The Language of War #

Aeschylus maintained that “the first casualty of war is truth”. Churchill agreed: “In wartime truth is so precious she must be attended to at all times by a bodyguard of lies” and later, “a lie gets halfway around the world before truth gets its pants on”.

Warmongers often justify atrocities with the term “the fog of war” When the drums beat and the trumpets sound, the voice of reason is silenced.

Voltaire mused that “killing another human being was always murder; except when it was accompanied by trumpets”.

Tallyrand’s assertion is “that what matters in politics is not the truth, but what people perceive to be the truth”. Most wars are fought defending an arbitrary version of a truth – a truth that can be a bit fluid, mercurial, or protean.

Propagandists are adept at using language for “perception management”; they often distort truth by misusing and abusing language. It is generally insidious grand scale subterfuge – attempting to cover up reality. Apologists will use euphemisms to justify the actions of their armies while using the foulest pejoratives to stigmatise, vilify and demonise the actions of their enemies. History is redolent with examples of the abuse of language as a means to “win the hearts and minds” of their own or their enemy’s population.

During the Second World War, in late 1941, the Curtin [Labor] government needed to find a way to encourage a sustained war effort from the Australian people. The Department of Information initiated propaganda which used a hate campaign against the Japanese as as an instrument of war. The message was, ‘we’ve always despised them, now we must smash them’.

“On April 10, 1942, Robert Menzies, then an opposition backbencher, gave a radio talk in which he spoke of the dangers of that policy. It was a policy, to its credit, the Curtin government soon abandoned. The relevance of Menzies’ speech to today’s world is obvious.”

Propaganda #

• a means of causing, maintaining and justifying War:

For a successful war in today’s climate, Propaganda must accomplish three objectives;

1. Leaders must convince parents to hand over their sons in the prime of their youth as cannon fodder. This is achieved by appealing to nationalistic fervour and elevating collective national concerns over private familial interests.

Patriotism may indeed be, as Dr. Johnson said, “the last refuge of a scoundrel,” but it’s also a warmonger’s first resort. Throughout history, desperate political leaders have cynically used war to unite people behind them or as a distraction from domestic problems.

2. The army’s first task is to turn normal civilised youth into hardened ruthless killing machines. Each of them, if mentally healthy, had a natural repugnance to killing another human. (1) This had to be trained out of them. They had to be trained to believe that their superior officers knew much better than they, so that orders would be obeyed without question. They, and the supporting population, also have to be trained to believe that a certain set of humans is intrinsically inferior to themselves

This can be achieved by cold heartless and contemptuous drill sergeant’s belittling, degrading and brutalising young recruits and dehumanising or depersonalising the enemy, depicting them as sub human savages. Examples of this are Bruce Dawe’s Weapons Training or Henry V’s speech to his troops before the Battle of Agincourt. In 1914, WWI, German soldiers - the Huns - were portrayed bayoneting Belgian babies. Hitler and Goebbels depicted the Jews as rats while the Rwandan genocide; the mass slaughter of Tutsi by members of the Hutu majority government, was justified by dehumanising the Tutsi as cockroaches making them easier to kill.

For war inspirational speeches: https://nebo-lit.com/language/text-types/speeches-to-rouse-soldiers.html

3. The general population’s support for the war effort must be sustained. In previous times this was not a big ask, however recent pacifist movements, anti-war sentiments and television images of the effects of carnage in people’s living rooms have necessitated stage managing media access to the brutal effects of war by censuring all media releases and curtailing the movements of free lance correspondents to ensure supportive reporting. Unauthorised photographs of the Western Front was a court martial offences. Now we “embed” our reporters.

Propaganda first became a telling force in the lead up to the Crimean War 1854 - 56. Worried that Russia might disturb the delicate balance of power in Europe by invading the Ottoman Empire to gain access to an ice free port through the Black Sea and the Dardanelles, Britain and France organised an Expeditionary Force.

In order to drum up support for their cause, Britain and France used a propaganda campaign that painted the Russian as sub human - a bear - and enthused or stirred their populations and soldiers to such high levels of espirit de corps or morale that when the Russians backed down, the French and British press urged their ministries to attack regardless and a force of just over 80,000 men was able to conquer a Russian force of over 300,000 serfs on their own territory. The term Jingoist (one who wants war -a bellicose attitude) is derived from a song of the time, “By Jingo we’ll show the Russians a thing or two.”

The success of this propaganda campaign spread to the Pacific colonies as both New Zealand and Australia reacted in panic to imagined threats of a Russian naval attack. New Zealand zealously fortified her harbours while in Australia a telegraph line from Darwin to Adelaide hastily built to warn us of an impending attack and Fort Denison in Sydney Harbour and Port Phillip Bay were fortified in fear of a Russian Navy that couldn’t make its way out of the Black Sea.

