If you want to make something distasteful into something more palatable, changing the name helps a lot. It might not be etymologically correct, but if you get it accepted in everyday discourse your battle is pretty much won. You can change people’s view of something by changing the name. That has long been the case. We used to build large tower blocks and call them “courts” which they never were, but it sounded better to live in a court than a tower. Killing civilians in wartime didn’t seem so bad if we called it “collateral damage”. Same sex marriage could get over the line if we called it “Equal marriage”. If you are pro-abortion a “foetus” sounds better than an expected baby. You know how it works. Flipping it the other way, also works.
Nothing epitomises that more than the media and governments inversion of language when it comes to the current war in the Middle East. Here you have a whole slew of descriptive words that have not only drifted from their original meaning but been upended and become part of almost everyone’s conversation. Our language has been so massaged that we end up adopting terms that bear no actual relation to reality. The power of the media with its subtle infiltering of a mindset pulls us into the absurd situation, where we find ourselves believing something which is manifestly untrue and the simplest of investigation would show it to be so.
Images play a big role here. The manipulation is clearly effective. People will protest “We have all seen the pictures daily on our screens” without a second questioning if what we see on these screens might not actually be true. We have this strange ambivalence to the visual image, be it still or moving. We have no trouble seeing videos of Putin and Trump romping around on sledges in the snow and hugging polar bears in Alaska, knowing that they are fabricated. At the same time, we are convinced that a picture of an emaciated child in the rubble of a building, tells a true story. A story of deliberate mass starvation, even when the picture in question, featured on the front page of the New York Times is completely false, as the paper later acknowledged. It was too late, of course. The picture was false but the narrative was believed.
You know the words: ethnic cleansing, starvation, indiscriminate, massacre, apartheid, and genocide. These are universally used across the board and accepted as fact without question. When I hear the media use these words in the context of Israel’s war against Hamas, I realise they are speaking a different language from the one I know. In their classic usage they bear no resemblance to reality and are an inversion of it. It makes it hard and pretty much impossible to discuss or engage with the issue in any rational way. When the common language is lost, we are left with shouting, name calling, flag waving, flag burning and the babel of hatred, with Jackboots waiting in the wings.
First, they came for the language, but it was only words, so I said nothing.
Restless Spirit 