War on words: Conflict corrupts language

War distorts everything, including language. Govts invent sterile phases and crude metaphors to make violence seem less disturbing and/or to diminish those perceived to be the enemy. But repeated use of such vocabulary changes societies using it, corrupting its soul and desensitising people to brutality or even genocide.

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It’s About Control

Ultimately, the goal of war vocabulary is to maintain control and justify actions that would otherwise be deemed as extreme or beyond the borders of reasonability. Writer John Rees says that George Orwell recognised this long ago. He understood that corruption of language was not a side-effect of political decay but the mechanism itself. Words only have meaning in relation to other words. And if one starts shifting those associations, meanings themselves change.

Take Israel’s war in Gaza following the Oct 7 terror attack. Israeli authorities have consistently deployed a strategy that plays on Israeli citizens’ fears and anxieties to justify the relentless bombardment of the Palestinian enclave. Therefore, Israel’s military actions are portrayed as necessary ‘security measures’. And the Israeli phrase that captures this perfectly is ‘mowing the grass’. The latter essentially refers to Palestinians as weeds that need to be cut from time to time to keep the backyard neat.

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Former Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant also referred to Palestinians as ‘human animals’, reinforcing the perception that Palestinian lives weren’t equal to Israeli lives.


Moral Detachment

This strategy was also used by the Nazis, describing Jews as ‘the tapeworm in the human organism’. Joseph Goebbels claimed that ‘Jews have to be killed off like rats’. Stalin’s USSR adopted this playbook, but in a more sophisticated form. Political dissidents in Soviet Russia were described as ‘bloodsuckers’, ‘vampires’ or ‘vermin’ that had to be purged. We see this Soviet vocabulary continue in Russia’s war against Ukraine where Ukrainians are described as ‘khokhols’, a derogatory reference to hair, and Ukraine as ‘malorossiya’ or little Russia.

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But another layer has been added to the terminologies, that of moral detachment. The latter allows even greater flexibility to bend international rules and normalise brutality. Thus, the term war is replaced by ‘special military operation’ as Russia has done with respect to its Ukraine aggression.

Similarly, American media came up with ‘US military intervention’ in Afghanistan and Iraq instead of US invasion that American actions against those two countries amounted to. Civilian Afghan and Iraqi lives lost in those wars were put down as ‘collateral damage’.

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Impersonal War Machines

Worse, sterile terminologies that justify mass death and suffering are likely to get a boost with AI and autonomous defence platforms. When a drone operator takes out a target thousands of miles away, he only sees a blip on the screen. When autonomous tanks roll through civilian areas, the operator is playing a video game in his bunker. These technologies desensitise us to the horrors of war and normalises conflict. Then people are no longer killed but ‘neutralised’. Countries are not invaded but ‘restructured’. Civilian targets become ‘human shields’ to be destroyed. And war becomes the solution for ‘root causes’.

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