Naming the calamity

In the human mind things don’t fully exist until they are given a name. The murder of America — more precisely of America as an idea and an ideal — that has been happening gradually over the past ten years, and then suddenly over the past few weeks, doesn’t have a name yet.

I was looking at how the murder of European Jewry by the Nazis got its name(s). As early as 1934, Hebrew-speaking Jewish observers translated Chaim Weizmann’s use of the German word “Katastrophe” to describe Hitler’s rise into the biblical word “Shoah,” which apparently is most closely approximated in English by “calamity.” This became the official name of the thing in Israel, while in the English-speaking world, and in many other languages, the term “the Holocaust” became standard usage. I’ve always found that term jarring, as have others who have spoken to the matter with much more knowledge and authority:

Some people find the use of “holocaust” for the WWII-period Nazi extermination of Jews unacceptable, on account of the theological and historical nature of the word “holocaust”.The American historian Walter Laqueur (whose parents were murdered in the Holocaust) has argued that the term “Holocaust” is a “singularly inappropriate” term for the genocide of the Jews as it implies a “burnt offering” to God. Laqueur wrote, “It was not the intention of the Nazis to make a sacrifice of this kind and the position of the Jews was not that of a ritual victim.”

“Catastrophe” is itself a curious word, as its original meaning in Greek and Latin seems to be more along the lines of “sudden turn” or “denouement” — a technical usage that still persists in narratology it seems — but by the 18th century had come to have its modern meaning of [sudden] calamity or disaster.

The ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians is referred to by Arab speakers as the “Nakba,” an Arab word which is usually rendered in English as “catastrophe.”

Is it appropriate or useful to compare the murder of the idea or ideal of a nation to mass murder, genocide, and ethnic cleansing? This is not a rhetorical question. I’m asking it because I feel viscerally that something truly catastrophic is happening in and to this country, and what that something is doesn’t have a name, yet.