Ethnic Slaughter Isn't Clean
What’s in a word? There are things I can’t say. Why? When I speak, I am embodying words. When I write, I am establishing the ongoing presence of “my words”. By using a word, I am enlivening it; I am validating the existence of that word in the world; emphasizing it, supporting it, feeding it, nourishing its presence. I am breathing words, and the mind-sets which spawned them, alive in the world. Like using money: Believing in it, agreeing with its meaning, and exchanging it, creates and continues its value. So works the world of words.
I don’t have much power and influence. I like to be careful with what I manage and am responsible for: My thoughts, my body, my words, my actions. I do not say “ethnic cleansing.” I don’t even like to write that here. After watching and discussing The Devil Came on Horseback with a friend, I realized the gist of it. In response to her questioning, I clarified: “Ethnic cleansing” validates and perpetuates the consciousness of the violators, the perpetrators, the mass murderers. Like Hitler, they actually think and believe they are cleansing (as in scum) off “their” lands. I refuse to think this way, it is abhorrent to me, and so I cannot speak this phrase without a sense of inner violation. I am not saying that I create my world with my mind, that if I do not see the ships in the harbor, they will not come and conquer me. I am saying I must describe the ships in the harbor to the best of my ability, and not confuse their contents with another idea entirely, like gods.
“Ethnic cleansing” says something that sounds like God. I grew up hearing “Cleanliness is next to Godliness”; it used to be ingrained in Western society, and still is, in many places. “Ethnic cleansing” skims across a mind without registering horror; the mass madness--raping and killing entire populations because they are in some way different--replaced by near-godliness. The phrase is very effective; a designer device diverting minds away from registering, visualizing, imagining, or feeling. It is a prophylactic phrase preventing a sense of the pain, terror, suffering, and grieving that descriptive words would arouse in our primeval mammalian architecture, would evoke in our mirroring minds. A conveyance that goes right around connecting communication, because its intent is not to bear meaning, but to confuse. Do you remember the 1989 Montreal Massacre killings? A young man separated college students by gender and shot the women, screaming, “I hate feminists!” Fourteen women were killed, eleven others injured. An expert on the psychology of mass murderers described how the gunman fit a mass murderer’s profile: hatred and revenge directed toward a specific group in society. Do we refer to this behavior as “gender cleansing”? Why not?
Lynn Oha Carey Fall 2007
