Truth & Consequences
Speaking the language of truth.

By Victor Davis Hanson, author most recently of Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power.
October 17, 2001 8:45 a.m.

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.