has become part of the vocabulary of any discussion of the Balkans.
The same applies at home. “Joy-riding” is an example. A young lad steals a car, drives it dangerously, loses control, and tragedy follows for others as well as for himself. How often have we heard of this, and seen on television the families outside the church on their way to the cemetery. And we call it “joy-riding”? Are we mad? Where is the joy in joy-riding? Joy for whom? – the parents robbed of a child? The boy left with a crushing burden of guilt for the rest of his life, or maimed, or suicidal, or dead?
Let’s call things by their proper name. Ethnic cleansing is ethnic expulsion. Joy-riding is death-riding. The Border Fox was not a lovable rogue but a brutal and cowardly criminal. Ditto The General. Shop-lifting is stealing. Being “elastic with the truth” is perjury if it takes place under oath, whether we’re caught or not.
Weasel words produce weasel thinking and weasel thinking produces weasels. Vocabulary shapes language, language shapes thinking, and thinking shapes people. Let’s call things by their name, and not use language that lies. ‘The truth shall make you free’.