Mendocino Coast Jewish Community

The specific stab of ice to my heart came with the word “infest.” “Infest” is not a word that is, or should be, used for human beings. Insects and vermin infest.

Language, as we all know, is powerful. It has specific power to dehumanize people. And once a person or a group is verbally dehumanized, it is possible to do still worse to him or her.

Raul Hilberg, the eminent historian of the holocaust, asked the question, “How did the Nazis accomplish the murder of six million Jews?” (He references the murder of other populations targeted by the Nazis, but his focus, as the title of his most famous book makes clear, was The Destruction of the European Jews.) Hilberg meticulously documents the practical steps taken by the Nazi government to accomplish what was—among other horrible things--a mind-bendingly complex bureaucratic and political undertaking. Hilberg concludes that a government can’t destroy an entire population in a single step. He describes four stages, each necessary, in order to commit genocide.

Before I even describe his four steps, or at least the first one, I should say that I think that analogies to the holocaust are very seldom useful. For one thing, historical analogies of any kind are always inexact. For another, the words “holocaust” and “Nazi” are so emotionally painful and explosive that it is almost impossible to think once those words have been said. So I want to be clear here: I’m not making an analogy between the holocaust or Nazis and the current situation in the United States.

I bring up Hilberg’s scholarship here because of his first stage, what he calls “definition.” Definition in the Third Reich had both a legal and a propagandistic aspect. Legislators had to define what constituted a Jew. And the instruments of propaganda had to dehumanize them. Until these were undertaken, no further damage could readily be done.

Here’s another imperfect historical example. I began working on Skid Row in Los Angeles in 1981. At that time the population of people on the streets was changing quickly and radically. There used to be a fairly stable and small population of older men, mostly white, mostly alcoholics, who lived on Skid Row. They were known as “winos,” “bums,” or “derelicts.” Not flattering names, any of them. But these names didn’t fit the Greyhound bus loads of young, mostly African American men arriving in downtown LA daily as manufacturing plants closed in the South and Midwest. At the Catholic Worker, we watched the demography of Skid Row get younger and blacker, a whole new kind of tragedy. This was happening all over the country, and at first it elicited compassion. “We have to do something!” said moral, religious and civic leaders. There began to be a push for more shelter beds and soup kitchens, for transitional housing, for livable welfare. And the word “homeless” began to be used around the country. None of this stopped the hemorrhage of unemployment in the manufacturing sector or the destruction of people’s lives as they found themselves on the streets. But the initial language was fairly kind.

Flash forward a few years, and there were more homeless people than could be contained in Skid Row. There started to be tent cities and encampments under freeway overpasses, homeless people in more affluent areas, more urgent pressure for funding and services to ameliorate homelessness. And, sure as rain, new language began to creep into the public pronouncements: “predators,” “health hazards,” “vermin.” These words made possible a new approach to homelessness: it became a police problem, a sanitation problem, and cities could “sweep” and “clean up the streets.”

All of this came to my mind as I read the president’s tweet calling the presence of immigrants in our country an infestation. Neither should we overlook the casual “like MS-13”--the brutal gang that originated among Salvadoran immigrants in Los Angeles in the 1980s and has spread in the U.S. and Central America. This reference adds murderous gangsters to the images of lice and rats. On the campaign trail then-candidate Trump called Mexicans “drug dealers and rapists,” two other odious categories of humanity.