What Cancel Culture Language and the Language of the Third Reich Have in Common

Graham Hill
MA (Hons) LLB (Hons)

Victor Klemperer was a Jewish Professor of Literature at a Dresden University in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1947, having survived the Nazi regime, he published a book titled Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen (The Language of the Third Reich: A Philologist’s Notebook.). The book recorded how language and vocabulary came into being during the Reich and how the meaning of words changed.

Words and their new meanings were introduced into everyday vocabulary mainly by the use of repetition and by news media spin (which the Nazi party controlled) and by dressing up concepts in the camouflage of neutral “science.” Buzz words, in particular, were inserted into everyday speech without their meaning being challenged.

In the modern-day language of protest the word “Systemic” is a Buzzword. As an adjective, it is added to nouns (oppression, sexism)  carrying with it a ‘data packet’ of social science-techno speak to add credibility. In a recent interview, Professor Thomas Sowell has said that “systemic racism” as a concept “has no meaning that can be specified and tested in the way that one tests hypotheses.”  He added that it reminds him of propaganda. It has gained traction by being regularly repeated. It remains an asserted opinion not a truth but it is presented as truth.

Klemperer gave an example of how to change the meaning of a word by the use of euphemism. When setbacks were reported, “Valliant” for example was used in the phrase, “Our troops are valiantly fighting..”

Examples of newly coined words were entjuden (“to de-Jew”) and after 1945 there was Entnazifizierung (“denazification”).

The prefix ent- in German, our de-,  Klemperer saw that:

“New demands led the language of the Third Reich to stimulate an increase in the use of the dissociating prefix ent- {de-} (though in each case it remains open to question whether we are dealing with completely new creations or the adoption by the common language of terms already familiar in specialist circles.”  

LTI page 14

Presently, we are seeing ‘disassociating’ in the use of the  “de” prefix in the following:  “defund” (the Police), “decentre whiteness” (as used by the NZ School of Music which Lindsay Perigo has noted) and the now visceral favourite of “immature malcontents”,  “decolonise” — history, International Relations studies, Literature, Art and so on. Another ‘de’ word is the obvious “deconstruction”. We used to say analyse.

The corollary of decolonisation is colonisation and that appears to be by Neo-Marxism and socialism. Language use belies the ‘signifier’ of a colonising enterprise, and what is surprising is its origins are European from National Socialism. Its aim and endpoint is the disassociating of people: entjuden, now ent-us, you, we, them me or anybody not liked.

In the Roman Republic that process was known as proscriptio — proscription — which included public identification, official condemnation, being declared an enemy of society, confiscation of property, outlawing (the stripping of rights) and banishment. Cancel Culture writ large in other words.

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