WEDNESDAY: We thought M. Gessen made a nice choice...

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 2, 2025

...with respect to that one key word: We thought M. Gessen made a good observation with respect to a small bit of language. 

The passage comes from a new column in the New York Times. Gessen describes the "arrest" of a student at Tufts. A bit of advice is implied:

Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. Our Police State Has Arrived.

[...]

Those of us who have lived in countries terrorized by a secret police force can’t shake a feeling of dreadful familiarity. “I never realized until this moment how much fear I carried with me from my childhood in Communist Romania,” another friend, the literary scholar Marianne Hirsch, told me. “Arrests were arbitrary and every time the doorbell rang, I started to shiver.”

It’s the catastrophic interruption of daily life, as when a Tufts University graduate student, Rumeysa Ozturk, was grabbed on a suburban street by half a dozen plainclothes agents, most of them masked. The security camera video of that arrest shows Ozturk walking, looking at her phone, perhaps to check the address where she was supposed to meet her friends for dinner that night, when an agent appears in front of her. She says something—asks something—struggling to control her voice, and within seconds she is handcuffed and placed in an unmarked car.

It’s the forced mass transports of immigrants. These are not even deportations, in the way we typically think of them. Rather than being sent to their country of origin, Venezuelans were sent to El Salvador, where they are being imprisoned, indefinitely, without due process. It’s the sight of men being marched in formation, their heads shaved, hundreds of people yanked from their individual lives to be reduced to an undifferentiated mass. It’s the sight, days later, of the secretary of homeland security posing against the background of men in cages and threatening more people with the same punishment.

These mass transports are not "deportations," Gessen says, in the way we normally think of such actions. As Gessen goes on to describe the difference, a key point is being made.

We denizens of Blue America should think with great care about the language we use. Describing these actions as "deportations" (full stop) helps normalize the actions in question—helps make them seem more routine, more understandable, than they actually are.

We should all be careful about "using our words"—about avoiding the transmission of misleading impressions. We were also struck by a choice of words made by Adam Serwer in the (not-failing) Atlantic:

Trump’s Salvadoran Gulag

One thing that could be said about many—and possibly all—of the more than 100 men removed from the United States by the Trump administration under the archaic Alien Enemies Act of 1798 is that Donald Trump has been convicted of more crimes than they have.

Trump, after all, was convicted of 34 felony counts by a jury of his peers in New York City for faking business records in order to cover up his hush-money payment to the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels in 2016. His administration has acknowledged in court that many of the men deported to a gulag in El Salvador “do not have criminal records in the United States.” Many appear to not have criminal records elsewhere either. 

A certain word appears in the headline, then in the second paragraph. Serwer uses that word four more times, referring on three of those occasions to "an overseas gulag."

Serwer also uses a kinder/gentler term, one which is much more conventional. But when he does, the word arrives suitably wrapped: 

ICE rounded these men up in early March, and then put them on a plane to the Central American nation, alleging that they were members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang. The men were then imprisoned in El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, a prison infamous for reported human-rights violations including, allegedly, torture. 

[...]

So far, the Trump administration has provided only weak evidence that any of the men condemned to a foreign prison notorious for human-rights violations were guilty of anything. 

You may not want to say gulag gulag gulag gulag all through some discussion of these unusual events. But if you find yourself saying "prison," it's important to make it clear that, as with these "deportations," we're speaking here about a "prison" of a strikingly different kind.

In our view, Serwer made another excellent choice: 

Despite the absence of evidence, the administration continues to refer to these men publicly as “gang members” and “terrorists,” and they have become fodder for Trumpist propaganda. Last week, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem filmed a depraved video with the prison as her background, advertising the Trump administration’s willingness to deport people overseas to be tortured by the bureaucracy of a strongman whose own government the American authorities have said is affiliated with organized crime...

You might want to be careful with the word in question. That said, we're not inclined to disagree with Serwer's choice. We refer to this key word: 

Depraved.

Full disclosure: This post was typed while President Trump was making his oration about his tariffs. (No one has ever heard anything like it!)

In our view, something is plainly "wrong" with this man. We regard that as a tragic loss of human potential, but we badly need to find the words with which to convey that point of concern.

We expect to explore that topic nest week. We Blues do need to improve our skills when it comes to using our words.