Einträge P-R - mediensprache.net

Sprachmuster und Sprachsymbole in rechtsextremen Musikszenen
DFG-Projekt 2006-2010
Projektleitung: Prof. Dr. Peter Schlobinski & Prof. Dr. Michael Tewes
Parasite, Pest
Parasite: From Greek para (beside) plus sitos (food), a person who lives off others; someone
who eats at another’s table, exploiting their hospitality through flattery. In biology, the word
means an organism that grows and feeds and is sheltered on or in another organism while
infuring the host or making no useful contribution to its survival. The idea is of clinging to
someone else, doing harm in the process or, at best, no good. Pest means any plant or anmial
considered harmful to humans or human affairs.
The image of parasites or pests has been widespread in depicting people their enemies would
be rid of. Before the exterminators go to work, they need to dehumanize the “pests.” For
example, Dmitri Volkogonov, in his 1994 book, Lenin, comments that Soviet leader Vladimir
Lenin advocated executing the “parasites” – a “cleansing of the Russian land of any harmful
insects, swinder-fleas, wealthy bugs and so on” (Glover 1999, 258). In films, writing, and
speeches, the Nazis rendered Jews as rats, lice, and vermin. Adolf Hitler, writing about
cultural life in Vienna after World War I (Mein Kampf, translated in 1969 by Ralph
Manheim), exclaimed: “If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess, you found, like a
maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light – a little Jew!” (339). Hannah
Arendt (1968, 5) explained that antisemitism in Europe reached its peak whenever Jews
declined in position and influence, left with wealth but no power or public function: “Wealth
without power or aloofness without a policy are felt to be parasitical … because such
conditions cut all the threads which tie men together.”
More recently, militant Islamists have been targeted, as Maureen Dowd stated on April 7,
2002 (nytimes.com): “Islam seems to be appropriated and eaten away by parasites: the
terrorists.” Similarly, President George W. Bush spoke in March 2002 of helping
“governments everywhere … remove the terrorist parasites that threaten their own countries
and peace” (in the Christian Science Monitor, March 15, 2002, 5), while other Americans
denounced the terrorists as “vermin.” Islam, in turn, applies the term to others within its own
divided world: the Ayatollah Khomeini, for example, called Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Iraq’s
Saddam Hussein “treacherous parasites” that should be “dealt with” by the Islamic nations
(Parfrey 2001, 192).
Many critics of Islamists will no doubt continue to use the metaphor to serve as a warning,
however crude, of real danger. In most cases, however, the usage is strictly propaganda that
strips others of their humanity. Aldous Huxley observed, “If you call a man a bug, it means
you propose to treat men as a bug” (Michael and Doerr 2002, 16). The labeling opens the way
to murder. See also ANIMAL; APE; DEMON; DOG; EVIL; EXTERMINATION;
MONSTER; PIG; SNAKE; TERRORISM AS DISEASE; VAMPIRE; WORM.
7. Georg Stötzel u. Thorsten Eitz (Hrsg.): Zeitgeschichtliches Wörterbuch der deutschen
Gegenwartssprache
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