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Pentagon's recent assault on the English language has left it "softened
up" and "degraded".
By Tony Montague
It was a US senator, Hiram Warren Johnson, who said in 1917 "The
first casualty when war comes is truth". Language is also a
victim of that first strike, part of the "collateral damage".
The distortions, dissimulations, and outright lies that accompany
warfare are created with words. Indeed honest language and discourse
are targeted even before the outbreak of actual hostilities.
The proponents of any armed conflict - whether politicians, generals,
or media moguls - need the backing of public opinion. When war comes,
they must rally support for "our heroes" and denigrate
"the enemy" and the doubters (who are also the enemy).
In order to understand and counter the mindset of the warmongers
it’s important to look at the different ways they use - or
more to the point abuse - language. And in a darkly satirical way
it can be an amusing exercise.
Propaganda is a neutral word, meaning "any organized effort
or movement to spread particular doctrines or information"
though it has come to be used in a derogatory sense only. No one
now readily admits to disseminating it, but past master Joseph Goebbels,
Nazi Germany’s Minister for People’s Enlightenment and
Propaganda, had no such qualms. He was proud of his skilful mendacity.
Goebbels realized that if you repeat a lie over and over again it
eventually comes to be regarded as the truth. In plain parlance,
shit sticks.
Present-day western leaders are usually a little more subtle when
they take liberties with the truth. Implying guilt, for instance,
is preferable to making direct accusations, because it can’t
be refuted. In George Bush’s news conference of March 13 concerning
the worsening Iraq crisis he referred eight times to the 2001 terrorist
attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. There was -
and is - not a shred of evidence connecting Iraq’s former
dictator to 9/11. But opinion polls taken after the conference indicated
that half of the U.S. population believed Saddam to be at least
partly responsible. The shit stuck, and made it much easier to subsequently
justify bombing and invading Iraq.
Newspeak turns words on their head, cynically reversing their original
meaning and intent. The term was coined by George Orwell for his
anti-totalitarian and futuristic satire 1984, in which the Ministry
of Truth propagated the three essential slogans of newspeak: War
is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength. Ironically,
the year before the publication of Orwell’s work (1948) the
U.S. Department of War changed its title to the Department of Defense.
Two decades later the department was undertaking the "pacification"
of villages in Vietnam. This involved killing domesticated animals,
setting homes on fire, rounding up all the men, shooting those who
resisted, and abusing elders, women, and children. Similarly the
phrase "peace through strength" is used by the Bush administration
to justify massive increases in its "defence" budget.
Ignorance is indeed strength in the new American century.
In order to help "defend the indefensible", as Orwell
put it, the warmongers have created an impressive array of euphemisms.
Many of these draw on terminology and expressions taken from the
business community, the legal and medical professions, sports newscasts,
consumer culture, even gardening books. The most infamous is "collateral
damage" - civilians killed and maimed in the course of bombing,
shelling, and shooting at "the enemy". There are many
others. Every conflict involving the U.S. military inspires new
coinages from its ever-inventive wordsmiths. In recent years they’ve
given us such now familiar niceties as "surgical strikes",
"smart bombs", "soft targets", and "to
interview detainees".
Obfuscation is a closely-related strategy — the concealment
of violent realities by the use of confusing and abstracted language.
This can take several forms. Technical words and jargon are favourites
as they put up a wall - with the added implication that they can
only be understood by experts and insiders who should be allowed
to get on with the job. A classic example is the reference made
in one Pentagon document to "kinetic energy penetrators",
more usually known as bullets.
Deliberately vague information is said to lack "granularity"
(note the crunchy-cereal connotation). This is desirable for U.S.
military media-briefings, which are ideally low on specifics and
rich in BS. Take for instance General Tommy Franks’ Sentence:
"Our forces are continuing to move; they’re moving in
ways and to places that we believe are just exactly right."
Then there are the ubiquitous abbreviations, such as BDA (bomb damage
assessment), TLAMs (Tomahawk land-attack missiles), ALCM (air-launched
cruise missiles) and GBUs (guided bomb units) and of course those
elusive WMDs (weapons of mass destruction). Letters and figures
are always preferable to images of flesh and blood and suffering.
Below is a guide to some of the more common or revealing words and
phrases being deployed in this ongoing series of defensive actions
on behalf of humanitarian values and democratic freedoms.
Warspeak - a lexicon
of words mangled by the military
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