George Orwell’s Big Brother himself would be proud of the brutal euphemisms dreamed up to describe the separation of migrants’ children from their families and their subsequent incarceration at the US-Mexico border. The latest rhetorical ploy is that young children are being taken to “tender age” shelters. The adjective “tender” here officially describes the youngsters’ age, but it implies that the policy is itself an example of official tenderness. This idea is reinforced by the use of “shelter”, as though the children are being protected from a storm or bombing raid, whereas they have in fact been deprived of the shelter of their parents.
What do you do to children of a “tender” age? Why, you put them in cages, of course. But they must not be called cages, lest people realise that you think of these humans as little more than feral dogs. Instead, Fox News host Steve Doocy suggested, the authorities had simply improvised a bit of hipster interior design, building “walls out of chain-link fences”. This is reminiscent of the contest over what Israel called a “fence” built well into the occupied territories. Since much of it was a concrete wall, the opposition preferred to call it a “wall”. A room whose walls are built out of chain-link fencing is a cage.
What, meanwhile, should we call all the places in which the US is holding children near its southern border? “Internment camps” reminds some embarrassingly of the ignoble treatment of Japanese people during the second world war, while “concentration camps” seems to others, well, a bit too Nazi. (It was in fact the British who invented the term “concentration camp”, as a euphemism, during the Boer war.) The official term remains “detention centres”, as though the children have just been a bit naughty and are required to stay for an hour after school. That there can be such a relentless blizzard of dishonest unspeak to describe the kidnapping and imprisonment of children in 21st-century America might seem astonishing – but, as we are learning, in Trump’s world anything is possible.
