Tyranny of Words and War
Published on Thursday, February 6, 2003 by the Toronto
Star
"Tyranny of Words and War"
by Antonia Zerbisias
Since Sept. 11, 2001, we have acquired a new vocabulary, or at least new definitions for words we thought we understood.
Think evil and evildoers, sleeper agents and sleeper cells, civilization, freedom and fundamentalism, homeland and security, jihad and justice, war, heroes and victims, targets and terrorism.
George W. Bush's rhetoric is full of this sort of double-Newspeak: "This is a new kind of evil ... this crusade, this war on terrorism ... we will rid the world of the evildoers ..."
In the current climate in the United States, merely misspeaking yourself by not using these words and phrases in the politically correct and prescribed way can be seen as an act of resistance, or even treason. This in the land that invented freedom of speech.
Here in Canada, how you use these words — or not, as in the case of "terrorism" and "terrorist" — can bury you in an electronic avalanche accusing you of being anti-American or anti-Semitic or, a promulgator of the "new anti-Semitism," whatever that is.
You don't need to be a columnist to feel the wrath of the Newspeak keepers. Just ask Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, who was attacked for his 9/11 reflections, a year after the tragedy, in a CBC documentary.
Now you'd think that the media, rather than jump on the Newspeak bandwagon, would deconstruct this propagandistic perversion of the language rather than disseminating it. But no.
Instead, they, and TV news in particular, are appropriating the words and phrases for their graphics and promos.
This could explain why, despite its publication last November, there has been almost zero mention of one of the most considered post 9/11 books, Collateral Language: A User's Guide To America's New War (NYU Press). Several data base searches turned up nothing except two mentions by The Independent's Robert Fisk, a brave and brilliant journalist held in very low regard by those who will brook no criticism of the so-called "war on terror."
Collateral Language is no tribute to the Twin Towers dead, or a quickie look at the intelligence community. This is original stuff, the kind of book that should have received great notices and extensive publicity, if only for how it frames and defines our post-9/11 perceptions of the world.
Edited by St. Lawrence University's John Collins and Ross Glover, it is an anthology of 14 essays by scholars from a variety of disciplines.
What they do is examine the tyranny of the new vocabulary, asking exactly what 14 words and phrases such as evil, freedom, jihad, terrorism and the-war-against- (fill in the blank) have come to mean today. They also ask what the moral and ethical implications are of using these words in these new ways.
Of course, the idea that words are used to manufacture consent is not new. Noted linguist Noam Chomsky has been talking about this for years. But Collateral Language takes the phrases right out of, say, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations yesterday and puts them in their proper peace = war and war = peace context.
Language "helps to create a climate in which the need for military action appears to be self-evident," the editors write in their introduction. "Almost immediately after Sept. 11, supposedly `objective' journalists were echoing politicians and pundits by saying `The United States has no choice but to respond,' thereby giving the subsequent war an aura of inevitability.''
And, in so doing, the media, which give more of a platform to military experts than to voices of protest, obscure the true impact on human beings who are the "collateral damage'' in "precision air strikes'' or "targeted killings.''
As the editors point out: "To speak of `collateral damage' is a far cry from acknowledging the blown-off limbs, the punctured eardrums, the shrapnel wounds, and the psychological horror that are caused by heavy bombardment."
Watching TV all day yesterday there was no talk I caught of the blood that will probably run in the streets of Baghdad. And you can bet that, if and when the invasion occurs, we'll all be spared images of the guts and gore that will be spilled.
All the better to narrow the range of thought we give to a war that, as in Nineteen Eighty-Four, seems to have no end.
Antonia Zerbisias appears every Thursday. You can reach her at azerbis@thestar.ca
Copyright 1996-2003, Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved.