The use of “disappear” as a transitive verb (they disappeared her), or as a substantive noun (the lawyers for the disappeared were unable to contact their client) originated in Argentinian, Chilean, and Philippine dictatorships of the 1970s and 80s. It refers to political kidnappings and the ominously abstract extrajudicial killings.
El/La disidente fue desaparecido. The dissident was disappeared.
No se sabe qué pasó con los desaparecidos. It is not known what happened with the disappeared.
As a word used most notably by the families of the disappeared, it’s almost deliberately and ironically Orwellian. It creates a sort of passive exonerative voice, one that implies that an action has occurred without anyone taking the action. The victim is absent, but so is the victimizer. The absence of one highlights the absence of the other.
Of course, part of the way that disappearance sparks fear is the quite deliberate fact that you can’t quite specify who’s taking the action. It’s not that the person vanishes like a rabbit in a magic trick. Someone has been disappeared. But by whom? Was it an official act? Local cops, feds, vigilantes, militias? Unknown, unsaid, unsayable? The outcome is the same: emptiness.
I was a Spanish major and spent a semester in Chile in the late 1990s, so desaparecido is a word I knew well before we began applying it in the US. It’s new and grammatically strange to people who aren’t familiar with the history, but language is adaptable. We find a way to label and describe horrors protean and indescribable alike.
I did not study German or get into serious depth on the run-up to the Second World War, so I was not familiar with the word Gleichschaltung, meaning synchronization or bringing-into-line. In other words, the whittling away of norms and the creation of legal exceptions that turned Germany into Nazi Germany. The legal process of Nazification.
Once you know the term, it’s hard not to see its shadow in the way medical journals are getting threatening letters from the regime, in threats to whistleblowers, the way ICE abuses suspects almost at random, in reports of another forty-eight desaparecidos in New Mexico, in rising harassment of defense lawyers, in yet another cavalier arrest of the wrong person, in the overt cruelty of firing a teacher for using a child’s requested name, in the way White House officials claim anyone who speaks up in favor of civil liberties is a terrorist, of course and obviously in that accidental deportation to a Salvadoran concentration camp, in yet more threatening letters to immigration lawyers and to doctors telling them to leave the country, in ever more cavalier immigration arrests of citizens.
(A straightforward shooting of the innocent, of course, is totally normal. We already know all about that kind of thing. We are accustomed, if not inured, to accidental shootings or to brutality that top officials at least pretend to deplore. That kind of horror is legible to us: it’s bad, but we know how it works, how it leads to civil suits and suspensions and consent decrees, as ineffectual as they may be. That’s a crime we know with a vocabulary we have already learned.)
In fifty years, what will the encyclopedia entry on early 21st century American Gleichschaltung look like? What new words will we have to describe this moment? What ominously abstract loanwords will work their way into Mandarin for students to look up when they’re taking Western History exams and need to describe the end of the first American republic?
Perhaps a Better Analysis Than Mine
The authoritarian takeover attempt is here. Sadly, we were warned.
There is still joy
And a capybara.
And another cat.
Secretly Ironic 