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Recent coverage of Gaza and the West Bank illustrates that, while corporate media occasionally outright call for expelling Palestinians from their land, more often the way these outlets support ethnic cleansing is by declining to call it ethnic cleansing.
Y’all ever notice that arguments about how to call something steal oxygen away from what to do about it?
Genocide, ethnic cleansing, and mass-murder are just words. Calling it a pumpkin pie won’t bring back one dead child.
Reality is independent from language. Words borrow meaning, they’re not the source of it.
There’s no such thing as just words.
Language is humanity’s superpower. It’s what allows us to share ideas, pass down knowledge generationaly, specialize labor, and form communities.
Words have meaning, and intentionally avoiding words that accurately describe events is incredibly harmful. There’s a reason that when a school is bombed, they call a bunch of the 13-17yo victims “military-aged males” instead of “children.”
And language is extremely important to how we think and form our understanding of the world.
Yeah but by turning people away from the media we also isolate them from groups with similar ideals, forcing them into bubbles/echo-chambers which are easily radicalized to promote violence and insurgency.