It doesn’t mean what you think it does
Commentary by Arwa Mahdawi
If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy, wrote Orwell. That applies today more than ever.
I would like to start a petition for journalists—and everyone else—to immediately stop using the C-word. Centrist. It’s an insidious word that has degraded how we think about politics and distorted how we see the world.
Perhaps that statement sounds a little over the top. After all, being a “centrist” sounds eminently reasonable, doesn’t it? A centrist is a moderate, right? Someone who is rational and practical and takes the middle ground. Someone who isn’t extreme like those crazy ideologues on the far right or far left. A centrist, logic dictates, is really what everyone should strive to be.
But stop for a moment and ask yourself how you would define a centrist in more specific terms. When you start spelling out what the word really means, it becomes clear that it obfuscates more than it illuminates. The word does not describe a set of ideas so much as it reinforces a system of power.
This, of course, is a feature not a bug of political language. As George Orwell wrote in his famous essay Politics and the English Language: “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”
Orwell wrote that essay in 1946. Today, 78 years later, it feels just as relevant. Look, for example, at the carnage in Gaza and the West Bank. Look at the statements from Israeli leaders that clearly suggest genocidal intent. Look at the tragedies that barely make a dent in the public consciousness any more. This week, for example, an Israeli airstrike killed four-day-old twins, along with their mother and grandmother, when their father went to collect birth certificates in central Gaza. Look at the levels of brutality that barely seem to register any more: there is video evidence of the sexual abuse of Palestinians at a notorious Israeli military prison (though the more accurate term is “torture camp”) and, even with that evidence, we know there will be no real accountability.
Look at the dead. Nearly 40,000 people in Gaza are now dead, including nearly 15,000 children. When you look at the scale of devastation, it seems likely that those figures are an underestimate. Further, counting the dead is excruciatingly difficult: kids are being blown into fragments so small that their surviving relatives have to collect pieces of them in plastic bags. Then there are the tens and thousands more who are now dying from starvation, or facing a looming polio epidemic.
Political language dresses all those dead and starving children up in euphemism. Don’t believe your eyes, it says. Look at the West Bank, meanwhile, where Israel has published plans for new settlements, which violate international law. Since October 7, the Israeli army and settlers have displaced 1,285 Palestinians and destroyed 641 structures in the West Bank, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Ethnic cleansing is taking place before our eyes.
Now look at how all of this is being justified. This war isn’t just being waged with bombs, it’s being waged with “euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.” When you lay out what is happening in clear language, it is indefensible. So political language dresses all those dead and starving children up in euphemism. It obscures ethnic cleansing with vagaries. Don’t believe your eyes, political writing says. What you are seeing is far more complex than your eyes can possibly comprehend.
This narrative is so entrenched that people don’t believe their eyes when it comes to Palestinians. Last October, the actor Jamie Lee Curtis posted a photo on Instagram showing terrified-looking children peering up at the sky. She captioned the post “terror from the skies” with an Israel flag emoji. When it was pointed out that the kids were Palestinian, she deleted the post. Her eyes may have told her that those innocent children were terrified; the narrative, however, was more complicated.
Around the same time, Justin Bieber posted a photo of bombed houses with the caption “praying for Israel.” When it was pointed out the picture was of Gaza, he deleted it and apparently stopped praying.
In 2022, a picture of a small blonde confronting a soldier was widely shared online, with the claim that it was a Ukrainian girl standing up to a Russian soldier. How brave, people thought. How inspiring! When it was revealed that it was actually old footage of a then 10-year-old Ahed Tamimi, a Palestinian activist, interest in the image fizzled out.
Again: when you lay out what is happening in clear language it is indefensible. When people see what is happening with their own eyes, it is indefensible. I say that as someone who has seen what life is like for Palestinians with my own eyes. As someone who had to run from soldiers shooting teargas when I visited my dad’s village in the West Bank when I had just turned six. Who was interrogated by an IDF soldier when I visited my dad’s village at 15, because I had a school chemistry book in my bag. Who knows what is like to be harassed and humiliated by heavily armed soldiers at checkpoints when you are just trying to go from one village to another. If you experience life under occupation for even a day it becomes starkly apparent that there is no way to defend it.
In order to defend the indefensible, politicians and political writers move away from concreteness, from clear language, and hide behind the respectableness of terms like “centrism.” Pro-Palestinian protesters are labeled the far-left or extremists. Continuing to unconditionally send arms to Israel and shield the country’s far-right government from accountability, however, is considered a centrist—and therefore reasonable—position.
See, for example, this paragraph from The New York Times, in early August, when Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro was still being considered as a possible candidate for Kamala Harris’s running mate.
“Mr. Shapiro has emerged as the choice of the party’s pro-Israel donors, those with ties to the school-choice movement and business-friendly contributors in Silicon Valley. But his centrist positions that appeal to those groups are the same ones that make him the least favorite of the party’s most liberal funders.”
This paragraph is one of the rare instances where there is some explanation as to what centrism actually means. Centrism we are told, is being pro-Israel and pro-business, no matter what. This piece came out while Shapiro was facing criticism from the left for an old essay he wrote in which he called Palestinians too “battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland of their own.” He has never properly apologized for this, nor will he ever have to, because being racist against Palestinians is a centrist position.
As Orwell wrote, atrocities can be defended, “but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties.” If the Democratic party were to be honest about why it is doing very little to stop the carnage in Gaza and the settlements in the West Bank, the bluntest argument would be along the lines of: “Israel is an important tool in maintaining US imperialism and western interests. The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is expedient to those interests. Human rights law doesn’t apply to the west.” Of course, being pro-ethnic cleansing doesn’t quite square with the do-gooding branding of the Democratic party. Instead, we are bombarded with the idea that massacring children is somehow a centrist and moderate position.
“If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy,” Orwell wrote. There is very little that most of us can do to change what is happening in Gaza, but the one thing we can all do is simplify our English. So let’s begin with “centrism.” If we are to be honest about what we mean, if we are to express it in its simplest terms, we should use the word “status-quoism” instead. The point of words like “centrism” is to prevent thought and prompt acquiescence. It’s up to you whether you want to acquiesce.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist.
Source: theguardian.com, August 22, 2024