Other noteworthy consequences of the Crimean War were the contribution of Florence Nightingale organising field hospitals for cholera- stricken soldiers and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade, which chronicled a charge of light cavalry under confusing orders against impregnable Russian gun positions, giving us these memorable lines:

“Someone had blundered:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die”.

The French army general Pierre Bosquet famously declared: C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre: c’est de la folie (“It’s magnificent, but it’s not war: it’s madness”).

The Boer War (South Africa 1899 — 1902) raised the stakes in the war for the minds and hearts of the citizens of the world. The British, in their drive to secure the lucrative gold mines in South Africa were determined to dominate the Dutch Settlers and used the power of language to sway public opinion to their cause and paint the Boers in as bad a light as possible. It was waged in the true imperialist mould, revealing an unvarnished desire on the part of an insatiable Britain for world hegemony. Concentration camps, a brainchild of Lord Kitchener, made an unwelcome appearance for the first time, with women and children interned within enclosures. Neglect proved the ultimate killer – 25,000 Boer women and children, along with 14,000 natives perished simply to deprive their soldiers food, supplies and comfort - justified by calling them whelps and dams. Not Britain’s most glorious hour.

Robert Fisk writes that “governments want their people to see war as a drama of opposites; good and evil, them and us, victory or defeat. But war is primarily not about victory or defeat, but about death and the infliction of death. It represents a total failure of the human failure”.

Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut both struggle with deriving meaning from a senseless World War II. Vonnegut spends twenty years processing the meaningless bombing of Dresden for no practical purpose, yet telling his story, Slaughterhouse Five, to vent his outrage and shame. In doing so he invents a narrative and character that repudiates the traditional heroic war novel.

Heller’s Catch-22 does much the same through an absurdist approach. In both the main characters exist in a period of time, but are not a part or product of that time – they are alienated.

The central message of John Gray’s Straw Dogs is as stark as it is startling. Human progress, declares Gray, was a myth. “If we thought we were steadily becoming more civilised, then we were delusional. Instead, human beings are “weapon-making animals with an unquenchable fondness for killing”.

From The Trenches: The Best Anzac Writing of World War One, edited By Mark Dapin, examines the use of language to express a new reality.

“For the British, war was about romance and gallantry. They liked nothing more than a carefully pressed uniform, a parade ground and a razor-sharp fighting line. At most, British soldiers spent two months of the year actually training to fight. The other ten were devoted to parading, attending to their uniforms and waiting on their officers, for whom they were expected to serve as cook, valet, porter and gardener. ‘The actual conditions of warfare were studiously disregarded,’ Amery wrote. ‘Nowhere was there any definite preparation for war, nowhere any dear conception that war was the one end and object for which armies exist. In their place reigned a … hazy confidence that British good fortune and British courage would always come successfully out of any war that the inscrutable mysteries of foreign policy might bring about.’

“What took the place of actual training was an emphasis on character and courage so extreme it left room for little else. British officers in particular were expected not only to be brave, but to show a complete disregard for their own safety, an approach to warfare that often led to their untimely, if widely lauded, death. … ‘These experienced soldiers never care how fast bullets may whizz about them,’ Solomon Plaatje, a native South African intellectual, journalist and statesman, wrote after observing the British army during the war. “‘They stroll about in a heavy volley far more recklessly than we walk through a shower of rain.’

Moreover this was war where the means of death dealing were more mechanised and lethal than they had ever been. Dapin calls the first part of his book “The Great Adventure”, as he succinctly traces the soon-obliterated enthusiasm when war was first declared. Those delusions are admonished by the poem with which the section opens - Walter Turner’s Death’s Men.

These are its chilling last lines:

“click, clack, click, clack, go Death’s trim men/ Across the autumn grass”.

Following Turner up the line is Philip Schuler, an Age war correspondent who then joined the AIF. His Australia Answers the Call begins with that pseudo-chivalric language that Paul Fussell analysed in The Great War and Modern Memory: “young manhood”, “baptism of fire”, “thousands of braves”. The Great War killed off this rhetoric, as it would kill Schuler, at Messines in Belgium in 1917.

The more self-aware of the authors whom Dapin selects wrestle with the question - moral as well as stylistic - of what language can be found to register the horrors of war. Sometimes there was a resort to mocking euphemism - the naming of frontal assaults as “stunts”. For John Monash, a dry, descriptive mode seemed best: “the front line is not really a line at all, but a very complex and elaborate system of field works”. He writes also of those behind the front - field police, liaison officers with the French Military Mission, salvage corps and 200 girls in the laundries.

