The Language in Nazi Germany

I am a huge fan of Stephen Fry.  In my mind, he is one of the smartest men to walk the planet and his grasp on the English language is enviable.  I could listen to him speak all day long and generally when I begin watching videos of him, I can't stop. Fortunately, it actually worked out for me last night while I was deciding what to write about.  The title of the video was quite misleading in a sense because I believed he was going to be talking about the German language specifically, at first.  But it was much more than that. 

Fry was discussing how we haphazardly throw around derogatory terms about others without realizing that we may eventually believe in our harsh words.  The Jewish persecution began with language.  By calling Jewish people rats or vermin on the radio everyday for weeks on end, listeners began to believe that they were sub-human.  I wonder just how often this occurs within our media today without people even realizing it.  Rhetoric can be used in a multitude of ways but it is just about impossible to think that a terrible act, such as the Holocaust, could have been started simply by language.  

It is so easy to look back at World War II and blame it entirely on the Nazis but as I learned in the video, it was not the Nazis who did it but rather humankind.  We can’t make brash judgments on groups of people because we are them as well.  Hearing about the book that was built out of a Nazi’s letters home reinforced the fact that they were humans no matter how inhumane and disgusting their actions were.  We are, as Fry said, the only species that does this.

Stephen Fry states, “It is important to remember that it is language that guarantees our freedom,” but in this case it also took away so many lives and freedoms.  We have to be careful and be aware of how we state our opinions and the word choices that we make. The last thing he says is, “We have to be alert to it and think about it,” so nothing as grotesque as the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide.