Tag: anders breivik

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Watching our language on mental illness and disability

[Content note: ableist language]

It was probably inevitable that in a post on The Standard about the differences in commentary style between leftwing and rightwing blogs, someone would come along and start saying things like:

Kiwiblog’s comments threads feature a great many angry retards, who mistake the laying out of their prejudices for thinking about a subject and presenting an argument on it. This topic attracts them more than most, and the thread was accordingly psychotic in tone.

When I pointed out that using words like “retard” and “psychotic” was unfriendly to people with mental health issues, it was probably also inevitable that I would be called a member of the “volunteer word police”.

The thing is, ableism is a serious issue. And I’m not ashamed to point it out when I see it.

If you’re unfamiliar with the word “ableism”, this is a good introduction.

There are two very good sets of reasons to not use that kind of language.

The first is the harm it causes. The way we talk about people with disabilities or mental illnesses contributes to how society treats them. We can use language which accords people some basic dignity and agency – like “wheelchair user” – or we can use language which pigeonholes them and defines them purely by what they “can’t” do – like “wheelchair-bound”.

And when we talk about judgemental, vindictive, aggressive, callous people like the standard commenters at Kiwiblog as “retards”, we’re saying that people who have severe mental disabilities are judgemental, vindictive, aggressive, and callous. Do you think that’s going to lead to anyone saying “gee, maybe I should be more open-minded and accommodating to people with mental disabilities?”

There’s a lot of highminded progressive principles which liberal/lefty people subscribe to, about treating people equally and not tolerating oppression. And we extend our analysis of power and exploitation to language all the time. We can all see the harm caused by referring to workers as a “resource” or telling sickness beneficiaries that “the best path to recovery is paid work.”

But when it comes to ideas like “don’t use ableist language” or “stop calling Paula Bennett fat” those progressive principles tend to fall down. Suddenly, we refuse to see the harm we cause with our language.

The second reason to avoid ableist language is, sadly, probably more persuasive.

That’s the idea that when we write off threatening, bigoted hate-speech as “retarded” or far-right and religious extremists as “nutjobs”, we’re downplaying the real threat they pose and cut ourselves off from being able to challenge their ideas or the people who propagate them.

Calling Kiwiblog commenters “angry retards” basically lets David Farrar off the hook for providing a platform for bigotry and hate. Talking about Cameron Slater’s mental health all the time mitigates the fact that he has built a following on deliberately destroying people’s careers and trying to threaten their lives. Writing off people like Anders Breivik as “crazy” stops us from examining and understanding the huge community of people who think, say, and may be planning similar violent actions. (And writing off that entire community as “crazy” is a great way to let them organise further acts of terrorist violence right under our noses.)

It’s easy enough to see why this language has a lot of currency. It’s so satisfying to be able to write off whole groups of people as being beneath us, isn’t it? But really it just hurts everyone else, including ourselves.

If that makes me a member of the Volunteer Word Police, I can only hope that the job comes with a shiny badge.

If you’re having difficulty figuring out how to stop using words like “retard” or “lame” in your day-to-day life, here’s a handy guide.

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How to respond to Charlie Hebdo?

Twelve people have died in the attack on French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo, and the response from many people – from a New Zealand perspective fairly divorced from the immediate impact – is familiar.

We’ve been here before, with violent extremists attacking media organisations for publishing inflammatory cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad, though this attack is far more serious. And with the “benefit” of distance, there’s a lot to unpack – about the nature of satire, about the targets of satire, about the freedom of the press, about the right to cause offence – but what worries me is the instinctive reaction many Westerners have to declare “these people died because of these cartoons, ergo these cartoons should be published everywhere!”

It’s especially concerning in the context of this excellent article from Informed Comment, which posits a more complex explanation for the Charlie Hebdo attack – beyond just “they hate our cartoons and attacked us because they hate us”:

This horrific murder was not a pious protest against the defamation of a religious icon. It was an attempt to provoke European society into pogroms against French Muslims, at which point al-Qaeda recruitment would suddenly exhibit some successes instead of faltering in the face of lively Beur youth culture (French Arabs playfully call themselves by this anagram).

If we accept this explanation, then the cries to republish the cartoons as widely as possible simply play into the extremists’ hands. Likewise demands for greater government surveillance and further compromises of civil liberties can actually make us less safe by making it a hell of a lot easier for violent extremists – of any persuasion, because there’s nothing unique to Muslim extremists about hating governmental authority – to persuade others that hey, you’re in a fight for your very existence here.

And I just don’t know what the point of republishing the cartoons is. Many journalists have already shown solidarity with the victims at Charlie Hebdo. Many cartoonists have already created their own works in support of the freedom to satirise. Without context – and especially, as I’m seeing in a lot of places, without even a translation of the original French – the cartoons don’t serve as satire, and publishing them seems to simply be “neener neener neener, look at this picture of Muhammad, you can’t stop us” thumb-biting.

As Fredrik deBoer notes, the question of whether we should crack down on violent extremists in defence of the freedom of the press is a “dead moral question”:

Of all the things that you should fear your government will lose the resolve to do, fighting Muslim terrorists should be at the absolute bottom of your list. There is no function that our government has performed more enthusiastically for years.

So any talk about needing to steel our nerves or reinvigorate our efforts against terrorism is frankly a smokescreen.

What really worries me is that none of this is new. We know that aggressive responses just breed more conflict. We know that trying to “bomb them back into the Stone Age” just creates more violent extremists.

In the Informed Comment article above, Juan Cole notes that we have an alternative model to dealing with these kind of acts: the approach taken by Norway against Anders Breivik, which steadfastly denied him the opportunity to become a martyr for his cause.

So why don’t we take it? Why is the first instinct to say let’s arrest them, expel them, and drone-strike their families?

The depressing reality is that in the West, Islam is our generation’s Communism. “Foreign fighters” are our “reds under the bed”. There are many authoritarian people – across the political spectrum – who simply want to increase the reach and repressive power of government (as long as their particular end of the spectrum is in office).

They may paint themselves as moderates, liberals who just really, really love freedom of speech – but you just have to look at the kinds of comments their followers leave and upvote (and no, I’m not linking, but you know exactly what I’m talking about). They know the score, and it isn’t about a careful, thought-through reaction to the acts of a specific, tiny minority of the Muslim population.

It’s only natural to react with abhorrence and disgust at the violent massacre of innocent people. It’s natural to take up the rallying cry of “Je suis Charlie” and march in the streets against acts of terror.

What I fear is that abhorrence being manipulated to justify further erosion of our basic rights and freedoms – the very things George W Bush told us the terrorists hate us for.