By Arwa Mahdawi / The Guardian
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I would like to start a petition for journalists — and everyone else — to immediately stop using the C-word. Centrist. It is an insidious word that has degraded how we think about politics and distorted how we see the world.
Perhaps that statement sounds a little over the top. After all, being a “centrist” sounds eminently reasonable, does it not? A centrist is a moderate, right? Someone who is rational and practical, and takes the middle ground. Someone who is not extreme like those crazy ideologues on the far right or far left. A centrist, logic dictates, is really what everyone should strive to be.
However, stop for a moment and ask yourself how you would define a centrist in more specific terms. When you start spelling out what the word really means, it becomes clear that it obfuscates more than it illuminates. The word does not describe a set of ideas so much as it reinforces a system of power.
This, of course, is a feature, not a bug, of political language.
“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness,” British writer George Orwell said in his essay titled Politics and the English Language.
Orwell wrote that essay in 1946. Today, 78 years later, it feels just as relevant.
Look, for example, at the carnage in Gaza and the West Bank. Look at the statements from Israeli leaders that clearly suggest genocidal intent. Look at the tragedies that barely make a dent in the public consciousness any more.
This week, for example, an Israeli airstrike killed four-day-old twins, along with their mother and grandmother, when their father went to collect birth certificates in central Gaza.
Look at the levels of brutality that barely seem to register any more: There is video evidence of the sexual abuse of Palestinians at a notorious Israeli military prison (although the more accurate term is “torture camp”) and, even with that evidence, we know there would be no real accountability.
Look at the dead. Nearly 40,000 people in Gaza are now dead, including about 15,000 children.
When you look at the scale of devastation, it seems likely that those figures are an underestimate. Furthermore, counting the dead is excruciatingly difficult: Kids are being blown into fragments so small that their surviving relatives have to collect pieces of them in plastic bags. Then there are the tens and thousands more who are now dying from starvation or facing a looming polio epidemic.
Look at the West Bank, where Israel has published plans for new settlements, which violate international law.
Since Oct. 7 last year, the Israeli army and settlers have displaced 1,285 Palestinians and destroyed 641 structures in the West Bank, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said. Ethnic cleansing is taking place before our eyes.
Now look at how all of this is being justified. This war is not just being waged with bombs, it is being waged with “euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.” When you lay out what is happening in clear language, it is indefensible. Political language dresses all those dead and starving children up in euphemism. It obscures ethnic cleansing with vagaries.
Do not believe your eyes, political writing says. What you are seeing is far more complex than your eyes can possibly comprehend.
This narrative is so entrenched that people do not believe their eyes when it comes to Palestinians.
US actor Jamie Lee Curtis in October last year posted a photo on Instagram showing terrified-looking children peering up at the sky. She captioned the post “terror from the skies” with an Israel flag emoji. When it was pointed out that the kids were Palestinian, she deleted the post. Her eyes might have told her that those innocent children were terrified, but the narrative was more complicated.
Around the same time, Canadian singer Justin Bieber posted a photo of bombed houses with the caption “praying for Israel.” When it was pointed out that the picture was of Gaza, he deleted it and apparently stopped praying.
A picture of a small, blonde child confronting a soldier in 2022 was widely shared online, with the claim that it was a Ukrainian girl standing up to a Russian soldier. How brave, people thought. How inspiring! When it was revealed that it was actually old footage of then-10-year-old Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi, interest in the image fizzled out.
Again: When you lay out what is happening in clear language, it is indefensible. When people see what is happening with their own eyes, it is indefensible. I say that as someone who has seen what life is like for Palestinians with my own eyes, and as someone who had to run from soldiers shooting tear gas when I visited my dad’s village in the West Bank when I had just turned six. Who was interrogated by an Israel Defense Force soldier when I visited my dad’s village at 15, because I had a school chemistry book in my bag. Who knows what is like to be harassed and humiliated by heavily armed soldiers at checkpoints when you are just trying to go from one village to another.
If you experience life under occupation for even a day, it becomes starkly apparent that there is no way to defend it.
In order to defend the indefensible, politicians and political writers move away from concreteness, from clear language, and hide behind the respectableness of terms such as “centrism.”
Pro-Palestinian protesters are labelled the far-left or extremists, but continuing to unconditionally send arms to Israel and shield the country’s far-right government from accountability is considered a centrist — and therefore reasonable — position.
See this paragraph from the New York Times earlier this month, when Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro was still being considered as a possible running mate for US Vice President and Democratic Party presidential candidate Kamala Harris: “Mr Shapiro has emerged as the choice of the party’s pro-Israel donors, those with ties to the school-choice movement and business-friendly contributors in Silicon Valley. But his centrist positions that appeal to those groups are the same ones that make him the least favorite of the party’s most liberal funders.”
That paragraph is one of the rare instances where there is some explanation as to what centrism actually means.
Centrism is being pro-Israel and pro-business, no matter what, we are told. That piece came out while Shapiro was facing criticism from the left for an old essay he wrote in which he called Palestinians too “battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland of their own.” He has never properly apologized for this, nor would he ever have to, because being racist against Palestinians is a centrist position.
As Orwell wrote, atrocities can be defended, “but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties.”
If the Democratic Party were to be honest about why it is doing very little to stop the carnage in Gaza and the settlements in the West Bank, the bluntest argument would be along the lines of: “Israel is an important tool in maintaining US imperialism and Western interests. The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is expedient to those interests. Human rights law does not apply to the West.”
Of course, being pro-ethnic cleansing does not quite square with the do-gooding branding of the Democratic Party. Instead, we are bombarded with the idea that massacring children is somehow a centrist and moderate position.
“If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy,” Orwell wrote. There is very little that most of us can do to change what is happening in Gaza, but the one thing we can all do is simplify our English.
So let us begin with “centrism.” If we are to be honest about what we mean, if we are to express it in its simplest terms, we should use the word “status-quoism” instead.
The point of words like “centrism” is to prevent thought and prompt acquiescence. It is up to you whether you want to acquiesce.
Arwa Mahdawi is a US columnist for The Guardian.
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