The name of this is not genocide, okay? – 03/06/2024 – Sérgio Rodrigues

You need to be careful with your words, use them as accurately as possible. The other day, in the Rio neighborhood of Gávea, I witnessed a moving scene. A thin, ragged boy of five or six asked a well-dressed lady who was leaving the supermarket full of bags and said: “Will you buy me a snack, auntie? I haven’t eaten for two days.”

He didn’t earn money to eat, but something even more valuable, a lesson that will stay with him for the rest of his life – perhaps a short measure of time, patience. “Pay me, no! You don’t start a sentence with an unstressed oblique pronoun”, replied the woman, before continuing on her straight and tonic path.

Another example of sloppy use of language that the woman could point to: calling what is happening in Gaza a genocide. It seems that this goes against, in addition to many sensitivities and guidance from the White House, also the legal definition of the word. But there are alternatives.

One could label Israel’s methodical massacre of Palestinian civilians a “bloodbath”, for example. It is difficult to make reservations about such a precise expression to name the extermination of women, babies, children, teenagers and the elderly in their homes, hospitals and refugee camps, accompanied by the veto of all attempts at humanitarian aid.

An advantage of “bloodbath” is that, as there is no sign of blood when human beings are asphyxiated in gas chambers, any parallels with the Holocaust are ruled out immediately, preventing the speaker from committing the rhetorical crime that made the Brazilian president declared “persona non grata” by the morally unassailable Israeli government.

It is true that the expression “bloodbath” may echo, in the minds of those who hear or read it, other massacres of defenseless populations, such as those that victimized the Armenians in the First World War and the Tutsis of Rwanda in the 1990s. On occasions there was a lot of blood, as in Gaza. The problem is that in this way the unwanted — and stubborn — word “genocide” would return to the scene. On second thought, it’s better to look for another solution.

Who knows, maybe the old carnage will do the trick? Or massacre, hecatomb, butcher shop? Ethnic cleansing is best avoided, no matter how much noun and adjective seem to fit together and with reality, but the vocabulary of inhumanity and voluptuous slaughter is far from limited.

Razia, carnage, slaughter – there are many lexical options available to the speaker who has found it difficult to carry on with his normal life while watching on his cell phone screen, almost in real time, innocent lives are slaughtered in droves, day after day, in front of a humanity apathetic or powerless.

Some discomfort is natural: we had never experienced exactly this after we interconnected. And it is clear that decent people do not want to be accused of anti-Semitism – a word that has been used with obscene imprecision in demands for unconditional moral surrender, as if criticizing the Israeli government was equivalent to defending the indefensible terrorism of Hamas.

It’s just that they don’t think it’s right, these people attached to old humanist values, that the Palestinian people are treated like a colony of termites by a far-right supremacist government while we watch everything in silence, hostages to Biden, Netanyahu and other children of a mare, or measuring words like stutterers in front of Madame da Gávea who points at us her finger made of expired nail polish and teaches us the acceptable way to use words.

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