Though it would be unreasonable and highly unfair to claim that the deaths that have so far occurred among Iraqis civilian population were the intention of the Anglo-American coalition, the use of the term collateral damage serves to divorce the actual human cost of war in terms of civilian casualties from the reporting of those casualties to the American and British publics, who are at present fighting a war in the Persian Gulf by proxy. Contrasted to the horrors of Tokyo, Dresden, London, Rotterdam, Leningrad, and Hiroshima during the Second World War, horrors caused intentionally to destroy civilian morale and caused in accordance with what are generally considered the tenets of ''total war'', the deaths of civilians in Baghdad and Basra seem to be more accidental than intentional on the part of the United States and Great Britain (never mind, though, that if it weren’t for those two countries initial instigation of military action involving aerial bombardment, those deaths would not even be a possibility).
Some, however, have called into question the efficacy of doublethink expressions such as collateral damage. Hendrik Herzberg wrote in the New Yorker's April 7th edition that, ''collateral damage is one of those antiseptic-sounding euphemisms that are sometimes more chilling than plain language, so hard do they labour to conceal their human meaning.'' After all, the purpose of expressions such as collateral damage is to obscure the truth just enough for the speaker to avoid scrutiny for his remarks. On the other hand, imagine the reaction of the parent or child of one of the individuals blown to bits in a Baghdad marketplace and the term collateral damage doesn't quite seem appropriate to the situation. As Orwell writes in 1984 as Winston Smith struggles to remember his mother, lost to him in childhood, ''tragedy'', he perceived,'' belonged to the ancient time''. The times in which we live are beginning to bear a frightening resemblance to those of Orwell's ''Negative Utopia'', where tragedy does not exist as it once did, a world where death has passed from a human loss to a statistic and is fast becoming a sterile fact of life.
In the wake of September 11th, pundits wondered if irony had been killed along with the 3 000 people in the towers. It seems now, in the wake of more senseless bloodshed whose reality is sheathed in doublethink expressions like collateral damage, that it is not irony but tragedy whose death knell tolls. This loss of touch with reality, as far as human cost is concerned, constitutes yet another frightening similarity between our world and the world of 1984. Even more frightening is the degree to which this trend is precipitated by governments: as in 1984, the government uses terms such as collateral damage to prevent any real blame from falling into its lap, and thus assures the maintenance of its absolute power.
In the months leading up to the Coalition invasion of Iraq on March 19th, the term regime change was bandied about as a possible motive for military action. It was in the best interests of the Iraqi people, the governments of the United States and United Kingdom argued, to launch an invasion into the country. Never mind that that particular argument was alternated with ''invade to disarm Iraq'' on a fairly regular basis, the Anglo-American partnership centred (immediately before the attack, anyway) around removing from power the tyrannical despot Saddam Hussein, whose oppression of the Iraqi people had been allowed to continue for far too long. Understandably, the Bush administration made no attempt to remind the American public that daddy’s little war in the Gulf twelve years ago left the Hussein government intact, and that American troops had, in fact, pulled out of the country just in time to leave those rising up against Saddam to be butchered ruthlessly by Iraqi Republican Guard without any US support. Twelve years later, that’s all water under the bridge, right? Of course, because Junior’s intent on being the leader that finally achieves the regime change that has [cough] been the United States' goal all along.
But what does regime change really mean? The censors in the US Ministry of Information are intent on the public knowing that the term refers to the unseating of the terrible, horrible, unspeakably awful Saddam Hussein and replacing him with a new administration that will democratically govern Iraq for all Iraqis. This particularly juicy piece of jargon really refers to the removal by military force the Hussein administration and replacing it with a new regime, as the victorious United States sees fit, one that will cater to the American oil interests in the region and help a bitter American President facing economic downturn remove from his side the thorn that is the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and replace the cartel with a much more easily-stomached system of controlling the flow of oil: US hegemony. The needs of Iraqis, if they are indeed catered to after the war's conclusion, will be minded only to please cameras and soothe the American public.
Much more frightening about the concept of regime change, is the power of the media that conveyed that expression to the public to focus its attention on specific targets, and to make other events almost completely unknown. No CNN coverage has so far been devoted to the Cuban government's rounding up and confiscating the papers of members of domestic non-violent opponents that began immediately after the United States and Great Britain went to war. No ABC reporter has covered the story of the hundreds of suspected members of opposition groups that were arrested or beaten by Robert Mugabe's government in Zimbabwe since March 19th. CBS has so far been mute on a similar situation in Belarus. Regime change, too, may meet the same media fate as these atrocities. It will likely be swept under the table as soon as the war in Iraq is over and the Bush administration has found a new target. Regime change, such a popular topic for coverage leading up to and during the present conflict, is likely nothing more than yet another piece of doublethink jargon produced by an administration with no real intention of keeping its word on the subject. How much have we, the public, and heard on the progress of US-instigated regime change in Afghanistan?
