War of the Words
Language as a Weapon
When Barack Obama took over as president in 2009, the global war on terror, or GWOT, just didn’t seem to fit the tenor of his “hope” and “change” message. So wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were rebranded as “overseas contingency operations.” Talk about the banality of evil! Even Orwell’s Big Brother might be impressed by OCOs as a substitute for invasion and war.
A euphemistic word Obama didn’t banish was “surge.” The “surge” in Iraq allegedly had worked under General David Petraeus, even though its gains proved as “fragile” and “reversible” as Petraeus hinted they would be. So Obama conducted his own surge in Afghanistan, the so-called good or smart war after the Bush/Cheney disaster in Iraq. And of course the “gains” in Afghanistan also proved both fragile and reversible, though no one was held to account for the miserable failure of the Afghan War. Whoops. I mean the Afghan contingency operation for democracy and enduring freedom.
Showing that he too could learn from America’s folly, Vladimir Putin termed his invasion of Ukraine a “special military operation.” U.S. leaders laughed at this, criticizing Putin for his propagandistic euphemism, even as they persisted in using terms like “overseas contingency operation” for America’s “kinetic” military actions. The eye of the beholder, I guess.
These thoughts came to mind as I perused my Twitter/X feed this morning and spied this illustration posted by Chay Bowes:
Though the Russian flag is on the left, it could be the flag of China, Iran, North Korea, or any other alleged evildoer. The Russians invade, we intervene (for the sake of democracy, naturally). The Russians commit war crimes, we have unfortunate instances of collateral damage. In the war of the words, the U.S. military is clearly rather clever in a self-aggrandizing and self-exculpatory way.
Looking at comments from this Twitter feed, I came across another useful illustration of manipulating language and information in the cause of war. Take a gander:
I confess I’d never heard of Arthur Ponsonby and his book, Falsehood in War-Time. I need to check it out.
This may prove a handy list to keep around as America’s national (in)security state acts to gin up the next war.
I've long thought that America's ongoing problem in the last and this century has been that it never experienced war - by that I mean the destruction of its cities and society, massive death of civilians, the widespread rapes of women, and all the other horrors. War for the US has been censored broadcasts and videos, and the return of body bags and traumatized returnees from somewhere else.
Those in charge then solemnly speak of "patriotism" and "sacrifice", with the families of the dead or maimed shattered, while everyone else goes about their daily lives.
If Americans experienced war like the Russians in WWII, the Vietnamese in the 1960's, or now the Palestinians in Gaza - no politician would dare the lies they tell us daily about American's role in the world.
In recent years I have told my friends and acquaintances that anything you hear about evil Putin was already said about the evil German Kaiser Wilhelm II during WW I. Demonizing the “other” makes war palatable to uninformed citizens. The enemy is always the “Untermensch.” This phenomena is well described by Christopher Browning in ORDINARY MEN: … He documents how ordinary men who had no political agenda or commitment to Nazism were turned into murderers. I remember well language used for the Vietnamese when I arrived in the U.S. 58 years ago. Times change, but war propaganda never does.