It has always been quite interesting for me to notice how one of the most basic and often used tools of communication is so rarely questioned, so rarely analyzed. Words define our everyday world; they describe our emotions, our ideas, our actions. The author Gary Craig once said that words shape our thoughts and our thoughts eventually create our reality, and this is what gives language its awesome power. Yet so rarely do we pay attention to this great power language has on shaping our way of seeing the world. As I listen and notice how quickly we tend to pick up, accept and integrate concepts, ideas, and words given to us by people of power, politicians, presidents, military men, the mainstream media; I cannot help but wonder if we are not quite delicately being led just like lambs through a very narrow and scary path.
Surely the power of language is nothing new; propaganda has been around for millennia. Of course we know that words have a tremendous power to communicate ideas and emotions, and yet why do we keep easily accepting the narrative laid out for us by powerful elites.
Noam Chomsky once famously pointed out that the best way to control a debate in a democracy is to establish a very narrow political spectrum, but to allow for a very lively debate within these small margins. I would argue that many of the words used by people of power in politics and the main stream media often keeps the public within this very closed margin of debate and quite often channels the discussions in very narrow directions. We often do not even notice this, which is what makes words and language something that must be used with extreme attentiveness and care.
Take for example the so called ‘war on terror’ infamously announced by President George W. Bush just after the attacks of September the 11. This concept actually became a US Government policy, and it was widely accepted, debated, and referred to by politicians, generals, and the media; and yet what does it actually mean, I would be hard pressed to find a more ambiguous term. ‘Terror’ could be anything you can imagine; it could even be an elderly person riding a motorcycle at high speed in the highway. Who defines it, how do you fight it, when is it defeated, or even better why do we accept and continue to use such a terminology. Could it be perhaps because we cannot even see how far away from the margins of the debate we are, how conditioned we have become to remain inside this narrow spectrum.
Robert Fisk, the Middle East correspondent for the British paper The Independent has done a fascination job pointing out many of these concepts throughout his writing, describing them as what he calls a ‘language of power’. For instance, Fisk talks about how for decades the Israeli/Palestinian conflict has traditionally been referred to as a ‘peace process’, a term that many consider actually refers to a rather unjust, unbalanced, and dishonorable negotiation process, which has in the meantime allowed for the continuous occupation and colonization of Arab land, contrary to all international law, by the Israeli Government through what they refer to as ‘settlements’ or ‘outposts’ protected by a ‘security barrier’.
As Fisk points out, whenever this ‘peace process’ gets stuck, we talk about having it being put ‘back on track’, as if there ever was a clear cut path to peace that was being followed before. Something that will nonetheless be accomplish by a Quartet on the Middle East that is led by Tony Blair, a figure once referred to as a ‘peace envoy’, a term hard to reconcile with his eagerness to send British troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, and his alarmist views on Iran, a country he continuously described as a “looming threat”.
And so claims of occupation of Arab territory by the Israeli state have thus become a mere ‘dispute’ or nothing more than ‘competing narratives’. It is no surprise then that we cannot possibly comprehend what drives people for decades to commit cold and bloody murders when we use this kind of language, when we see them as victims of a mere ‘dispute’. Oddly enough we rarely hear of ‘competing narratives’ between the United States Government and the Taliban. It’s funny, weren’t many of these same Taliban fighters called ‘mujahideen’ or ‘freedom fighters’ during the 1980s? I wonder why that was.
Even the use of the term ‘the genocide’ seems to be almost exclusively restricted to the disaster endured mostly by Jews during the Second World War; something the Turkish Government is quite happy to respect, because the catastrophe suffered by the Armenians at the hands of the Ottomans during and just after the end of the First World War can possibly be considered as a ‘regrettable event’, a ‘mass killing’, even a ‘massacre’, but never a ‘genocide’; no, there can only be one of those. Any attempt to revise history otherwise still remains, according to the Turkish Government, as a ‘hotly dispute’ issue.
