17 September 2020
The current use of ethnic cleansing as a euphemism for genocide dates to the early 1990s and the war in the Balkans. But the phrase has antecedents that stretch back over a century. While phrases using cleansing have not always been tantamount to genocide, they often have been euphemisms for pacifying or even displacing the lower classes and undesirable elements in a society.
The calque of the Serbo-Croatian etničko čišćenje first appears in the Washington Post on 2 August 1991:
The Croatian political and military leadership issued a statement Wednesday declaring that Serbia’s “aim ... is obviously the ethnic cleansing of the critical areas that are to be annexed to Serbia.”
The use of similar language in the Balkans dates to the early 1980s, as this use of ethnically clean from the New York Times of 12 July 1982 shows. It’s a calque of the Albanian political slogan Kosova etnikisht e pastër (an ethnically clean Kosovo):
''The nationalists have a two-point platform,'' according to Becir Hoti, an executive secretary of the Communist Party of Kosovo, ''first to establish what they call an ethnically clean Albanian republic and then the merger with Albania to form a greater Albania.''
(The slogan is in Albanian, but it’s disputed whether or not it was a genuine slogan of Albanians in Kosovo or the work of Serbian propagandists intent on fear-mongering.)
Unfortunately, similar euphemisms are older. The Nazis, no surprise, used the term Säuberungsaktion (cleansing process) as a euphemism for genocide, as this translation in the American Political Science Review of April 1936 attests:
In Berlin, for example, there was a cleansing process (Säuberungsaktion), directed against Marxists, Jews, and others who were alleged to be enemies of the state.
And the standalone cleansing as a euphemism for genocide is a bit older. From the same journal of August 1935:
At the same time, municipal administration was purged of Jewish, republican, socialist, and other “unreliable” elements. No statistics are available on the cleansing of the professional civil service.
Even older is the term social cleansing, which dates to the late nineteenth century and refers to improving the material lot of the disadvantaged in society as means to prevent revolution and discord. We have this from the Daily Northwestern (Oshkosh, Wisconsin) of 20 April 1887:
The men of honest intentions in the line of reform and improvement are coming to the front, and the blatant, foul-mouthed, blood-seeking frauds and imposters and nihilists are being relegated to the rear. The great social fermentation is going on, and the scum is rapidly being boiled out and slung into the waste hole. The purifying process is progressing admirably. Things will work themselves out all right under the guidance and intelligence of the American people, and the country will be better for the social cleansing it has had.
And this from a December 1895 article on the “Colored Children in the District of Columbia”:
The next two persons interviewed were a gentleman and his wife, who began work for and with the colored people in the old days of the Freedman’s Bureau, and who have been actively engaged in it for thirty years. They seem to have lived and labored through those years firm in the faith that the forces at work for the uplifting and humanity must and will prevail; that with moral and social cleansing will come physical regeneration and the full reward of those how have learned to labor and wait. They attribute the present difficulties to the awful effects of slavery; and hold that beneath skins, black or white, human nature is the same.
And this from the Daily Alaska Dispatch of 28 October 1909:
Those anarchists we have and have had came to us from abroad, where they were bred by reason of abuses against which anarchy is a violent and unreasoning protest. What the world needs is a political and social cleansing of those spots that afford inspiration to this doctrine of chaos.
While ostensibly for the benefit of the poor, such efforts often led to what we know call gentrification and displacement and removal of those whom the programs were supposed to benefit. And there is this, advocating for government spending for social cleansing in the pages of Once a Week of 12 January 1892:
The Reform movement, just inaugurated in New York City, aims to wipe out the slums, and on their sites to lay out parks and playgrounds for the children of the poor; to enlist those millionaires who have no other earthly use for a fraction of their millions in the work of making New York a better place to live in. Government patronage and indorsement and legal sanction, by means of penalties and real estate condemnations, in cases of slums in all large cities, is called for. Rivers and harbors are deepened and repaired by Government appropriations—why not Government appropriations for social cleansing purposes? Men of money will find it in their interest to co-operate in this work. During their lifetime they should do it. They will make money by doing it.
And much later, there is this from the Richmond Times-Dispatch of 2 June 1930:
“In India we find those who worship the plow, because he sees he gets some benefit from the plow.” Said Mr. Brunk. “The carpenter worships his tools, because he gets some benefit from those tools. Worship is the means to the end with those people. The only hope for their social cleansing and the alleviation and banishment of their poverty and ignorance is through the missionary.”
But reformists within the establishment did not have a monopoly on social cleansing. In the early years of the twentieth century, the term also appears in Marxist writing, referring to refer to the toppling of capitalism. We have this from the Socialist Labor Party’s Daily People of 12 September 1905:
Vice tribute is said to be levied in the city as of old. Still, it is impossible to convince the reformers that what is wanted is not reform but revolution. Then a thorough social cleansing will be possible.
And from the same paper on 14 January 1914:
Finally, obedient to the behest that self cleansing is a prerequisite for social cleansing, Union No. 49 begins house-cleaning at home, lays intrepidly and with integrity of purpose the finger upon the serious defects of its own International Union; and urges its fellow wage slaves in the Typographical, as well as in all other unions, to hasten to do likewise, and, by education and, organization, join hands in the requisite joint effort to overthrow the social nightmare of the Capitalist Regimen.
So, while ethnic cleansing is a straight-up euphemism for genocide, the milder social cleansing, while sometimes arising out of the best of intentions, often produced a similar, albeit less extreme, result, that is the purging of undesirable elements from a society.
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