By DOUG SHAVER
July 14, 2019
I recently heard a radio report, probably on the BBC (I wasn’t taking notes), about some leftist organization referring to certain American detention facilities as “concentration camps.” The reporter said some Holocaust survivors along with many other people were objecting to this. A defender of the usage responded with a statement to this effect:
Let’s not get sidetracked into semantic arguments. Let’s discuss what is going on in those places.
Very well, but if your mind is made up that they are in some relevant way like Dachau or Auschwitz, then what is left to discuss? You have made your point, which that you believe the internees are victims of inhumane racial or political oppression. If you are prepared to defend that proposition with a reasoned argument, then we can have a discussion. If you are not, then your request for a discussion is disingenuous. What you want is not discussion but capitulation. It’s your way or no way, which makes you a thug.
Redefining the terms of debate is the last resort of the sophist needing to claim the moral high ground. Thus racism, once understood as a label for white supremacy, has been redefined by progressives as referring to any theory, idea, or institutional policy having an actual or potential negative effect on groups of nonwhite people, regardless of any intended effect. This is pernicious because although the crime has been redefined to include a lesser offense, the moral penalty has not changed. Nobody is claiming that racism is less evil than it used to be. And the result is not in any way a more effective opposition to white supremacy. Real white supremacists could not care less if you call them racists. They might deny the accusation, but not because it really bothers them. They deny it because they know it’s bad PR to admit to racism. People who are not white supremacists deny being called racists because they are not white supremacists and resent, with good reason, being branded as if they were.
Another frequent instance of this political semantics is the liar accusation, which unfortunately is sanctioned by the dictionaries. Not that the dictionaries are to be faulted. Their job is to report usage, not to regulate it, and "lie = falsehood" is a common usage. That does not make it a good usage. And there is another usage of which the dictionaries also inform us. It defines “lie” much more specifically: a falsehood told by someone who knows it to be false and with intent to deceive. By that definition, anyone who believes what they say cannot be lying when they say it. We can say they should not believe it and must be guilty of some offense of some kind if they do believe it. Very well. They are doing something they should not do, but lying isn’t it.
Now, some decent people have responded thus. “What we may infer from all this,” they say, “is that someone actually is lying whenever they say something that isn’t true, but if they don’t know it isn’t true and they’re just mistaken, then they’re not morally culpable.”
Really, now? Never mind the dictionary. Does anyone in the real world ever call someone a liar without intending to impugn their moral integrity? Not that I have ever noticed. We have at least two words, already in common usage, for a falsehood erroneously believed, and they are “error” and “mistake.” But those are things we’re all guilty of. To be mistaken is just to be human, but we can’t give our adversaries that much credit. We need to be better than they are, and so: We might make mistakes, but they lie.
(This page last updated on July 14, 2019.)