Parasites and Useless Eaters
Parasites and Useless Eaters
I have been teaching a theory of communication called logostherary, meaning to attend to the word, for almost thirty years to college students. One text for the class is Viktor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.1 I can offer no better example of the power of spoken word than Frankl’s book because Frankl is writing about the world constructed into being by Hitler. Hitler spoke the concentration camps into existence before he physically constructed the camps. Frankl’s book is the aftermath of Hitler’s language. Hitler spoke of the jews as parasites and spoke of people with disabilities as useless eaters.2 All words are doing something and are forms of symbolic action. Expressions like “actions speak louder than words,” will never allow us to grasp the power of words or understand what words are doing.
Parasites are bugs that feed off of a host body and when we speak about the dehumanizations of the jews, it can be traced back to this one word. People with disabilities were spoken of as useless eaters and it plants a seed within the mind of the listener of those who use resources and who contribute nothing back. This language looks at the worth of people as being established by what they can do and how they can be of use instead of accepting them as they are and establishing a priori their worth as human beings. We know that the disabled did not have a high probability of surviving the holocaust because they never made it to the camps but instead, were executed on the spot during home invasions by the Nazis.
I teach my students that the holocaust could not have happened if people saw fellow humans as equal human beings. Hitler had to create the scapegoat as the first step toward the Final Solution. The jews had to be constructed as not human and the disabled had to be constructed as worth less than other humans. Studies on genocide establish that killing people is never the first step. Genocide begins with language and the time to intervene is at these early stages. Once the camps are constructed, it is too late.
I continue to teach this content because we need to stop telling children that words are nothing; expressions like “stick and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me” is not the bromide that we think it is. What these words do is: not take the child’s hurt seriously, teach the child that words are nothing, and reinforce the status quo because it invites the child to do as others have done to them.
We need to instead teach that words are powerful: for the good and for the bad. Most students do not understand what they are creating and participating in when they speak about people as animals. The language of immigrants as animals is ubiquitous within the culture. It is language that Trump uses often. The parallels between Hitler and Trump are painfully obvious and have always been from the start. I attempted to have several pieces published in The New York Times on the connections between the two men when Trump was a first-time presidential candidate. I was not successful for a number of reasons: 1) I am not a known commodity 2) the strong reaction of “nothing but words” mentality 3) the journalistic protocol of avoiding any modern-day parallel to Hitler and 4) not publishing a point of view until it is commonplace.
It is both from the position as someone who understands the power of words as well as the mother of a son with disability that informs this piece on the specific language that is being used with regard to people with disabilities. Fred Trump, Donald Trump’s nephew, has written a book about his uncle.3 Fred Trump reports that Donald Trump said of the disabled that they “should just die.” Some people, for whatever reason, refuse to take this language seriously just as they refuse to take seriously Trump’s mocking of the reporter who has cerebral palsy or Trump’s mocking of President Biden who has a stutter. This language reported by Trump’s nephew is consistent with previous displays that places Trump firmly within the company of Hitler. Now, the connections between Trump and Hitler are commonplace. Lots of people are saying it because lots of people are seeing it.
We still have those within the country who refuse to take Trump’s language seriously and there are those who say that everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion as to how they interpret this language. Opinion comes from the Greek word doxa which means it appears to me. If you are of the opinion that this language is not significant, it means that constructing some people as less than other people and/or constructing one group as not human is acceptable to you. This goes way beyond the labels of Republican or Democrat. Instead it is the choice to enter a world that sees one group as deserving to live and one group deserving to die.
As I have been saying from the start, Trump is not the problem but instead we are. The audience always gives the speaker power. Just as the German people gave Hitler the power to repeat his messages over and over again, we too have given Trump the power to repeat his messages to his immediate audience at the rallies and then, to be transmitted through mass media. Repetition is its own form of persuasion.
There is so much talk about our divided nation at this moment in time but, to me, this language is the source of the division. I do not know how we are going to be able to reconcile the disparate parts of this country. There are those who see people as people and there are those who see others as living lives not worth living. There is no common ground between the two. The issues we now face are so much bigger than Trump vs. Harris. This is only the tip of the iceberg but it is a significant tip. I cannot subscribe to a worldview where my son is seen as less than others or that he lives a life not worth living. I would hope that other Americans are as repulsed by this language as I am. You do not need to have a child with disabilities to understand that the world constructed by Trump’s language is a world not worth living in.
For an introduction to how Frankl’s work is taught within the classroom, see Janet Farrell Leontiou, Viktor E. Frankl Goes to Community College: How Creating Meaning May Save Your Life (New York: Peter Lang, 2022).
This language of both “useless eaters” and “lives not worth living” to refer to the disabled was language that Hitler picked up from physicians who in 1939, killed children who fit within these categories. See Hugh Gregory Gallagher’s “Holocaust: The Genocide of Disabled Peoples,” in Century of Genocide ed. Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons (New York: Routledge, 2009); 207-232.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/24/us/politics/donald-trump-nephew-book-fred-trump.html