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Possibly The most surprising thing I have discovered on the internet is the number of people who will unironically refer to others as “degenerates” without expecting anyone reading this to immediately assume that they are a straight-up fascist
A number of people are reblogging this saying how scary it is that they might unknowingly echo this kind of rhetoric because it’s filtered into everyday speech, and like. Yeah, that kind of mostly-innocent mistake is to some extent an inevitable feature of language and the way it passes from person to person, and yeah it can be anxiety-inducing and occasionally mortifying and I do sympathize.
That said.
You potentially being mortified because you accidentally said a nazi word is really beside the point of this post? In fact – and I suggest this as gently as possible – it’s a somewhat self-centered response, imho? I wasn’t blogging about how disturbing it is to say something embarrassing, I was blogging about how disturbing it is to see fascist ideology getting mainstreamed.
And it is the *ideology* that I find concerning, more than simply the language. Yeah “degenerates” is an incredibly loaded word, and people are well within their rights to direct a hard side-eye (at the least) toward anyone using it. But lbr, even if you could somehow wave a magic wand and erase the historical context that would still be a pretty vicious thing to call someone. Implying or outright stating that someone is subhuman is fascist rhetoric even absent specific fascist terminology. People are in the notes responding with things like “it’s not just a synonym for freaks,” and okay, but……hot take, you shouldn’t be calling anyone a freak either! If you scrub “degenerate” out of your vocabulary but replace it with “freak” used in exactly the same way – other, lesser, outside the boundaries of “”“normal”“” and thus automatically loathsome and/or dangerous – that’s not better! If someone is doing bad things, say that. Don’t use rhetoric that positions “normal” as “moral.” In the first place it’s shady as hell (“normal” is a subjective judgment frequently dictated by whoever has the most social power) and in the second place it’s not even accurate, plenty of horrible behavior is perfectly normal and societally acceptable.
Anyway I’m sorry if I’m heated about this but the TL;DR is that yeah hearing that word makes every hair on the back of my neck stand up but I’m not actually here to play word cop, I’m here to (1) point out that fascist language filtering into common usage suggests some concerning things about the accompanying fascist ideas, and (2) ask anyone with good intentions to do a little bit of thoughtful self-interrogation about why they feel that is a remotely acceptable way to refer to human beings.
Ok can we all keep our shirts on and read a dictionary? The word is from the 1500s and has several uses outside of nouns. As a noun, it’s used to refer to those whose behavior doesn’t adhere to the social contract. There is a more recent context of using it to describe fascists, for the reason above, but it doesn’t necessarily still mean that years after the Fox News controversy machine spun it up. Dictionaries are our friends!
You should read the dictionary more carefully. From your link:
(adj) Having declined or become less specialized (as in nature, character, structure, or function) from an ancestral or former state; having sunk to a condition below that which is normal to a type; having sunk to a lower and usually corrupt and vicious state.
(verb) to pass from a higher to a lower type or condition; to sink into a low intellectual or moral state; to decline in quality; to decline from a condition or from the standards of a species, race, or breed.
(noun) one degraded from the normal moral standard; a sexual pervert; one showing signs of reversion to an earlier culture stage.
No, fascists did not coin the term. But they have historically really liked slinging it around (and still do currently), because it comes weighted with a lot of judgments about normal vs abnormal, pure vs impure, and when it comes to insults that mesh really neatly with fascist ideology it’s hard to beat “you’ve declined from your noble ancestral state to a corrupt/inferior/primitive form of person (or less-than-person).” That usage of the word by fascists is also in no way “more recent” or purely connected to “the Fox News controversy machine.” The Holocaust Memorial Museum has an entry for it in their online glossary of terms and symbols. The Nazis staged an infamous exhibition of “”“degenerate art”“” in 1937, and in Germany that phrase or anything like it is still incredibly loaded.
Furthermore, words have connotations as well as denotations. Dog whistles are a thing. I’m not going to post screenshots because I don’t really see the point in subjecting my mutuals to it, but if you go on Twitter and search “degenerate” basically every other post that pops up is virulent frothing-at-the-mouth transphobia. I can’t recommend it as light reading, but if you look up alt-right manifestos or incel forums (or even just peruse the angrier comments on a right-leaning news site) you will also find this word getting throw around a hell of a lot. Part of the reason I personally have an immediate flinch response to it is that when I was first finding my way around the web as a kid, “degenerate” was part of the internet vernacular of Stormfront types the way that Pepe memes are popular with alt-right types today.
When I Google the word and do a news search, one of the more recent (3/27/23) articles is about some guy in Kansas who was driving around with a “14 Words By David Lane” decal on his work truck (and who was charged for racially-motivated murder in 2014, incidentally), and when asked for comment responded “I don’t care what a bunch of degenerates, Marxists and pedophiles have to say about my work.”
TL;DR It is objectively true that if you go around calling people you don’t like degenerates then people familiar with fascist rhetoric are probably going to side-eye you – and they have abundant good reasons for doing so.
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