The Annihilator Adjective

In this Elder of Ziyon essay, The immorality of charging Israel of "genocide", I learned a new phrase:  incremental genocide.  What does that mean?  It truly does not matter.  The propaganda technique for today is what I call "the annihilator adjective."  It empties meaning out of the word being modified, allowing you to fill it back up with whatever meaning you like.

Suppose you want to call someone an asshole, but you can't just use the word straightforwardly because he may not be objectively an asshole and you would thus open yourself to criticism.  So, instead, you call him a "social asshole" or "decentered asshole" or "networked asshole".  Really, you could use any adjective you like, the weirder the better.  The adjective doesn't have to mean anything, it just has to sound like it might mean something (see:  "Jabberwocky").

Then, when challenged, you reply, "But, I am not calling him an asshole as you understand the concept.  What I mean by asshole is..." and you can proceed to bury your interlocutor in an avalanche of meaningless verbiage.  The avalanche of meaningless verbiage will leave no lasting impression on your interlocutor's mind because it is meaningless.  The enduring impression is that your victim is labelled an asshole and in your interlocutor's, simple and impressionable, mind is left the sense that you are one smart guy (you "know words").

Actually, you are the asshole.

The canonical use of the annihilator adjective is "social justice".  What's that?  We all  have some sense of "justice", worked out over long years of moral, legal, and literary development, and we associated strong, positive feelings with the concept.  We tend to know what it means and we tend to like it, a lot.  Socialists want to cloak themselves in the mantle of justice, but it is not easy for them to do that because socialism is not just.

Enter "social justice".  Oh, what's that?  And the socialists proceed to bury us in an avalanche of meaningless verbiage, leaving upon us the impression that they somehow inhabit a higher moral plane.  Actually, they just want to take your stuff.

It turns out that the socialist assholes (I use these words in their dictionary definitions, no annihilator adjectives for me, thanks) want to label Israel genocidal.  This is absurd on its face and they cannot do that straightforwardly.  Enter "incremental genocide".  What does that mean?  Of course, it does not mean anything.  It's just a way for the socialist assholes to associate the word genocide with Israel.