If there’s something characterising the contemporary social speech -leadered by journalists and politicians of every kind, imbued in turn by the global pensée unique– that’s, rather than its populism and lack of character, the sweetened language in which its ideas come wrapped: I’m talking about that softened vocabulary of euphemisms and slynesses that shuns, at all costs, calling things by their name, lest reality makes sore the thin skin of our mealymouthedness.
Among the uncoutable, almost infinite examples, these days stands out-for its sudden spreading-the word ‘migrants’, with which we must call the immigrants from now on-as the factories where the communication engineering is hatched have decided. Migrants, how harmless it sounds! The term seems to wash off, like baptismal water, their illegal condition, seems to endorse their pureness, to belie their resolve of settling down in Europe and, in short, to divest the migration process of any detrimental or burdensome aspect for our own wellfare. And, granted, our exquisite sensitivity – actually a guilt complex of which we can’t, or even don’t want to heal – has swallowed the switch in one go, without batting an eyelid, and thus, in the record time of one day – just one day, reader! – the word immigrant has already been eradicated – not to say censored – from our vocabulary.
As usual, the semantic magic has worked; and that’s because in this trained Europe, whose true critical spirits are endangered species, we can’t realize how we’re being sneaked the goals, nor how with every new of these goals they’re shaping -not to say manipulating- our opinion, taking us one step further away from anything resembling a free thinking.
