The Term 'Ethnic Cleansing' Tacitly Endorses Genocide
Stilted jargon that brings priggish Liberals and Nazis together
The term 'ethnic cleansing' is used by mainstream journalists to endorse genocide. The term obfuscates its meaning with poetic, yet bureaucratic language. An unwanted ethnicity is a bit of dirt or filth to be removed. They are not being murdered, exiled, and systematically discriminated against—they're being cleansed. Its enthusiastic, mindless use by journalists reveals a common bias so many share, but claim to be above.
The use of the term admits buy-in to a highly judgmental (subjective) term that represents itself as descriptive (objective). It's applied as an innocent euphemism when describing acts of mass violence of undetermined scope. 'Genocide? Let's not be hasty here. I'm a journalist and accustomed to describing events objectively.' Sounds like the words of a jackass who invokes misunderstood idioms in the hope that some dopey, low-effort pleonasm will make up for shoddy analysis and moral inconsistency that only articles written by committee can possess (that btw, is an example of successful pleonasm in the service of sounding smart).
The term was coined or popularized by Slobodan Milošević (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slobodan_Milo%C5%A1evi%C4%87) in the late 1980s to describe ethnic homogenization efforts by various Yugoslavian successor factions and states—especially Bosnia and Herzegovina. He himself was tried for war crimes and genocide, but somehow his sanitary name for those acts became a favorite of journalists everywhere. When it was the Serbs receiving genocide in Kosovo, then it was 'ethnic cleansing,' because it was heroic Albanian Muslims doing the killing (don't forget the other journalistic rule: Christians are bad). When Azerbaijanis finish eliminating Armenians from their four thousand year old homeland in Nagorno-Karabakh, that's ethnic cleansing. When Ukraine, Latvia, or Lithuania do it to Russian speakers, it's not even a crime.
There are no linguistic accidents. Even corruptions find a use. In this case, we find the murder weapon in plain sight and can't believe our eyes. Maybe it's not that horrid dagger 'genocide,' it's the cheese knife 'ethnic cleansing.' Language exists from a point of view. The failure to object to using the term is evidence of tacit agreement of its premise: that there is such a thing as ethnic filth. That is to say, the journalists and copy editors who insist upon using this term are advertising their own biases and seething hatred under a false patina of objectivity.
I'm old fashioned. I still say "genocide", like I did again this morning.
https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/interrupting-genocide