The favoured figurative device of Great War writing (indeed of much war literature in the century since) hearkened back to Homer. This is the simile. Official war correspondent Charles Bean wrote of “an occasional sniping shot, exactly like the crack of a cricket ball”. New Zealander Alexander Aitken likened a tank to “a pertinacious beetle”, while for Frederic Manning (whose 1929 novel The Middle Parts of Fortune Ernest Hemingway thought the finest about the war), “the drumming of the guns” was “as though a gale resounded overhead, piling up great waves of sound”.

By remaking the unfamiliar through the familiar, the horrible through the benign, simile allows the illusion of escape from war to the distant peaceful land left behind. But literary respite, like time spent away from the trenches, is only temporary. Dapin shows ways of reckoning with war and implicitly invites us to contrast them. We can set Walter Downing’s exultant account of the recapture of Villers-Bretonneux on Anzac Day 1918 - “the fierce low growl of tigers scenting blood” - with John Jacob’s account of advancing into battle: “We all got up and walked on as if we had suddenly got tired of lying there.”

This was followed by increasing sophistication of propaganda of Hitler and Goebbels during the second of two world wars, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Bosnian/Serbian Crisis and finally the current Iraq Wars. Increasingly to justify the deaths of millions of soldiers, those who were butchered were described by more acceptable terms such as casualties – (were their deaths accidental?), the fallen, losses, wastage…….. to depersonalise their deaths.

War’s effect on soldiers #

It is hard to overstate the calamitous enduring effects of modern War on many aspects of society. The ongoing cost of war is borne by individuals, families, especially successive generations of women and broader society. As well as undermining the certainties of the past, it has lasting repercussions on future psyches. The snapshot survey of 90 probation case histories of convicted veterans shows a majority with chronic alcohol or drug problems and nearly half suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, variously known as Shell shock, nerves, battle fatigue… or depression as a result of their wartime experiences on active service. While Australia only suffered about 38 soldier deaths in Afghanistan from 2001 – 2020, more than 400 returnees have committed suicide. Paradoxically, the US armed services found that remote operators of drone attacks were its highest victims.

The conventions of piety, pretence and posturing were laid bare and attempts to restore respect and order were increasingly hollow, papering over a prevailing sense of guilt, dread, despair and absurdity.

The Middle East has people fighting named in ways carefully emphasising a gulf in respectability: Israeli “soldiers” but Hamas “militants”. To Israel, naturally, the Hamas fighters were “terrorists”. They had built “terror tunnels” passing into Israel, through which more threatening things than funfair ghost trains could indeed roll. Binyamin Netanyahu said, moreover, that Hamas had turned UN facilities into “terrorist hotspots”.

Shakespearean examples: #

Language, can also be an effective inspiration in times of War. Shakespeare recognised the power of rhetoric in his History plays as he contrasts the positive techniques with negative ones, especially in Julius Caesar, Henry V, or Richard III.

Richard III’s call to arms is consistent with Shakespeare’s portrayal of a Machiavellian tyrant. He first resorts to denigrating Richmond’s followers as desperate nobodies who are guilty of envy and then appeals to his followers by assuring them of his secure protection for their lands and wives as long as he remains their sovereign. After derisively referring to Richmond as a paltry fellow and milksop, he turns to the device used by all insecure tyrants – FEAR.

The threat that “these rats will lie with our wives and ravish our daughters.” It is more of a rant, an abusive diatribe rather than an uplifting or inspiring call to arms.

As a contrast, look at the positive inspiring tone of Richmond’s address to his troops or that of Henry V before the battle of Agincourt.

During World War II,” Stephen Sewell demonstrates:

both Britain and Germany were led by men who were artists - they were both painters and both great orators.” In a sense they summoned each other up.

“And at the very moment that Churchill was delivering his ‘We shall fight them on the beaches’, the Foreign Office was drawing up plans for capitulation and saying that Churchill’s speech was a load of old cobblers. And yet it was the magnificence of Churchill’s language - that magnificent rhetoric - that gave them a pathway through to winning the war.”

Richard Flanagan on the language that takes us into War:

“everyone is a fool in war, and everyone suffers. It is humanity at its worst and best. It’s not a question of blame; we should never go to war except for the strongest of reasons. Unfortunately Australia seems to go to war for the weakest of reasons.”

“The war in Afghanistan has been a monumental catastrophe,” he added.

