How we are being numbed by the language of politicians
Here I am in perhaps the world’s most livable city, sitting in front of the tube after one of the best home-cooked meals on the continent and suddenly I'm struck by an irritating question. Why does my brain crash and my ears shut down every time I hear the word “terrorism”? When used together with the word “war,” as in the phrase “war against terrorism,” I’m tempted to scream—the only affordable therapy for a 60-year-old teenager who doesn’t get it, who thinks that terrorism is a phoney, a setup, a fabrication, pure baloney. Normally, as most couch potatoes, I’m terminally short on passion. But there is something about a procession of body bags passing across the TV screen that sets off a reaction of self-identification, of taking a position. Nothing too dangerous, you understand. I am elitist and pampered, but am willing to stand up in a cultural struggle over words. The horrible disaster that occurred on 9/11 has spawned an insidious, politically correct vocabulary of cowboy metaphors and wartime rhetoric, whose slovenliness has made it easy to imagine that terrorism or antiterrorism are political options, and that some kind of shared patriotism or collective identity vis-à-vis the Islamic fanatic is going to save us. Looney tunes like “We’re gonna hunt ’im down and smoke ’im out,” “bring ’im to justice dead or alive” and, more recently, “We got ’im,” are remarks more becoming of son of paleface trying to impress his bed mate Trigger, or the local saloon keeper, but they don’t make our lives safer and are an irritating obfuscation for anyone trying to make sense of our everyday lives. Who in Munich doesn’t feel more like the hunted than the hunter when they board a plane, attend an event at the Amerika Haus or open their mail wearing a white plastic bunny suit? Calling the other a coward or a thug is only an exercise in humiliation, which merely serves to subject us to more danger than is necessary. Used in the sense of a “war” on drugs, or crime or Aids, the word “war” is a—more or less—harmless linguistic exaggeration referring to a diffuse campaign employing a wide range of civil, political, economic and police counter-measures. Unfortunately a few goofball freeform pulpiteers managed to label the 9/11 attack “terrorism” rather than, for example, a “crime against humanity,” transforming innocent victims of a dramatic event into martyrs, reinvigorating nationalist logic, substituting the complex political, social and economic problems that we need to confront for a simple “us vs. them.” The crowd at OK corral, screaming for a shoot-out, swaggering around, looking for a brawl, loved it. The word “war” was suddenly given back its real meaning and a short time later we were in a real war. Bring ’em on. And now we have war fronts everywhere. Iraq is a front, Turkey, we are told, is a front, too. Anywhere that terrorists (people who have a beef and don’t eat pork) think they can strike is a front. Flap your flag, shut up and salute and support this war for freedom—never mind that it is an irresponsible, gross oversimplification. From where most of us in Munich observe the events—in front of the TV or behind the newspaper—the conflict has more in common with a spectacle like a bullfight than with a real war. It is at once complicated, fascinating, spasmodic and grotesque. The bombers are bred to be killed; the police and undercover agents are paid to take chances and the spectators, the media included, are expected to applaud or abhor the events. The bull—sporting a full beard and a shaved head, a kind of Timothy Abu Mussap Wiese, wearing Lederhosen and carrying a lap top, one-third American, one-third Islamic, one-third Bavarian nut—and the matador face off, both scared shitless. Encircling them are the picadors and an obnoxious group of extremists that jeer them on and demand entertainment inciting the Western and Muslim communities to a war that, weighed against alternative ways of resolving our grievances, is to no one’s advantage but the special interests and fringe groups in the peanut gallery. Controlling the risks associated with the spectacle takes a strategy that has absolutely nothing in common with hunting or military tactics. Forcing a change in the vernacular is a good start. Terrorist acts—and antiterrorist acts, where appropriate—need to be redefined as crimes against humanity, the perpetrators as fugitives from international justice and the world court and the UN as the responsible agencies to address the issue. Political bluster needs to be replaced by a dignified and statesman-like language that can be used to talk the spectators out of the stadium and back into the morality of everyday life, where integration and making peace with one’s archenemies has always been a political option and preferable to covering cadavers.