<snip>
"Refugee" connotes (denotes?) people seeking refuge from another country.
<snip>
Whilst diminishment through this sort of term has a long, dishonourable
tradition, something else may be happening here: on the one hands claims
upon Great Events In History to heroicise the disaster (as with September
11) into some sort of sublime; on the other, a redrawing of the imaginative
boundaries to put what has actually happened a little beyond the pale.
So I'm not surprised people are angry. Some of the public emotion (at least
as reported) has seemed to me not empathetic so much as mawkish, a kind of
sentimentality from which those involved are excluded.
Not, I trust, too provocative. (I'm going offline for about two weeks, so
shan't be able to respond.)
CW
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'To rob a man of his language in the name of language is the first step in
all legal murders' (Barthes)
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