Stalin was born in Georgia.
I was out this morning, just got back to my keyboard so was unable to address your concerns. I see the issue has been ably explained by @Miller and the community.
You asked why a mod note and not a Warning, and it’s because to me, it was obvious you weren’t deliberately intending to use the term in the derogatory manner it conveys. The meanings of words change, take on importance/lose importance at different points in time. We must all adapt.
I can’t tell you how heartbroken I was when people became horrified at my use of the term, ‘niggardly’. C’est la vie.
Fair enough. I have calmed down a lot since I started this thread…but have to say, I’m glad I did as I wasn’t aware that the term was so loaded. No, I wasn’t intentionally being racist or derogatory, I was simply trying to convey a group colonizing an area that had been ethnically cleansed, and that was the term that popped into my head.
At any rate, thank you for the explanation and also for the opportunity to learn some stuff I didn’t know before.
Yes, I was thinking of (IIRC) Khrushchev, not Stalin. Sorry about that.
The word ‘infested’ immediately jumped out at me, even before the mod intervention.
It’s not an acceptable term when applied to human beings. It has very strong connotations of racism and Nazi ideology.
You’ve probably never seen the Nazi propaganda movie Der Ewige Jude, or other Nazi propaganda material.
From the Philadelphia Holocaust Memorial Plaza:
Likening people to vermin (rats)
Why does racist imagery often show people of certain backgrounds as animals? Rats make us think of disease, dirt and infestation, and have been used to represent Jews in antisemitic imagery throughout history into the present. Take a look at this is propaganda poster from the 1940s when the Nazis occupied Denmark. The text reads “Rats. Destroy them.”
In a Nazi propaganda film, the Eternal Jew the occupants of a Jewish ghetto are shown in tight quarters likened to rats swarming in a sewer. The statement “Destroy them” is particularly vile due to the common use of Zyklon B to eradicate rats as well as its use in the Nazi death camp’s gas chambers.
NB: The Nazis regarded Slavic people (like Russians and Ukrainians) as subhuman vermin as well as Jews.
The concept of the Slavs in particular being Untermenschen served the Nazis’ political goals; it was used to justify their expansionist policy and especially their aggression against Poland and the Soviet Union in order to achieve Lebensraum, particularly in Ukraine.
Early plans of the German Reich (summarized as Generalplan Ost) envisioned the ethnic cleansing and elimination of no fewer than 50 million people, who were not considered fit for Germanization, from territories it wanted to conquer in Europe; Ukraine’s chernozem (“black earth”) soil was considered a particularly desirable zone for colonization by the Herrenvolk.
Is it gross and offensive only in this context? If the status were reversed, would it be more acceptable?
For example: Can we say that the U.S. Congress is infested with white supremacists?
That would also be unacceptable, in my opinion.
I would just like to comment that I appreciate your saying that you will try to avoid using the term that way in the future. It’s a mark of maturity to make a statement like this and to put it into practice.
The good things seem to get lost amidst all of the back-and-forth, so I thought it needed to be acknowledged.
I ask this question, because, as a general matter, objecting to this usage would be inconsistent with how the term has been used, and received, by the board, going back many years. A few recent examples follow; there are many more.
Posts in which Trump and his far-right loyalists are described as infesting various groups and institutions:
Posts referring to the presence of disruptive people in online fora as infestations:
Political operators of various stripes constitute an infestation:
Drug-dealing cartels infest a country:
And so on, and so on.
All of these posts are in Great Debates and Politics & Elections, not the Pit. All of these posts use the infestation imagery to refer to actual people, rather than concepts (“crime-infested”) or inanimate objects (“gun-infested”). As far as I can tell, not one of these instances attracted any attention or resulted in any sort of objection; all passed without comment.
The point here is not to call attention to these posts and expose these posters to censure under the terms established in this thread. No — the point is to observe that usage of the “infestation” concept has been non-controversial on this board when there is a general consensus that the phenomenon being so described constitutes a harmful invasion, especially by representatives of an established center of power against an oppressed minority.
For example: I would hope nobody on this board disputes the premise that the long-standing and ongoing infiltration of law enforcement by violent race-motivated terrorists is a bad thing. Which is why the following usage does not produce a single batted eye.
The “infestation” concept is certainly powerful, in how it connotes the penetration, infection, and/or destruction of an established entity by a corrupting outside force. As has been noted by prior posts up to this point in the thread, there is a well-known application of the concept which reflects a hateful and harmful dehumanization and suppression of the unwanted influence of untrusted minorities by suspicious majorities and their delegated authorities. This, clearly, is negative — racist, supremacist, etc. — and is rightfully condemned and should not be tolerated in respectful discussion.
But this is not the only possible context, as illustrated by the litany of counterexamples above. Authoritarian zealots are not, in any universe, an oppressed ethnic group or other victimized minority, and there may be legitimate rhetorical value in the perception and labeling of their nefarious shenanigans as an infestation.
From this perspective, I don’t think it’s clear at all that @XT committed an unambiguous infraction in his use of the word, as implied by the unanimous tenor of this thread. Ukraine is not a monolith of power imposing their will on their helpless Russian neighbor; and the Russians moving into Ukraine and setting up camp are not innocent pilgrims with motivations unconnected to the larger Russian political agenda. To describe these Russians as “infesting” Ukraine may be questionable, in that it treads closer to the gray center between the heretofore uncontroversial connotation illustrated by the examples above and the nasty, hateful usage connected with the subjugation of persecuted minorities. But it does not, I believe, fall all the way to that side of the continuum, and the pile-on here, in my opinion, was unwarranted.
