Second opinion IT is a familiar notion that euphemism is
the handmaiden of evil. The Nazis called the killing of millions 'special treatment' (I am reliably told that one of British Airways' less successful advertising cam- paigns in Germany also promised its pas- sengers 'special treatment'). The buses in which mental patients were taken from asylums to gas chambers were called 'community transport'. During the Armenian genocide in 1915, the Turks used words such as 'relocation' for the removal of victims to their certain and preplanned death; and the Japanese called the human beings upon whom they conducted their odious bacteriologi- cal experiments during the war 'logs'. The interahamwe of the recent Rwandan genocide called their Tutsi victims 'cock- roaches'. No doubt hundreds of exam- ples of such linguistic obfuscation in the service of Satan could be found.
People often ask how evil on so large a scale could come about. It surprises them, because they subscribe to the romantic notion that ordinary people are decent and reasonable: they are betrayed or led astray by their leaders.
I don't agree. The evil that I see and hear about, day in, day out, may be on a small scale by comparison with the great crimes of the century, but that is only because the reach and authority over others of the people I encounter is limit- ed. Whatever constitutes the ordinari- ness of ordinary people, it is not their goodness.
They use euphemisms and circumlo- cutions as adeptly as any vile govern- ment. Take the example of Sarah Thornton, the woman who stabbed her husband to death while he lay drunk upon a couch. Their relationship had, by all accounts, been a stormy one: 'Malcolm and me', she said, 'were a dis- aster waiting to happen.'
A disaster waiting to happen! What is implied here is that the disaster existed independently of the voluntary conduct of the participants in it, a common tech- nique of self-exculpation. Only last week a patient explained to me how he had come to break his wife's jaw: 'When I got home, doctor, there was a row going on.'
'Between whom?' I asked.
'Well, me and me missis.' The row, then, had a being all its own, and imposed itself upon two helpless and unsuspecting people.
By their circumlocutions shall ye know them! I asked a man last week whether he had ever tried to kill himself, by tak- ing an overdose, for example.
'It has been known to be done,' he replied, as if he were talking of a distant Stone Age tribe of peculiar habits rather than of himself.
Last week, I made a special collection of verbal evasions. A man came to me in distress because his wife had left him and he claimed to have no knowledge why. 'Were you possessive and jealous?' / asked tentatively.
'There was some jealousy there', be replied. Where? On the ceiling, under the bed, or in his heart, perhaps? And another patient complained of a distressing symptom. 'Doctor, I've been getting a lot of these outbursts.'
He meant that he hit his wife as other men at a certain stage in life get angina attacks.
Theodore Dalrymple
Previous page
