Empty Words and Worthless Violence

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, and on and on. These words are deployed not to inform, but to create an emotional, and thus a political impact. All, by the way, assume that the speaker or writer has access to inner motivations and attitudes of a person or people they do not actually know, and probably haven't bothered to try to understand. Some have been used so often, and in so many different cases, that hearing them again reprises the story of Chicken Little.

This is worst when a term has a clear definition in law (local, state, national or international) but is used in ways that don't fall within that definition. Such misuse of legal terms ultimately leads to frustration when institutions bound by law to act fail to do so. And this in turn leads to suspicion and distrust of these same very necessary institutions. Our use of legal terms as expressions of our outrage pushes our governments to respond primarily to our emotional needs rather than our actual welfare and that of others. When legislatures, parliaments, and general assemblies are goaded into providing therapy for the hurt and angry it is unlikely that they will accomplish their real purpose of promoting civil order, the general welfare, and peace. 

Even as I write this I realize how emotionally unsatisfying it is to try to speak the truth in clear language. I would have felt better, and maybe received more attention, if I'd used the most egregious and outrageous examples I could find. And indeed, even using the terms "egregious" and "outrageous" makes me feel a little better. Lets try a few more: stultifying, puerile, wrong-headed, back-handed, pig-headed, inane. . . See, I feel better and I haven't said anything meaningful at all. 

Yet in the end I'd rather bear with my lack of emotional satisfaction rather than undermine the only tool I have to communicate: language. When language is gone there is only one alternative. And the only thing worth less than empty words is violence; of which we have more than enough already.

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