The writer said he deplored the way asylum seekers had been described during the last federal election. “We should never allow that because once you start [promoting] these ideas, you take the same steps that end up on the Death Railway. Poisonous language can seep into the soul of the national body, and that’s wrong.”

War Euphemisms and other language tricks: #

Politicians talk of war in euphemism; the fallen, casualties.. or in religious metaphors; crucifixion and martyrdom, while those who were there use more graphic language of slaughter and abattoirs. Most soldiers resort to silence – the horrors are indescribable – unspeakable – ineffable or as Robert Hughes puts it “the back of language is broken”.

Detaching words from their usual order has long been a tactic of the powerful and in his popular 1989 work on the practice, Doublespeak , US English professor William Lutz shows how even the ancients used language to deceive. Writing of the Peloponnesian War in the fifth century BC, Thucydides was careful to describe acts of cowardice as “courage”.

Describing a brutal massacre at Gaul, Julius Caesar used the term “pacification”.

In 1802, Napoleon, in an attempt to spread the seeds of the French Revolution attacked Austria, Italy, Spain, Germany and Russia. Instead of calling it an invasion, he called it a “liberation” with the justification that he was freeing them from the tyranny of Absolute Monarchies to that of the liberal despot. Robespierreobserved: “Nobody likes armed missionaries”.

Examples of distortions of language in War: #

The Geneva Convention established what constitutes a War Crime. Noam Chomsky maintains that every American President, could be successfully indicted for war crimes. Since 1947, the CIA has operated on a policy of “plausible denialism”, (denialism - the “practice of refusing to accept the existence of truth, or validity of something despite concrete evidence).

Military parlance becomes evasive and obfuscating; often bureaucratic, anodyne, sterile – demotive - “Escalation of force” = the killing of children - full of: Euphemisms, Pejoratives, Abstractions, Ambiguities, Metaphors, depersonalisations and vilifications.*

Once you transform people into objects with language that dehumanises them, we can justify the cruelty we inflict on them. We need to use words that respects their humanity and dignity.

Hanoi Hilton for Prison camps.Officials talked of Winning hearts and minds” Shortened to WHAM.A memorable phrase by a commander: “*In order to save the village we had to destroy it.”* To pacify a village you often had to kill everyone in it.

Vietnamese referred to as “slants, slopes, Charley, White Mice (local police), boonies of Nam, | Abstractions Ambiguities euphemisms Stigmatisation | | Iraq Conflicts Second Iraq War2003 …… | Gazan Conflict or clash (not a war) War on Terror | New Vocabulary to disguise new weaponry.CW – Chemical Weapons, *Smart bombs*, *Cluster bombs*, ***Daisy Cutters.***EPW – Enemy Prisoner of War . Civilian deaths – “collateral damage” later morphed into “friendly fire”.Attrition used as a verb “to attrit” – blast the hell out ofEnemy assets – roads, bridges, weapons, tanks, communication networks …and soldiers. Bridges not blown up but “collapsed” and they talk about the “useful erosion of military capability” Instead of demolition.

Pentagon Media Liaison Unit – *Spin doctors:* “embedded” Journalists who reported favourably on the war. We know what can happen if you get into bed with someone. Fox News glamorised the American efforts and some media were caught digitally enhancing images to favour their side. Ironically, graphic images of the atrocities at Abu Grab prison were taken by American soldiers. Bush’s *“Axis of Evil”* speech.Hussein’s “Mother of All Battles”* and “Send them home in body bags”*WMD – Weapons of Mass DestructionEPW – Enemy Prisoner of War – became *“illegal combatants”* To evade conditions protocols of the Geneva Conventions.*HVT –* High Value Target.*Renditions* – Removal of EPW to countries that condone the use of torture in interrogations. “*Black site”* neutral non-signatory to any torture prohibiting treaty.*EIT *“enhanced interrogation techniques”) or” coercive interrogation”*GWOT – Global war on TerrorMilitary “degraded” 70% of enemy combatants or deconflicted or attrited for KILLED. Condelessa Rice flat footedly denied additional deployment of troops was an “escalation” preferring “augmentation“ later becoming a **“surge”.Suicide bombers referred to as a Person-Borne Improvised Explosive Device (PBIED) The people fighting were named in ways carefully emphasising a gulf in respectability: Israeli “soldiers” but Hamas “militants”. To Israel, naturally, the Hamas fighters were “terrorists”. They had built “terror tunnels” passing into Israel, through which more threatening things than funfair ghost trains could indeed roll. Binyamin Netanyahu said, moreover, that Hamas had turned UN facilities into “terrorist hotspots”.

