Commentary
Misleading language is a friend to tyrants, for whom it works as a placebo against public unrest. In Russia, the charged words “war against Ukraine” are forbidden. Russians must use the more soothingly anodyne “special military operation.”
Ideologues are also masters of the weasel-word craft. In the domain of euthanasia, a concept tainted with historical horrors, activists have had to work overtime on vocabulary to avoid the word “killing.” So we have “dying with dignity,” which not only excises the means of death, but casts moral aspersion by implication on those who cannot function autonomously. Legally, we have MAiD—“medical assistance in dying”—a euphemism for euthanasia and a brazen rip-off of the palliative-care movement’s raison d’être, medical assistance to ease suffering in a natural death. Not doctors killing patients. As of 2020, MAiD accounted for 22,000 deaths in Canada.
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