I can't even think of a title for this

[manifesta]

ALSO EDITED TO ADD: Please read ephemere's post Patalim first. (Trigger warning for descriptions of violence.)  I just now ran across it and it is so, so much more eloquent and important. I tried to choose a quote that best encapsulates it, but you should really read the whole thing. Go on. This post will still be here when you get back.

Elizabeth Bear really, really should have gone away and thought long and hard before commenting.

Words associated with historical representations are not "mythologized."

my·thol·o·gize

To convert into myth; mythicize.

1. To construct or relate a myth.

2. To interpret or write about myths or mythology. #

The background behind "deathmarch" is real. There is nothing mythic about respecting the experiences of those who have been systematically dehumanized and slaughtered or the people who belong to one or more cultures scarred by those experiences.

While I do not equate "deathmarch" with gender, sexuality, or ethnic insults, they belong to the same spectrum of violence and reflect very similar attitudes. "Deathmarch" resides at the very end of that spectrum, but casual insults that enable some groups of people to marginalize other groups of people and wittle them down to lesser-than-human are at its start. Tell me: does choosing not to use "gay" as an insult mythologize the word? I ask because I have a feeling that people who will cheerfully defend the use of "deathmarch" would be less inclined to defend the use of less socially acceptable insults such as "gay," even  though those insults do not hold the same resonance as a term that implies large-scale murder.

Words have power. Pretending they don't have power, or shouldn't have power, only increases the power they do have--through ignorance. By using words related to marginalized groups' identities or experiences in such a casual context, we choose to erase and mythologize what those words represent.

From megwrites:

"Because what's a deathmarch to you, after all? Just a word for you to play with. Because it's not part of your history as a white citizen of the U.S. Because you don't look back and get to say "I don't know what nation any of my ancestors come from because they were rounded up, enslaved, had their names stripped, and became animals to those who bred, sold, and used them like property." Because nobody's ever rounded up your friends and neighbors and family members and shipped them like boxes or cattle to a place where they were intended to be worked to death or killed outright. Because nobody's ever come to you and said "sorry, this home you live in isn't yours, gotta go" and held a gun to you and make you walk from GEORGIA TO OKLAHOMA. Because your home, the place where you reside, has not seen active aggression from a foreign combatant in centuries. Because of course murder and torture and genocide are banal to you. They don't touch or affect you personally or culturally, so why shouldn't you play around with those words.

They don't hurt you after all. So why shouldn't you say "Soup Nazi" or "deathmarch" or any of those things. It isn't like it hurts you, and if it doesn't hurt you, it's obviously not important, is it?" #

Edited to add a few things and shuffle the post around for clarity. I apologize for any confusion.

Comments

[gehayi]

It sickens me when people ignore historical blood and pain and anguish and death, or try to pretend it never happened. It sickens me when people use "death march" to mean "edging toward completing a book I've chosen to write" rather than "forced march by a despised group of people en route to a place where they will be imprisoned indefinitely or killed outright" and "Nazi" to mean "person who is a little stricter about details than most people" rather than "MASS-MURDERING BIGOTED FUCKTARD." I hate it when people turn reality into a myth.

Because myths are safe. Myths don't bleed. Myths aren't filled with bewilderment and horror and pain. Myths don't demand that the nightmares they describe be fought or eliminated; in fact, the nightmares are necessary for the myth to be entertaining.

A good writer can see the blood and bones beneath the winding-sheet of myth, and can can put flesh on those bones and make them live again and show people what the reality was and is. But it's easier to reduce people to stories. To blunt the power of words and memory and render them and their suffering less powerful, less important, less vivid, less worth thinking about, and ultimately, less real.

And once something isn't real, you don't have to worry about it any longer. Mythologized reality reduces everything to a handful of tropes and cuts away all the messy, uncomfortable, awkward bits that might cause privileged people to speculate on the notion that privilege wasn't something they deserved. A myth says, "This is the way things are supposed to be. This is the way things are meant to be."

There are people in the world who don't like having their history bent, folded, spindled or mutilated in order to make a society or a dominant race in that society feel good about itself. That's irrelevant to a myth.

But it shouldn't be irrelevant to real people.

[manifesta]

Mythologized reality reduces everything to a handful of tropes and cuts away all the messy, uncomfortable, awkward bits that might cause privileged people to speculate on the notion that privilege wasn't something they deserved.

This, precisely. Thank you for commenting; you've pinpointed the problem very well.

It's really interesting to see Bear's language backfire on her, isn't it?

[gehayi]

Thank you and the other posters for posting about this. And thanks especially to miir for calling Bear on it.