The English language, Orwell wrote, ‘becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.’
There’s been no better exemplar of this in recent history than George W. Bush: ‘They misunderestimate me’; ‘The problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur’; ‘I think we agree, the past is over.’ Apart from doing a great disservice to the English language and making him a rather easy target for derision, the effects of the humble Bushism were largely inconsequential. That’s to say, they weren’t intentionally sinister or lethal, which certainly wasn’t true of all the rhetoric that emanated from the Oval Office during his presidency.
Much of the Bushspeak crafted by the neo-cons in the aftermath of 9/11 played a significant role in allowing the United States to shift the paradigm and reinvent the very idea of what constitutes war and, by extension, the enemy. Phrase like ‘The War on Terror’, ‘the axis of evil’ and ‘unlawful combatant’ have now slipped into everyday parlance.
The new U.S. doctrine, embodied in the idea of the world as a battlefield and carried out with drones, is documented in detail in Jeremy Scahill’s book Dirty Wars. The pseudo-legality of it all sets a frightening precedent, even for American covert activity.
The U.S.’s deliberately vague and arbitrary definition of an enemy combatant, or terrorist as they’re interchangeably termed, as any man of fighting age is an attempt to legitimise the murder of innocent civilians. Many of those killed would once have been euphemistically referred to as ‘collateral damage’, but most now see through this sophistry and no thinking official would use the phrase today. Instead, the amorphous, catch-all slur of ‘terrorist’ is bandied about.
It’s become engrained in the American psyche that ‘terrorists’ pose such a monumental threat that they have to be eliminated at any cost, even if it means laws or rights have to be subverted. These crimes are carried out in the name of democracy; it’s difficult to think of an action or regime that has done more damage to this once admirable form of government.
Extrajudicial assassinations and a complete disregard for the rule of law are fundamentally anti-democratic. One’s reminded of that wonderful scene in Robert Bolt’s play, A Man for All Seasons, in which William Roper challenges Sir Thomas More over his refusal to arrest Richard Rich:
William Roper: So, now you give the devil the benefit of law?
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get to the devil?
William Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that.
Sir Thomas More: Oh, and when the last law was down, and the Devil turned around on you-where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?…Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.
Those that supported the illegal invasion of Iraq, or Israel’s occupation of Palestine or the euphemistically termed ‘drone campaign’ failed to recognise and now refuse to acknowledge that there will be consequences for these actions.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 the question no one was asking was: ‘Why?’. I recall Alan Dershowitz’s rebuke of Robert Fisk after the Middle-Eastern correspondent asked this very question. He was, according to Dershowitz, anti-American, which in turn meant he was with the terrorists and therefore anti-Semitic – a slur Dershowitz employed to imply that he was a Nazi sympathiser.
This exchange, in many ways, foreshadowed what was to come in the Middle-East. The views expressed by Dershowitz were not confined to the Right; many liberals – often under the guise of ‘humanitarian intervention’ (another euphemism) – argued the U.S.-led invasion and occupation was a just cause and, in their eyes, to ask why made you an apologist for terrorism.
The debate was narrowed and any dissenting voices drowned out with propagandistic slurs like those leveled against Fisk.
Over a decade later, in what was pitted as a debate on the use of drones by the U.S. military in the July/August 2013 edition of Foreign Affairs, both sides conceded that some innocent civilians had and would be killed in drone strikes and agreed that it was a moot point. Arguing the case not against drones, but why they fail, Audrey Kurth Cronin wrote:
There is nothing inherently wrong with replacing human pilots with remote-control operators or substituting highly selective aircraft for standoff missiles (which are launched from a great distance) and unguided bombs. Fewer innocent civilians may be killed as a result.
Ignoring that her last point is not supported by a shred of evidence, the way the ‘debate’ was framed and argued gives one a sense of the widespread acceptance that the U.S. was still fighting a just war against an evil enemy.
With the simple act of christening someone a terrorist, there is seemingly no limit on the crimes that can be committed against them. Although terrorism has existed for centuries, it’s only since 9/11 that the U.S. has applied the term so liberally. And the trend has spread throughout the world.
In China, the Uighur’s are ‘terrorists’; in Egypt it’s the Muslim Brotherhood; in Sri Lanka it’s the Tamil Tigers; in the Ukraine it’s a charge leveled by both sides; in Israel it’s Hamas and Hezbollah; in Iran it’s the Americans; in Syria and Iraq it’s the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant; in Nigeria is Boko Haram; in Indonesia it’s Jemaah Islamiah; in Latin America it’s the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia People’s Army. One gets the point.
In many of these cases the claim is not baseless; many people from these groups have indeed carried out terrorist acts. But the label does more than describe their indiscretions; the term’s become so politicised that different people around the world think of different things when they hear it, but that these terrorists need to be crushed is the inevitable conclusion.
This provides enormous scope for human rights abuses and the subverting of the rule of law, a process with which Australia is becoming increasingly familiar. Both major parties supported the U.S.-led occupation; both parties supported the unlawful incarceration and torture of prisoners, including David Hicks and, most recently, both parties have remained shamefully silent on the drone strike that killed Christopher Harvard of Townsville and the New Zealand born man with Australian citizenship known as ‘Muslim bin John’ in Yemen last year.
For over a decade the word ‘terrorist’ has been a tool to justify illegal and immoral state actions, but when the U.S. government decided it wanted to negotiate the release of Army Sgt. Bowe Berghdal the word became an impediment. As the U.S. government has stated innumerable times, they do not negotiate with terrorists.
In an article for Slate entitled, ‘What People Don’t Understand About the Berghdal Deal’, Fred Kaplan ridiculed those who called the Taliban terrorists. ‘They are enemy combatants in a war that the United States is fighting.’ Berghdal, he went on, ‘was not a hostage…He was a prisoner of war, and what happened on May 31 was an exchange of POWs.’
One has to ask whether he’s serious. That ‘war’ he mentions is the War on Terror, launched, in part, to oust the Taliban from power in Afghanistan.
The rhetoric has become completely divorced from its literal meaning; it doesn’t stand up to any scrutiny, yet it continues to be regurgitated by a tired media that, whether intentionally or not, reaffirms the propaganda of those in power.
Unfortunately for Kaplan, before one had barely had an opportunity to digest his piece, the Pakistani Taliban attacked Karachi Airport (in an act of terror) leaving 28 people dead.
Perhaps Orwell didn’t go far enough; the ‘slovenliness of our language’ provides those in power with all the justification they need to carry out the very worst of crimes. And the impediment of their conscience, with the stroke of a pen, is easily appeased.