A Glossary of Warmongering

national | miscellaneous | news report Friday March 14, 2003 10:57 by Joe Sheehan

'War is obsolete' -- Anatol Rapoport

Brilliant article from Counterpunch front page on the site gives proper definitions of the spin that is used! Follow the link to the definitions

by PAUL de ROOIJ

The propaganda leading up to wars debases language. In an effort to counter the inevitable prostitution of language, and to perhaps become aware of a different reality, a glossary of commonly post-Gulf War abused terms is presented below. It is an analogous development to the "Glossary of Occupation", which was meant to clarify the abused terms found in the Israeli-centric discourse.
There is one specific limitation to this glossary; it only discusses terms generally abused in the US-centric discourse. Now, Americans don't want to talk about what they have been doing to the Iraqis, and therefore there is a tendency for there to be NO words to describe what they do. Americans have no interest in describing, let alone coining terms for the Iraqi condition. For example, there are no words for the myriad cancer patients who don't have the requisite medicines. There are no words for the huge areas of Iraq polluted by depleted uranium bombs, and so on. Similarly, the media discourse has no words to describe the Iraqi condition because it has adopted a US-centric point of reference. For this reason, defining terms in a glossary is not satisfactory; it only looks at the glaring problems, the instances where there is a descriptive word.