The Power of Words:

How the language of politics can pave the way to moral collapse

The current treatment of immigrants, particularly that of children, crossing into the United States over the Mexican border is nothing short of disgusting, and must be repudiated by all decent people. The policy currently being enforced by this administration represents a grave attack on our most basic integrity, and it must be stopped.

More than 2,300 children have thus far been separated from their parents, according to The New York Times¹, and are being held captive under terrifying conditions in a manner that should defy belief. That it should happen in the Land of the Free is all the more demoralizing.

Moreover, President Trump’s choice to use dehumanizing terminology and vitriolic rhetoric when referring to immigrants should raise concern among anyone with even a basic sense of human solidarity, or a passing familiarity with the atrocities that have been visited upon countless innocent people throughout history, under the spurious warrant of authoritarian and nationalist principles.

We should perhaps not be surprised that an administration, which has at various times called human beings ‘animals’, or ‘not even people’, and whose President only today stated that Mexicans were ‘infesting our country’, should be comfortable pursuing a course that would see innocent children ripped from the arms of their parents, and penned-up in cages, barred from physical contact even with siblings. The fact is, it’s easier to be cruel when the objects of cruelty have first been dehumanized in the public discourse.

It is perhaps also worth noting, if only for its pathetic attempt to legitimize these recent atrocities, that Mr Trump’s Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, piled additional insult onto our collective sensibility, when he felt it salient to quote a passage from the Bible (Romans 13:1), in defense of these serious crimes against humanity. The content of this particular verse alone should offend any right-thinking, free person by its present application, which seems to suggest that Donald Trump and his ilk have been installed by Divine mandate — that is to say, by God himself.

Now, I cannot claim to be a person of faith, but I do know the Bible, and since Mr Sessions has deemed it fitting to bring that Bronze Age book into the conversation, I shall too. I’d direct anyone who might be inclined to agree with Mr Sessions to then pay a visit to Galatians 3:28, or Isaiah 10:1–3, or Luke 14:12–14, and see if they still feel their creator would support this administration’s current policy toward fellow human beings, who just so happen to be immigrants.

This all goes to say that the language of our political discourse matters, and though I feel that making direct comparisons to the totalitarian regimes of history is indeed problematic, I submit that it is not entirely unfair to say that we are oriented toward their general direction. Mercifully, the present situation is sufficiently removed from one of genocide, but it is important here to remember that genocides do not work overnight.

The detention of immigrants in this manner, coupled with this administration’s clear disdain for the free press, for intellectuals, for dissent of any kind — including peaceful protest — strikes a troubling image, one that cannot but be compared to the darkest times in recent human history.

That Mr Trump praises dictators like Vladimir Putin², Rodrigo Duterte³, and most recently Kim Jong-un⁴, might, through a genial interpretation, be viewed as an earnest effort at improved diplomacy, were it not for his malicious, and craven attacks on our closest cultural and economic allies in Canada, Europe, and Japan. This pursuit of isolation from democracies most resembling our own only serves to further compound the ills of promoting what Mr Trump has all along hailed as, America First, which serves as the global analog to his domestic anti-immigration position.

These issues, taken in their totality, cannot but conjure up suggestions of totalitarianism, which even now are infecting our democratic institutions. Meanwhile, the citizens of our former — and one certainly hopes, future — alliances abroad look on in disbelief, witnessing what it looks like when a modern empire, for all its promise and all its warts, slowly implodes.

Let us but hope the world hears our cries, should we be the ones who someday need refuge.