We can also see this language of power widely used by military men with terms like a ‘spike in violence’ popularized in Iraq and Afghanistan to refer to increases in the level of attacks towards coalition forces. And as Fisk interestingly points out, the term ‘spike’ refers to something that goes sharply up and then eventually moves sharply down; as opposed to a term like ‘increase in violence’ which might not necessarily decrease. Same with concepts like a ‘surge of troops’ , a term widely used in Iraq during 2006 and later in Afghanistan in 2009, instead of a term like ‘reinforcements’ which alludes to the idea of losing a war.
During the early weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, when we first started seen the origins of an armed resistance, I remember US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld referring to many of these people as ‘thugs’ and ‘diehards’. Yet it soon became obvious that the word he was poignantly avoiding was ‘insurgents’, because that would allude to the idea that just perhaps the US Government’s plan that the United States military was going to be received by the overwhelming majority of the Iraqi population as a liberating force might just have been a little too optimistic.
And so we talk about terrorism and how widespread and scary it is, and we all know what a terrorist is and looks like. He is surely a Muslim, most likely from Middle Eastern descent, quite possibly very impatient for going straight to heaven, and yet what does that make Timothy McVeigh and Anders Breivik? Are they terrorist too? .... Oh no, they are actually ‘right wing extremist’. I wonder what is the difference though.
In any case, the use of this language by people of power is not something that should surprise us at all, but what does worry me is how easily it is repeated and internalized without hardly any discussion or thought by analyst, journalist, and regular people. I believe that in order to understand why this is the case, we need to first take a look at one of the most powerful emotions experienced by living beings, fear.
It is not secret that a scared society is easily united, manipulated, and coerced into action. Fear has traditionally been used by ancient civilizations to instill loyalty and obedience to the state, and when this feeling is share by a great majority of the society, and it is thoroughly constructed and channeled by a government, it then becomes an extremely powerful tool. Fear rarely gives way to reflection and dialogue, but rather promotes strong leadership, bold decisions, and decisive action. Thus, this ‘language of power’ which uses words that denote black and white, good and bad, overly simplistic explanation easily puts societies in a constant state of fear and an ever present war footing, since it is pretty hard to take society to war if it has not been deeply scared and tricked into feeling threatened.
I remember reading Orwell for the first time as a young kid and being amazed about how well he envisioned the power of words and language. I can never forget a famous scene in 1984 when Winston ran into Syme, a friend of his who worked in the Research Department, and how Syme quickly begins to tell Winston of his work finishing the last edition of the Newspeak dictionary: “you think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it!" Syme said, “We are destroying words, dozens of them ..... We are cutting the language down to the bone. Don’t you see?” said Syme again, “The whole idea of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought ..... In the end we shall make thought crime literally impossible, because there won’t be the words in which to express it”.
Now, surely this chilling account is nothing more than a very interesting and creative work of science fiction, but is it truly so. When we have presidents talking about ‘axis of evil’, when anybody who opposes the authority of the government is labeled a ‘terrorist’ or an ‘extremist radical’ at best, when prisoners of war becomes ‘unlawful combatants’ striped of any rights and protections, when economic migrants become ‘unidentified aliens’, when the response to a terrorist attack becomes ‘the war on terror’ which has lead us to a state of endless war; we must then surely give a second thought to whether Orwell’s writing is truly a work science fiction.
The great Brazilian educator Paulo Freire always talked about the need for what he called ‘the oppressed’ to be able to start their empowerment process by beginning to name their world by themselves, a world that has traditionally been named exclusively by an ‘oppressive elite’. Hence, I would be truly weary whenever politicians, generals and populist leaders insist in naming our world exclusively on their own.
I believe we should step outside the close boundaries set by dehumanized words and concepts, and rather seek to find the excluded middle ground. We should beware of using words that feed cycles of fear, simplicity, and certainty, and rather embrace the complexity, diversity and unpredictability of the world. We should constantly think about and monitor the language of power used by the elites, and always reflect on who is doing the naming; after all, someone’s terrorist is someone else’s freedom fighter.
Phenomena and events are hardly if ever black and white, but rather more like fourteen shades of gray. It is only when we move away from words like terrorist, evil, defeat, enemy, and one tries to understand all the nuances and shades of events and people, that one is able to move away from a fearful, menacing and predictable world, into one of complexity, constant discovery and understanding.
