The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture

The first victim of war is the truth, but only in part because of outright lies and misinformation. In larger part because words, and language more generally, are used for emotional impact, especially fostering outrage, rather than to describe reality. This misuse of language can achieve a short-term impact, but gradually words lose their emotional value as they are overused and misused. To give one example, the so-called F-bomb is now barely an F-splat. It is a punctuation mark rather than an expletive. There are too many examples in the current war in Gaza. Virtually every characterization of every action by either Hamas or Israel serves less to describe than to create outrage and delegitimize the person or people taking action. (For example, is the person who acts a perpetrator? Strictly speaking yes, but because this term comes from the language of crime and punishment just using the word casts the actor in a negative  light.)  Terrorism, genocide, reprisal, revenge, innocent,  an

 Doesn't exist.  As Dr. Bulhof taught us lo those decades ago in our Philosophy of History course, there is  chronology , or the effort to list events sequentially in their proper location, and  history.  which places event, people, and locations in relationship to one another in ways that disclose their meaning  in a particular situation  contemporary to the historian. History itself has a historical context. In theory  chronology   is more factual, but it usually isn’t. The way we label events is already a subjective judgement on them. If a person is shot and dies do we label it murder, or  war, or terrorism, or martyrdom? Every label is a moral judgment. Moreover chronology is inevitably selective. It includes what the chronicler thinks are important events, and leaves out the rest. Chronology cannot escape becoming history. This is why history must constantly be rewritten. I wrote a biography (a particular kind of history) that was published in Southeast Asia in 1994. It went t