James C. Davies noted that “all human behavior, including conflict behavior, is a function or product of the interaction between the organism and the environment.” No other environment has had a greater impact on understanding the horrors of conflict than medical science. No one else was recruited to make the state’s faceless and disconnected bureaucratic killing machine more efficient and effective. Aside from the empirical knowledge that medicine has shed on the consequences of violent kinetic interactions between tribes, nations, and states over thousands of years, medical science has contributed vital biomedical knowledge, and its medical lexicon has become an increasingly useful tool in rationalizing, sterilizing, obfuscating, or concealing the effects of armed conflicts on civilian populations. .
Medicine, the noblest of human endeavors, has suffered “collateral damage” to its reputation since it became a key tool in Nazi Germany’s campaign of medical genocide. Today, the deliberate hijacking of its specialized terminology by the military, political, and media complex implicates science in psychological warfare aimed at changing and influencing public perceptions of the devastating human toll of war through the prevailing use and abuse of comforting medical euphemisms. While maintaining the distance between killers and their victims.
Thus, instead of “interventions,” the audience under attack experiences “liberation”; “Torture” is nothing but an “enhanced interrogation technique” performed on a subject deemed a threat to national security and conducted not in some backwards torture chamber of the past but in much more respectable “detention facilities”; Instead of a significant expansion of military engagement, the population of the affected area sees only “limited ground operations” or “special operations” where killing is “targeted” and carried out with “precision” air strikes. Trust us, this process won’t hurt!
Cleansing language goes hand in hand with concealing the generalized criminality of war and protecting the public from the real human cost and moral consequences of armed conflict. In the modern arena of war, precision strikes and surgical operations have become the dominant and symbolic features of strategic military tactics. But behind these complex terms lies a complex web of disturbing linguistic manipulations aimed at shaping public perceptions, downplaying the seriousness and horrors of war, and steadily distorting historical records and narratives. Medical terminology has once again seeped into civil discourse to rationalize, normalize and justify organized state violence.
The brutality of twenty-first century armies has been reduced to a banal set of active measures that result in nothing more than a “clash” between parties interrupted by “targeted” “exchanges of fire” coordinated with organized “pacification” efforts directed against enemy insurgents. . Oh, what a peaceful and poetically futile war of institutions! One could mistake the dirty battlefield for a perfectly clean laboratory, where the military uniform has been replaced by the lab coat and the rifle has been transformed into a scalpel in the hands of highly trained and competent surgical soldiers or the “expert” class of leaders whose authority should not be questioned or undermined by The uninformed secular public.
However, celebrating “precision strikes” and “surgical operations” as strategic developments obscures criminal liability and legal responsibility for their many uses, misuses, and abuses in the theater of war. After all, is “targeted” killing a deliberate pre-emptive attack on an enemy combatant or a means of self-defense? Are “precision” air strikes by missiles or drones subject to the same legal assessment and calculus as the good old “attacks” defined in military manuals and codified in international humanitarian law of the last century? What does medical conduct of war mean in legal terms? Can international law function effectively if it lacks a basic understanding of the methods and means of warfare of a more perverse medical nature? If the methods of warfare are sterile, precise and clinical, and the means of targeting are strategic, can there be any guilt or command responsibility for such impeccably healthy military operations under the international laws of armed conflict or international humanitarian law?
The manipulation of language is, at its core, a conscious effort on the part of governments and their militaries to mitigate the legal consequences of armed conflicts; To avoid implicating morally civilized societies that would not dare participate in such a pernicious enterprise, where despite their best “surgical” efforts the countless civilian casualties and devastating infrastructure damage can only be calculated with the utmost empirical precision. Distortion of language is not merely a rhetorical camouflage, but a seductive and deliberate attempt to hide unpleasant facts, thereby manipulating perceptions of modern warfare, and fostering a sense of detachment and insensitivity that allows conflicts to “freeze” and “thaw” and continue without ceasing. Widespread anger, opposition, or legal liability. Recognizing and dissecting this linguistic artifice is particularly crucial to uncovering the horrific truth behind the carefully crafted façade of organized state murder and holding those responsible to account.
[Photo by the U.S. Air Force, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons]
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.
Dr. Joanna Rozbydowski is a non-resident fellow at the Center for International Policy and an international law scholar based in Washington, DC.
War has long been seen as a brutal and unrelenting conflict, but it is also marked by a subtle and complex language. Deciphering this language is crucial for understanding the dynamics and motivations behind conflicts. From the nuances of diplomatic negotiations to the coded messages of propaganda, the language of war is both overt and covert, requiring careful and thoughtful analysis to unravel its true meanings. By delving into this delicate language, we can gain a deeper insight into the intricacies of war and the psychological, political, and social factors driving it.