Ethnocidal Zombie • noun • (eth-no-cy-dull zomm-bee)
Definition: a person afflicted by the psychological fear and realization of being consumed by ethnocide
Origin: The Sustainable Culture Lab
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My book THE CRIME WITHOUT A NAME was released on October 12, 2021 and NPR has picked it as one of the top books of the year!
You can order the book—including the audiobook—and watch recordings of my book tour discussions at Eaton and the New York Public Library at thecrimewithoutaname.com.
On April 7, 2022, I gave a talk and Q&A titled “Resisting Cultural Erasure in America” and the moderator of the talk, Jennifer Fang, had recently edited an edition of the Oregon Historical Quarterly that focused on the Chinese Diaspora in Oregon, and how much of Chinese-American culture and history had been lost, forgotten, and erased in Oregon.
Our conversation focused on ethnocide and cultural erasure at national and international levels, but also the impact of ethnocide on Asian Americans. To my surprise, a small part of our conversation also talked about zombies. Here’s a link to the video recording of our conversation.
Also, earlier this week, SCL team member Luna Ly attended the Association of Asian American Studies Conference and one of the recurring themes at this conference was also zombies. The conference even had a panel dedicated to discussing Ling Ma’s book Severance, which is basically a book about zombies. In the book, an incurable disease engulfs the world and those infected essentially become zombies, yet the protagonist of the book also has a mindless job at a publishing company in New York City and the thoughtless labor and consumption of industrialized consumerism has also turned her into a metaphorical zombie.
Zombification appears to be a growing cultural concern as Americans continue to consume television shows and movies depicting zombies, so I believe it makes sense to explain how an ethnocidal society will organically create zombies.
The Walking Dead
I have never been a fan of zombie stories, but I strangely know a lot about zombies. Prior to attending the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, I worked in the film industry in Atlanta, Georgia and I was a crew member on Season 1 of The Walking Dead.
I watched us cinematically create and kill zombies on set every day, and I vividly remember zombie “experts” visiting the set to make sure that the zombies in The Walking Dead did not stray too far from zombie lore and the existing canon. Zombies might not be real, but the idea of zombies is real, so if the show strayed too far from what viewers considered a zombie to be, then the audience might turn on the show. The viewers “know” what a zombie is when they see one.
I remember a conversation between the zombie expert and the show’s director and producers about how fast zombies could run. Since zombies are dead and do not seem to have the same pain threshold as the living, that could mean that they could run faster than a person. However, zombies are also dead so their bodies are decaying, and that might mean that they’re incapable of running fast because their bodies physically could not do it. The theoretical running speed of zombies is an essential idea that you must figure out for a show where zombies are chasing people.
I believe the conclusion of the conversation was that zombies could run faster than the living, but they could not run as long as the living. A zombie’s higher pain threshold would allow them to run faster, but their decaying body meant that it would break down and fall apart as they did so.
It is ironic that I learned about zombies while working in film because I worked in film so that I would not become a corporate zombie whose life was dominated by mindless, soul-sucking work.
In America and other westernized countries, 19th and 20th Century industrialization created a new status quo for labor in that people’s livelihoods became attached to working for a corporation or within a factory. People became merely cogs within an industrial machine.
They rarely had a connection to the results of their labor and often had no passion for their labor, and this meaningless toil creates a state of alienation. Additionally, as they work, they lose a sense of self because they spend most of their time engaging in something they do not care about so that they can create something they will not see. If most of your time consists of not expressing or getting to know yourself, then you can become alienated from yourself. Likewise, the alienation will continue to grow because your co-workers are equally alienated and workers are often discouraged from forming communal bonds because communing during work hours could make workers “less productive.” Therefore, you will become alienated from your fellow humans.
When people are encouraged to embark on an alienating professional career where their mind is being wasted, it is logical that they will relate to the zombies they see on television. They will relate to the zombies as they fight to remain human.
America’s fascination with zombies is a natural psychological projection of the ethnocidal culture America has created. Americans are fearful of becoming what we are encouraged to become, and we hope that our humanity will prevail in the end.