The Howard Government refers to Asylum seekers as *“illegal migrants”* and Rudduck referred to a young detainee as *“it”.* | Acronyms – sanitise death. Weasel words Avoids reality and neutralises emotions on killing people. Media releases become more sophisticated to stage manage the perception of combat and the process becomes manipulated and corrupted. Stigmatising Reduction to Acronyms to demote. Metaphors used to make them moreacceptable. Justifications Anodyne Demonisation and depersonalisation |

Though Terrorism has been around for more than 100 years, our leaders unscrupulously use it as a fear tactic to control and manipulate the masses.

Lyndon England had enlisted when she was 17, and she had gone through basic training during her last summer of high school. She had always wanted to be a soldier and to serve her country. In basic training, they broke you down and built you back up into a person whose actions and inactions had consequences for an entire system.

This was the principle of command responsibility: every soldier is accountable to and for her buddies, and every officer is accountable for the welfare and good conduct of his soldiers; you answer to your officer so he doesn’t have to answer for you, in every hierarchy and sub-hierarchy, at every link in the chain of command. England admired this order of duty.

Reporting on Afghanistan: media v the military #

Monash University School of English, Communications and Performance Studies’ Kevin Foster writes: Crikey – 004/09/08

When Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, the population clamoured for details of the British Expeditionary Force’s exploits in France and Belgium. But the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, refused to accredit a single correspondent to accompany British forces. Instead he appointed Lieutenant-Colonel Ernest Swinton of the Royal Engineers, to furnish reports from the front.

Swinton had few illusions about where his allegiances lay. His primary aim, he observed, was not “the purveyance of news to our own people” but to “avoid helping the enemy”: as a consequence, he determined to tell only ‘as much of the truth as was compatible with safety’.

Having gathered his information, shaped his account and purged it of any tell tale details, Swinton passed his material to his senior officers for vetting. They handed it on to Kitchener who, after putting his own blue pencil to work, approved it for release to the press, where it appeared under the ironic by-line ‘Eye witness’.

More than ninety years later, in Australian media coverage of the war in Afghanistan, we find ourselves back in “Eye-witness” world. Not a single Australian correspondent is based there. As such, the news we get from Afghanistan, “almost every picture and video of Australian troops, every audio ‘grab’ and almost every quote from a digger comes from Australian Defence Forces ‘public affairs and imagery specialists’”. These are soldiers ‘trained to use cameras and write press releases’.

Tex Guinan:

A politician is a fellow who will lay down your life for his country.

Rudyard Kipling:

If they ask why the young men died,
tell them because the old men lied.

Larry Heinemann, an American Vietnam veteran turned novelist writes:

“We were the unwilling, doing the unnecessary, for the ungrateful”

9/11 #

It would be hard to pack more history, context, and visceral meaning into two numbers than we do in the term 9/11. That day changed so much—about the world, modern life, and even the language we use. For many people, just hearing the term 9/11 instantly calls to mind the horrific scenes and complex aftermath of the attacks.

First responder - the much-celebrated heroism of firefighters, emergency medical workers, and police officers - a catchall term for a person whose job is to be the first to respond to emergencies. (In a similar way, the COVID-19 pandemic has popularized terms like frontline workers, referring to doctors, nurses, and other professionals on the “front lines” of healthcare.)

The World Trade Center site that became known as Ground Zero.

The language of patriotism is reflected in much of the language The sweeping antiterrorism bill passed in October 2001 was named the PATRIOT Act. In December 2001, Congress declared September 11 as Patriot Day. In 2002, the Department of Homeland Security was established. The site of the Twin Towers: the Freedom Tower.

The “War on Terror” and the “Forever War”

Motivated by the Taliban’s harboring of Osama bin Laden and other members of the al-Qaeda terrorist network, the US invasion of Afghanistan began in 2001. Officially ending in 2021, the war became the longest in US history, often being referred to as the “forever war.”

The demonization of Muslim populaces, reinforced by US policy, such as when George W. Bush grouped Iraq and Iran (historically enemies) under the label of Axis of Evil in 2002 or President Donald Trump enacting “Muslim ban”. Dictionary.com

Propaganda posters of the First World War from -

The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2018/apr/22/war-and-pleas-propaganda-posters-from-the-20th-century-in-pictures?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+AUS+v1+-+AUS+morning+mail+callout&utm_term=272758&subid=14416962&CMP=ema_632**)

[Speeches to Rouse solders] https://nebo-lit.com/language/text-types/speeches-to-rouse-soldiers.html

[Contrasting the Orations of Brutus and Anthony] https://nebo-lit.com/drama/julius-caesar/contrast-of-speeches-julius-caesar.html