“How can people of one group be made to do unspeakably ugly things to people of another group?”  This was a question pondered by Kathryn Ruud as an 18-year-old in the early 70’s following a film shown in college depicting the horrors of the concentration camps in Germany.  Following the film, a fellow student responded that “Only animals could do this!”  But Kathryn was learning German and had some German friends who seemed not so unlike Americans.

 

Kathryn  received her B.A. in German and International affairs in 1975, but it was not until 1982, during a semester abroad in Germany, that an answer to her question came to her.  “Language, polarizing language, was key,” she writes on her web page.  “Causing injury, or even death, to members of a designated out-group can seem positive, even moral, if we allow our worldview to be formed by the language of propagandists and demagogues.”  She researched other linguists, mostly German speaking, and gained a deeper understanding of the power of language to manipulate and polarize.  She went on to receive her M.S. in German and Linguistics in 1985 from Georgetown University.

 

In recent years, Kathryn has turned her focus to how the language of deep propaganda has begun playing a major role in American political discourse by parties both on the political right and left.  She developed a presentation that has been delivered to a variety of community groups and colleges in the greater Frederick area.  She is a contributing author to the book At War with Words, published in New York and Berlin in 2003.

 

Following are comments by one of her workshop participants: “This workshop opened my eyes to the intense level of political dialogue that is going on in the blogosphere and how important it is to respond….  The workshop helped me understand the extent to which extreme language is dehumanizing to all concerned, no matter who is using it against whom.”