In the early 2000s, the sitcom The Office was incredibly popular – what most don’t realize is that it is also a show about zombies. It is not about fictional zombies, but about a collection of people whose life depends upon the survival of a meaningless job that they do not care about. The appeal of the show is that it reminds all of us about the meaningless labor that has become the societal norm while also showing us people striving to remain human within the all-consuming meaninglessness of their professional lives.
When the show first came out, I did not understand it because I’d never had a traditional 9-5 job, since I started working in film after graduation. Yet my friends who took more traditional career paths with 9-5 jobs thought the show was hilarious. Now that I have left the film industry, I relate more to the show. I can see the humor within the human struggle to preserve your humanity within the industrial, soul-crushing machine that society has created.
Ethnocide and Zombies
To understand ethnocide and zombies, you must also understand Geistmord. This word is another SCL neologism, and it loosely translates as “the killing of spirit.” The word is a combination of the German word “mord” meaning “murder” or “killing,” and the German word “Geist” which means “ghost,” “soul,” “spirit,” “mind,” and “intelligence,” but it can also mean “culture” when applied to a collection of people.
Geistmord is another way for understanding ethnocide because culture is not just the physical artifacts and materials of a people, but also the spirit and soul of a people.
Historically, when American slaveowners spoke about “breaking” slaves, they did not aspire to physically break enslaved people, but to break their spirit. At a macro-level, the breaking of a people’s spirit consists of destroying their culture, and at an individual-level, it would be the crushing of their soul.
America prefers to believe that the soul-crushing norms of chattel slavery and Jim Crow are abberations or vestiges of the past, but if your society cultivates the language for justifying the destruction of souls, it is logical that a normalized Geistmord will pervade every aspect of society in one way or another.
In English, soul and culture are two different words and people struggle to see how they connect, so in English it is easy to imagine that you could have a healthy culture that also condones the crushing of souls.
In German, soul and culture can be the same word, so it is easier to understand how the destruction of souls can also destroy your culture.
Ethnocide manifests as a collective and individual process of Geistmord, the killing or murdering of Geist. It is the destruction of our “spirit,” “soul,” “mind,” and “intelligence.” This is a horrible destructive process that has shaped American society since its inception. The fear of Geistmord will naturally incline people to imagine, fear, and relate to zombies.
Zombies are soulless, mindless creatures who live by consuming the mind or brains of regular people. Zombies are alive in that they do not exist in an afterlife, but they are dead because they exist without a soul or a mind. Their Geist has been destroyed, yet they are still alive. This is how people subconsciously imagine victims of Geistmord and ethnocide to exist. They know that our society exists to destroy their Geist through mindless work, the terror of random gun violence, and senseless racial division and oppression; and also encourages you to destroy the Geist of others to obtain wealth.
Additionally, as people are encouraged to pursue soul-crushing, mindless work, we imagine that corporations, industrialization, capitalism, and our employers represent the proverbial zombies who live by profiting off of our Geist. This is Jeff Bezos thanking Amazon workers for sending him to outer space.
The lives of Amazon workers have not improved as Bezos has gotten wealthier and traveled beyond the earth. The supposed appeal of industrialized, alienated work is not that it enriches your Geist or helps you cultivate your Geistgarten, but that you could potentially have the opportunity to become a billionaire like Bezos.
A capitalistic, ethnocidal professional world consumes your Geist so that you can ascend the corporate ladder and eventually consume the Geist of your employees. This is the parasitic relationship depicted in every zombie movie and in television shows like The Office.
Despite the appeal of The Walking Dead and The Office in which far too many people can relate to zombies, we must not forget that the true appeal of the shows is our desire for humanity to survive the zombie invasion and find a way to preserve our Geist.
To preserve our Geist and save our humanity, it is imperative that we realize that we and our ethnocidal society creates the zombies. We must liberate ourselves from ourselves and our fears, and this liberation can only come from increased awareness and precise language to describe the nature of our society. By identifying and articulating the problem – ethnocide and Geistmord – we can craft solutions to improve our society and make life more meaningful. We can create the metaphorical such vaccine that can transform zombies back to their mindful, soulful human selves.