Almost immediately after September 11th, the Bush government established the Department of Homeland Security, charged with ensuring that the attacks of 9-11 would not happen again. In reality, homeland security has taken on a meaning only remotely related to the Department’s originally prescribed mandate. Never mind that, according to Harper's magazine, only one in eight Americans believe that the new Department of Homeland Security makes the nation ''a lot safer'', the Department has made it its crusade to protect the American people and their way of life at all costs, including the sacrificing of American civil liberties. Why are these attacks on fundamental constitutional guarantees going unnoticed? Because their damning identities have been successfully smothered by the term homeland security.
The paternalistic ''it's for your own good'' seems to be particularly appropriate for the approach the government has chosen with the use of the term. Increased scrutiny of the American public has been shielded behind the term and as a result the weeding out and removing from the crowd of those who stand to pose a threat to Big Brother George has not been brought to the attention of those who could be next. Instead, the American public has been kept transfixed, as were Orwell's paroles, by shallow entertainment, pleasures of the flesh, and images of death to those who ''deserve it''. This last diversion is particularly Orwellian: in “1984”, Smith recollects a scene from a flick shown to the paroles, ''There was a middle aged woman who might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms. Little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms around him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself. All the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him. Then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood.'' It's this type of entertainment being flashed across our television screens, to divert a public eager to be diverted. The US government has also promulgated the sense of hysteria and anger focused on the perceived threat to homeland security by repeatedly broadcasting the faces of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein on television and in the media.
The public's quasi-Pavlovian response is reminiscent of the two minutes' hate in “1984”, during which Orwell describes a video segment with the face of the enemy within, Goldstein, superimposed over images of the enemy without. In our modern world one cannot read the passage without being reminded of the images flashed across our society's television screens, the television media, whose evening broadcasts are fast becoming our culture's ''thirty minutes hate'': ''And all the while É behind [Goldstein's] head on the television screen there marched the endless columns of the Eurasian army row after row of solid-looking men with expressionless Asiatic faces, who swam up to the surface of the screen and vanished, to be replaced by others exactly similar. The dull, rhythmic tramp of the soldiers' boots formed the background to Goldstein's bleating voice''. Once again the Orwellian thesis that the best way to prevent a public from questioning its leadership is to keep its energies focused on an external enemy has been proven frighteningly accurate by the current US administration.
Two words that we used to know as part of the English language have been assigned new definitions by the dictionary-editing American government. Freedom and liberation once were used to give names to indefinable concepts that simply existed but could not be appraised. Since the invasion of Iraq, the American government's attempts to turn freedom into an ideology rather than a human right have intensified. Those who are not defined as ''free'' by the US government are not in fact free at all and require immediate liberation, a term that once meant something similar to emancipation but now is used to mean to be brought under the direct or indirect control of the United States of America. It's no real surprise that the latest attack on Iraq is called Operation Iraqi Freedom, but is not in fact about freedom at all, but about liberation. And the US government wonders why their gun-toting ambassadors aren’t being met with parades and fireworks!
Before regime change became the priority of the Anglo-American strike on Iraq, we were told that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. And he might still have them. Maybe. But since UNMOVIC inspectors can't find them, Saddam must be hiding them! Because he has them! We have the receipts! The United States took what was once a technical term and turned it into any type of weapons that we sold you or didn't sell you but that we no longer think you deserve to have. What's frightening isn't that a madman might be stashing potentially devastating weapons in the Middle East, but that the United States government has entered into public use a term with a definition so loose but with ''acceptable consequences'' substantial enough to put any potentially unfriendly state at risk of invasion or worse.
The United States government has undertaken the task of slowly rewriting the English dictionary to fit its specifications, and has brought the predictions of George Orwell to life in terrifyingly accurate representations. The realities of the modern media blitz, where the world can only be safe while in a state of war, where freedom means subservience to the ideals of a country thousands of miles away and adherence to its school of thought, and where to know enough to question the state of affairs is said to demonstrate a weakness of faith in the ideals of freedom and democracy, it becomes clear that the administrations of the world's states tacitly acknowledge that:
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
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