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Trigger words and distractions frame discussions in this era of moral rupture

The words we use, or words and phrases that are deployed, trigger us in different ways. These responses are not always rational. They don’t have to be rational to be effective.
Ismail Lagardien
By Ismail Lagardien
5 Sep 2025
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In our world upside down, trigger words and phrases unsettle our sensibilities and increasingly soil and debase discussions about state and society.

Words and phrases like freedom, self-determination, self-defence, genocide, humanitarian intervention, attack, occupation, indigenous/native, immigrant, migrant or aboriginal have all changed meaning. What was right yesterday is wrong today, and what was wrong yesterday is right today.

Yesterday’s villains are today’s persecuted, and those persecuted in the past are today’s villains. We appropriate the pain and suffering of others, make it our own, make it unique to us. We say what we’re supposed to say, not what we want to say, nor do we say what has to be said.

The world will never be the same again. Then again, that is what we said at the end of World War 1, at the end of World War 2, after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, after Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain descended in 1946. 

Walter Benjamin’s “tradition of the oppressed” has been bought and sold on, again, tinged now with messianism. The words we use, or words and phrases that are deployed, trigger us in different ways. These responses are not always rational. They don’t have to be rational to be effective, especially in response to abuse and exhortations to violence, and when calls to violence may be justified, even necessary.

For instance, Adolf Hitler’s invasion and subsequent occupation of the Sudetenland in 1938-1939 had to be met with force; anything else amounted to appeasement. Benjamin would write that the world had to fight back against Hitler and warned that “even the dead will not be safe” from the Nazi war machine.

It’s not difficult to make the leap from killing humans to desecrating tombs of the dead. Yes, the Nazis desecrated and destroyed Jewish cemeteries “and used the headstones for construction projects”.

Pacifism (I claim to be a pacifist) has its limits, especially when your country is being invaded or occupied, the way that Hitler occupied the Sudetenland and later Czechoslovakia, unless you think that people have to lie down and accept invasion and occupation, and not fight back.

Violence does not always have to be real, it needs only to be imagined; memories of historical injustice have only to be believed. In terms of the latter, it’s probably useful to remember claims that have to do with false memories, repressed memories or recovered memories – and involuntary memory.

I was put off by aspects of the “memory wars” of the past several decades. The emotional distress caused by memories is no less real than objective reality or past events. We need to start with caution, and at least listen.

I always, almost always (to a fault) err on the side of people who have said they were abused, even before the evidence is presented. Some folk refer to this as hyper-empathy disorder – you have to be a cold-hearted so-and-so to ignore injustice and the suffering of others.

You don’t need to have gone through childhood sexual abuse yourself to immediately acknowledge that others may have memories of traumatic experiences. We have to caution, always, against being too dismissive of actual trauma and the likelihood of epigenetic responses to trauma, suffering and injustice, or even feelings that may alter behaviour. The word “feelings” is important, it triggers the rationalists among us.

Trigger words and bottled responses


This brings us back to trigger words, how we settle on them, how they have meaning (to us), and how they condition our responses. We seem to have bottles of responses at the back of a cabinet labelled “replies to trigger words”.

Among mine are “soul” or “meritocracy” or “pragmatism”. (Innocence, too, is misplaced and sometimes overstated). We, nonetheless, have emotions such as anger, or feelings of disappointment, sadness, love, hate, and all those things that to some people seem “irrational”, and that, in the case of anger, have to be removed from our range of responses to the world around us. I’m not sure that it’s all that wrong. But it is not all benign, mind you.

Trigger words can lead to distraction. That distraction is real. Remind someone about their heritage – not necessarily anything pernicious – and you could get threatened with a punch in the mouth. It’s all part of the game of distraction. Don’t ask about the past, just move on….

As Toni Morrison said, all the way back in 1975:

“The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”

The statement above is reproduced by (wait for it….) the Black Agenda Report. Cue bottled response: why “black agenda?”, why not just “agenda?” followed by charges of “race-baiting”, and that pernicious claim, “we don’t see race”. This is rapidly followed by counter-claims of racism.

How quickly the Australian politician Bob Katter accused someone of being a racist. The context here matters. Katter is vehemently opposed to “certain” immigrants, those that do not ascribe to “Western” and “Christian” values – code-words, to be sure – and his threat to punch a journalist in the face was a response to the observation that he, too, comes from an immigrant family to Australia.

Helen Pringle, professor of social sciences at the University of New South Wales, summed up Katter’s transformation in the following passage, which situates his response to the journalist better than I could:

“After a now infamous first parliamentary speech of Senator Fraser Anning on 14 August 2018, which called for an end to ‘wholesale non-European migration’, the present Member for Kennedy endorsed Anning’s words ‘one thousand percent’. Asked by a journalist how this endorsement sat with the fact that his own grandfather was Lebanese, Bob Katter Jr denied that his grandfather (or his great grandfather for that matter, he said) was Lebanese, and decried the very question as ‘racist’.”

In our world upside down, the man who (yesterday) wanted to prevent “non-Europeans” from migrating to Australia is (today) the victim of racism.

In South Africa, today, and around the world, racists and bigots, supremacists and fundamentalists (the religious and the market fundamentalists) have managed to remain perched, Stylites sat on towering high masts, never mind the carnage and the torturous suffering their systems have wreaked.

They have achieved this by clever lexical legerdemain, by switching the meaning of words, appropriating the suffering of others to cast themselves as victims – and we’re all stumbling over trigger words, caught up, as we are, in a moral maze.

And when we can, we create distractions. DM