Now — if it is the consensus of the board’s moderators, or of the membership generally, that any such usage of the word must be avoided, because (say) the previously useful and acceptable sense of the term is no longer allowed because it opens the door for malicious actors to justify deployment of the word in its more loathsome context, that seems fine to me. It may be debatable, but there’s a rational basis for it.
But it will be new. It was not previously a rule, as shown above. And any suggestion that it has always been a rule is not accurate.
I got a notification about this post because I was quoted in it.
You seem to have gone to a lot of trouble to find occurrences of the word “infested” in previous posts, but I think you’re entirely missing the point. Please see @Miller’s first response in this thread (emphasis mine):
You’re not clear on when talking about an ethnic group as if they were insects “became” racist and dehumanizing?
Not a single one of your quoted examples uses that word in reference to any racial or ethnic group. And that’s a pretty damned important distinction.
I disagree, on two fronts. First, the MAGA minions, as advocates of white supremacy, certainly constitute an ethnically-specific subgroup. Examples abound of their activities being described as infestations, with no pushback. And second, it’s entirely arguable whether “Russian” in the context of the original discussion refers to an identifiable ethnic categorization, or better reflects an underlying political and/or nationalistic agenda.
My point here is simply to note that the historical usage of the term on this board has been much, much squishier than the black-and-white pile-on in this thread would suggest.
You called this thread a pile-on twice now, but there isn’t any. Everyone explained the problem with the wording calmly, some with cites of historical precedent, and I think nobody here thinks that @XT really had racist intentions, but that it was an honest mistake out of ignorance, which @XT conceded and promised to avoid that wording in the future, which is a rational and noble reaction. You don’t see many people admitting their own faults very often on this board.
White supremacists are vermin. Nazis are vermin. Rapists are vermin. None of those are ethnic or racist statements. Maybe they’re dehumanizing, but I don’t really think it’s wrong to rhetorically dehumanize the scum of the earth.
Russians are not vermin.
I think the word is fine when referring to those who choose to hold repugnant beliefs and exhibit hatred for others. But when it refers to people because of race, religion, color, nationality, or sexual preference then it becomes quite offensive.
Are you asking me as the representative of all things linguistic? The representative of the SDMB? As is always the case, acceptable language is based entirely upon context and community.
As pointed out above, calling white supremacists insects would indeed be insulting and dehumanizing. In this particular community I doubt many people would notice or take offense. My brain would probably say, “Nazis are insects, that checks out” and gloss right over it. Objectively I would agree that a best practice for dismantling this kind of language would be to avoid calling any humans insects.
Final thought: pointing out past instances of a Bad Thing as an argument against doing less of that Bad Thing is exactly how injustices become systemic injustices. “This is the way it’s always been” has never been a good argument for reinforcing a practice, no matter what Tevye says.
This. This totally.
Context matters. It’s the reason why it’s considered disrespectful to call a person “stupid” if they are mentally impaired, or if a 2-year-old child misspeaks, or a person misunderstands something that wasn’t in their native language. But people won’t bat an eye if someone gets drunk and drives head-on into a school bus and is called stupid.
It’s about context, and in this case the context is that it is not acceptable to say that a race or ethnic group is “infesting” something, because it is a historically loaded term in that context.
And I’ll “pile on” here in saying that it seems clear XT did not mean it as an insult and handled things extremely well in this thread.
They may be to Ukrainians, just as Trumpists are to many on this board. If using the word infested when referring to people is considered bad on the board, it should always be bad. Having to figure out which group of people it’s acceptable to refer to that way is a bad rule. If you want to ban the use of infest, just do it across the board. It’s just silly to allow some people to be referred to as vermin but others are off limits. Strange how the groups that are allowed to be referred to as infesting something happen to be the same groups that are disliked by the users on this board.
The post by Cervaise points out another problem with moderating in Great Debates. Why are so many insults allowed at all in that forum? Debates and arguments are two different things and debates generally don’t devolve into arguments and name calling. That’s specifically why debates have moderators.
Tightening up the moderation in GD to make them more like an actual debate would eliminate this problem at the same time. It may even encourage more people to participate in the forum. I know giving Politics and Covid their own forums took a lot of posts out of GD, but it seems it’s to have the lowest new topics count on the board. Often the threads end up being a couple people arguing past each other over and over while everyone else just moves on.
Aren’t these particular Russians vermin, though? I honestly don’t know; the OP is suggesting that Russia ethnically cleansed a portion of the Ukraine and sent in settlers to replace them. Based on those statements alone, I’d support calling them vermin, just as much as I’d call squatters in the West Bank. (I don’t know the actual situation there, thus “based on OP’s statements alone” the label “vermin” and the verb “infested” seem perfectly descriptive of subhuman, i.e., less than human, i.e., dehumanized actions. No idea where “racism” surfaces in that, though.)
Just so you know, I never used the word ‘vermin’ wrt Russians or anyone else…that was basically what people associated with my use of the term ‘infested’. I can see the correlation, but that wasn’t the association I was making in my own mind when I used the term. I don’t think the Russian colonists, many of who were forced to colonize a depopulated Ukraine were vermin. If I was going to use that term (which I wouldn’t at this point since all of this seems to trigger a lot of ill will), it would be for the Soviet Communists who both perpetrated ethnic cleansing and forced colonization.
See above
~Max