Why Using the Right Names for Things Matters When you use the right names, you chip away at self-serving deceptions.

 

by Daniel Larison 

Posted onAugust 13, 2021

Jonathan Katz spoke with Emma Green at The Atlantic about the resistance he encountered to using accurate language while writing a piece about Haiti and possible U.S. intervention there for an unnamed publication. Katz ended up taking the piece elsewhere, and Foreign Policy would later publish it. Here is the relevant exchange:

Green: You wrote recently about an incident where you got an assignment for a national outlet – you don’t name it. You were supposed to be writing about the recent assassination of the Haitian president, Jovenel Moïse. You used the word occupation to refer to the role that the US Marines played in Haiti from 1915 to 1934. And your editor questioned you on that word.

As a caveat, I should say: I think there are a lot of well-educated Americans who don’t know much about the history of the US presence in the Caribbean. And it’s an editor’s role to add nuance and push back and ask dumb questions.

Still, that story struck me because it seemed like you were encountering a reflexive resistance to telling the story straight. The assumption is that if you’re using this kind of loaded word, one that gets tossed around in academic circles, you’re not telling it straight. You’re bringing an accusatory, ideological lens to bear on history. Why do you think that reflexive desire to shy away from naming things exists at national outlets?

Katz: That period of time was officially called “the US occupation of Haiti.” There are letters from occupation officials referring to themselves and saying, “On behalf of the American occupation, thank you for the fruit basket.” Stuff like that. That back-and-forth with this editor reflects a tendency to try to downplay the most egregious parts of America’s past. To a certain extent, we’re seeing that in domestic conversations as well with the 1619 Project and America’s history of racism.

This is how an empire has to operate. If you keep in mind all of these individual moments and string them together into a narrative, the conclusions that one can draw aren’t very friendly to self-identity and national identity – to the imperial project.

As Katz pointed out in his follow-up article describing the pushback he received, the US referred to the occupation of Haiti as an occupation to defend itself against the accurate accusations of the crudest sort of colonial domination. A hundred years ago, it suited the government to call it an occupation because that word at the time made the policy seem less brutal and exploitative than it really was. It was, as Katz notes, a “euphemism.” If it happened today, it would probably be called a stabilization mission or a humanitarian intervention to avoid too much scrutiny.

That resistance to calling an occupation by the correct term is a familiar one. Even when it involves a policy from decades ago, there is a strong desire to deny that the US did things like that to other countries. Americans love to tell ourselves that this is something that other countries do, and that we are different. After all, we’re the benevolent hegemon, or so the hegemonists would have us believe. Marilyn Young described this mentality in one of the essays published in the new collection, Making the Forever War:

The United States has not been an aggressor, because, by definition, it does not commit aggression. The hostility of others to the United States cannot, again by definition, be a response to American actions, because the United States does not invite hostility but only reacts to it. What the United States claims it intends, rather than what it does, should persuade any fair-minded observer of the righteousness of its policies.

Read the rest of the article at SubStack

Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

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