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Worse than Schlock

October 9, 2009

In News

The world’s leading schlock-meister, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, came out with a new book today. It’s called Worse than War. He did an interview with Der Spiegel. Here’s one of his core insights:

“Most of what people know about the world is imparted to them through speech — through language of all different kinds. One of the striking things about genocide is that the people doing the killing view large groups of people as being subhuman or dangerous. They use language to either dehumanize or demonize them.”

Martin Peretz of The New Republic hails this as “the most profound insight into language since generational grammar.”