"This is not retribution. This is fumigation."

More Dehumanizing Rhetoric from the MAGAsphere.

In a recent interview on Fox, senator Ashley B. Moody (R-Florida), who is also a member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, insisted that the FBI investigations into former agency directors James Comey and James Brennan “is not retribution. This is fumigation. You have had radicals roaming in these institutions like termites." She also asserted that Trump is “fumigating” the FBI and other institutions to “bring back integrity and accountability.”

The extraordinary violence of her reference to fumigation should not go unnoticed.

In framing the matter in this manner, Moody was only putting her own stamp on the words of her leader, Donald Trump, who wrote on Veterans Day, 2023:

In honor of our great Veterans on Veteran’s Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream. The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave, than the threat from within. Despite the hatred and anger of the Radical Left Lunatics who want to destroy our Country, we will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

The representation of others as destructive insects is a time-honored dehumanizing trope. Heinrich Himmler, the man at the helm of Hitler’s SS, who was in charge of the vast network of German concentration camps and the extermination camps in Poland, said in a 1943 speech:

Anti-Semitism is exactly the same as delousing. Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology. It is a matter of cleanliness. In just the same way, antisemitism, for us, has not been a question of ideology, but a matter of cleanliness, which now will soon have been dealt with. We shall soon be deloused. We have only 20,000 lice left, and then the matter is finished within the whole of Germany.

Illustration of the Jewish people as Ungeziefer, from Der Stürmer

Nazi propagandists often represented Jews as insects, spiders, and worms. But they were rarely as specific as Moody. They mostly used the more general term “Ungeziefer,” which is typically translated as “vermin.”

The Holocaust began with bullets. Lots of bullets. But lining up Jewish men, women, and children along the edge of a pit and dispatching them with a bullet to the back of the head proved to be too stressful for the members of the Nazi killing squads, many of whom were traumatized by the act.

After experimenting with methods such as using explosives and carbon monoxide vans in their quest for more “humane” methods of killing, the Nazis settled on the use of Zyklon B in gas chambers—a technique that comported very well with Himmler’s statement about delousing, because Zyklon B is a cyanide-based insecticide. The gas chambers of Treblinka were ostensibly cites of fumigation.

Used Zyklon B canisters

Representing dehumanized people as termites seems to be relatively recent. It’s been sprinkled around political discourse for a couple of decades. Moody has used this language previously, and in 2018 Louis Farrakhan proclaimed on Twittter, “I'm not an anti-Semite. I’m anti-Termite.” Despite claims from his defenders, this is blatantly dehumanizing. He rhymed “termite” with “semite,” and capitalized “Termite,” to match “Semite” (anyway, what does it mean to be anti-termite?). Furthermore, individual termites are not a problem. To exterminate termites you’ve to get rid of the whole colony rather than just a few members of it. Fumigation is thus an image of mass violence. It’s not just Comey and Brennan that the regime is after. It’s all of their allies and sympathizers too.

“Termite” is a good choice for those who wish to dehumanize others. Termites are invisible. They are insidious. They can destroy your home without you suspecting that anything is amiss. So, they are an apposite image for the “enemy within”—a notion beloved by Nazis, MAGAites, and fascists the world over.

Reading this essay, you might have the impression that dehumanizing others as insects is mostly limited to Nazis and MAGA zealots like Moody. But that would be a big mistake. Below is just one chilling example.

The image and text above are from Leatherneck magazine, a US Marine Corps publication. Read it carefully, then consider its context. This piece was published in March, 1945. That same month, US warplanes dropped 2,000 tons of incendiary bombs on Tokyo, where at least 100,000 civilians lost their lives. The stench of burning flesh was so intense that fighter pilots flying over the city had to reach for their oxygen masks. Then, over the next five months, half a million or more Japanese men, women and children were, in the words of the US Air Force General Curtis LeMay, “scorched and boiled and baked to death” in the firebombing of 67 Japanese cities. And then, in August, American planes dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It’s easy and tempting to use dehumanizing language. But language like this, and the mindset that inspires it, is unspeakably dangerous. Trumpists make no secret of their views and what they wish to accomplish. In fact, they are quite open about it. So, the rest of us have no credible grounds for saying that we didn’t know what was coming.