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"Clean words can mask dirty deeds," wrote William Safire in a 1993 column on the term "ethnic cleansing." One year earlier, "ethnic cleansing" had entered the dictionary as "the expulsion, imprisonment, or killing of ethnic minorities by a dominant majority group." Due to its roots in the violence in the former Yugoslavia, the "killing" portion of the definition has overwhelmed the "expulsion" part, while the sense of mass imprisonment never seemed to materialize.

So when Tony Campolo told reporters earlier this month that "evangelical Zionists" favor "ethnic cleansing" of the Palestinians from Israel, the dictionary may have given him meager support, but he was using a loaded term.

"Some evangelicals have gotten caught up in the theology that before Christ can return, the Holy Land must belong to the Jews," Campolo told the Birmingham News on June 7. "They're really advocating ethnic cleansing. … It's the extremist view that favors taking more and more land away from the Palestinians."

Campolo has been out of the country and unavailable for comment. But his remarks to the News suggest he was using the "expulsion" sense of "ethnic cleansing" and not accusing evangelicals of advocating the mass murder of Palestinians. What he meant was probably closer to the phrase "ethnic purity," which got Jimmy Carter in trouble during the 1976 Democratic primaries. When asked about federally funded public housing projects in historically Polish and Italian neighborhoods, Carter said such neighborhoods should be able to "maintain their ethnic purity." (Carter had to apologize, but President Gerald Ford got it right when asked about the controversy: "Ethnic heritage is a great treasure," he said. "Heritage" is to be celebrated; "purity" is racist.)

As with Carter's comments, Campolo's accusation was really about real estate racism—one group's desire to be geographically separate from another group. The problem with "ethnic cleansing" is the phrase's ominous overtones that imply expulsion is being achieved or at least attempted by mass murder, as it was in the former Yugoslavia.

Those overtones did not just start reverberating in the early 1990s. The Nazis used the word "cleansing" to describe their initial campaigns to purge Jews from German towns in the 1930s, though they eventually used Endlosung to describe the concentration camps. Endlosung was translated into English as "final solution"—a bureaucratic euphemism that evokes shudders for its grim sense of efficiency. Today, "ethnic cleansing" almost sounds like "final solution" as a sanitized code word for chilling deeds. It's almost scarier to not say "murder" when you mean "murder."

The Nazis left other marks on our vocabulary for mass murder. Before the word Holocaust (Greek for "burnt whole") was first applied to the concentration camps in the mid-1960s, U.S. war advisor Raphael Lemkin published a book in 1944 that introduced the term "genocide," which he constructed from the Greek "genos" (race) and the Latin "cide" (kill), defining it as "the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group" (a recent variant is "democide"). In 1948, the United Nations convened a Convention for the Prevention and the Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Why get so technical with words that all essentially mean mass murder? Isn't the act horrific enough without haggling over what to call it? The first answer is that language is how we make sense of senselessness. Attaching a term to something awful is a way of absorbing what happened.

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June (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48