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 ne of the first
casualties of war is language. The historian Thucydides told us
that in the cauldron of killing, where emotion trumps reason, words
lose their meaning: so in the Middle East extremists become known
to the mobs as "soft" even as executioners are seen as
"heroes." Crowds hector the reckless, incendiary Mr. Arafat
for being too moderate as they chant in praise for the mass murderer
bin Laden.
But there is
also a different type of linguistic distortion in the West —
the opposite phenomenon of a deflation in vocabulary. Our distortion
of meaning derives not from the excess, but rather the complete
absence, of emotion. We Americans embrace euphemism at all costs
— the wages of a culture that demands the preservation of material
comfort at the price of real conviction, denies the acceptance of
evil, and in its arrogance believes that it can reinvent the nature
of man through either state intervention or the lure of pseudo-science.
We see such
an insidious ruin of words everywhere. The news agency Reuters objects
to the use of "terrorists." Americans in turn fumble over
the nuances of "fundamentalist." In fact, by any historical
definition both bin Laden's followers and the Taliban are fascists.
They believe in the innate superiority of a fanatical elite —
violent devotees of a perverted medieval Islam — and are willing
to torture, jail, and kill any who disagree. Women, homosexuals,
and non-Muslims are all dehumanized as their innate and natural
inferiors.
These fascists
are not fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell, nor even the extremists
like those of Earth First, in that they are not merely intolerant,
zealous, and occasionally dangerous. Rather the fascists now residing
in Afghanistan seek to spread their creed through the mass
killing of innocents and the desire of "conquest" at the
national level. Fortunately, our president and Mr. Rumsfeld, in
their embrace of a moral vocabulary to describe these perpetrators
of mass murder as "evil" and "liars," are the
rare moralists. In their candor and diction, they radiate leadership
in forcing us to accept the unpleasant, and for now are ready to
incur ridicule from the self-satisfied and cynical.
By the same
token our media seeks desperately to avoid the word "war."
Far better that we are caught up in a "crisis," a "struggle,"
or more rarely a "conflict." But by any fair historical
measure when 6,000 innocents have been butchered in a time of peace
by enemies of our very civilization — in addition to 100 billion
dollars of material losses, more still in economic dislocation,
and our symbols of American internationalism, military power, and
finance blown apart — then, by God, we are in a war. The catalysts
of every war in American history — Lexington, Concord, Fort
Sumter, the sinking of the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, and the
invasion of Kuwait — all cost us far less killed — and
more often soldiers, rather than women and children. Our "enemy"
— itself a word in rare usage — at least has few doubts
of the stakes involved in their battle against America, as they
wave posters of jets crashing into towers and convey promises of
germs and nukes on the horizon.
Yet perhaps
we feel the employment of the word "war" might suggest
a finality of sorts: Will our tranquility then be forever interrupted?
Are we really then traitors to the Enlightenment in resorting to
brute violence? In a "war" are we the moral equivalents
of our enemies? And so we find it more comfortable to reinvent words
to mask reality. "War," after all, brings such unwholesome
baggage, the entire 19th-century lexicon of "treasonous"
and "evil," or their antitheses "patriotic"
and "moral" — or even worse terminology like "defeat"
and "victory" or "surrender" and "triumph."
Imagine a Dan Rather or Peter Jennings reporting that America seeks
the defeat and surrender of its enemies in its commitment to victory
and the triumph over evil.
There are real
consequences for a society that has lost the value of its language.
In a "crisis" rather than a "war," bombing killers
who attacked and murdered our families and vow to continue until
stopped is simply the ethical equivalent to ramming airliners into
office buildings. "Terrorists" must be given a trial by
a jury, but "fascists" conjure up the scary image of the
SS who murdered American prisoners and so received no mercy
from GIs at the Battle of the Bulge. And with the rejection of the
word "evil," then a free society of voters is not all
that different from a regime that kills its own.
Our euphemism
seeks to reassure Americans that by not provoking our enemies we
might not further endanger our lives or risk our careful self-image
as superior creatures of reason. Falsity in expression is so much
easier than the brutality of truth. Hard-working people slaughtered
at their desks are not "incinerated" or "vaporized"
and so to be "avenged" or "remembered" (as in
"Remember Pearl Harbor"), but are now "lost"
or "gone." "Rubble" and "debris" suggest
an absence of corpses, limbs, teeth, and skin. Without funerals,
without visual reminders of their deaths, or mention of the circumstances
of their killing, our sanitized language has nearly allowed our
dead literally to "disappear."
States that
are hostile to the United States — their crowds cheering the
killers of our children, state media inflaming hatred of our people,
and autocracies turning their own internal civil dissent against
America — are now deemed "moderate" in that they
are not openly hosting our enemies or killing us. Such language
is not always reactive, but helps to govern events. Instead of lecturing
the Saudis or Egyptians on the need to allow their citizens to vote
and speak freely, we instead promise right at this minute to revisit
the sore of the West Bank — and in the process convey the idea
that there are rewards for the butchery of New Yorkers.
Our enemies
use the inflated rhetoric of distortion while we, mirror-imaging
them in falsity, avoid the reasoned lexicon of truth. If they are
premodern, so we are postmodern. Thus we seek to wonder why we are
"hated," instead of firmly and candidly reminding Islam
that America the last two decades has been the protector of Muslims
— against Soviet Communism, Iraqi dictatorship, thugs in Somalia,
or Christian death squads in Bosnia and Kosovo. Do we dare bark
back to the Palestinians that the real killers of Muslims the last
30 years have been other Muslims and atheists? — whether in
the horrific Iran-Iraqi War, the Russian assault on Afghanistan,
the Jordanian liquidation of Palestinians, the extinction of whole
villages in Lebanon by Syria, and the Iraqi murder of Shiites, Kurds,
and Kuwaitis? Arab Muslims, not us, sent missiles into the streets
of Iran, gassed their own people, polluted the sands of Kuwait,
killed Afghanis, and tortured their own citizens.
The spuriousness
of our words applies to our friends as well. "Alliance"
denotes states that by treaty and formal agreements pledge mutual
military assistance in case of "attack" (such as 6,000
civilians slain?). But surely the North Atlantic "Treaty"
Organization really connotes a loose coalition of sorts, a de facto
shifting and unofficial coalescence of interests. So we implore
sworn NATO "allies" to get "on board" in a "coalition,"
who are clearly reluctant to honor written agreements. By any fair
definition, we are not in an alliance at all, but rather an assortment
of convenient friendships with Europeans in which states choose
to abide by prior commitments only to the degree it requires the
least sacrifice. Rather than suggesting that we may well leave such
a farce, and seek real military partners among the democracies of
India, Russia, Japan, and South America, we talk instead of expanding
NATO!
If we are to
restore moral purpose in this country and end the era of cynicism
and nihilism, then we must stand for something in this war. And
we can only begin to do so and thereby regain a sense of who we
are, when our spokesmen speak the language of truth. And when they
do so, they should be pleased rather than ashamed that it is not
pleasant to everyone.
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