“All human behavior including conflict behavior”, James C. Davies noted, “is a function or product of the interaction of the organism and the environment.” No other environment has had a greater impact on the understanding of the horrors of conflict than the medical sciences. None other has been enlisted to make the bureaucratic, faceless, and detached killing machine of the state even more efficient and effective. Apart from the empirical knowledge medicine has shed on the consequences of violent kinetic interactions between tribes, nations, and states across millennia, medical sciences have contributed vital biomedical knowledge, and its medical lexicon has become an increasingly useful tool in rationalizing, sanitizing, obfuscating, or altogether concealing the impacts of armed conflicts on civilian populations.
Medicine, the most noble of human endeavors, has suffered “collateral damage” to its reputation since it became an essential instrument of Nazi Germany’s campaign of genocidal medical killing. Today, the intentional hijacking of its specialized jargon by the military-political, and media complex implicates the science in psychological warfare aimed to alter and sway the public’s perceptions of the devastating human toll of war through the pervasive use and misuse of comforting medical euphemisms, whilst maintaining distance between killers and their victims.
Thus, in place of “interventions” the public under assault experiences a “liberation”; “torture” is but an “enhanced interrogation technique” performed on a subject deemed a national security threat and conducted not in some backward torture chambers of the past but in far more respectable “detention facilities”; in place of sizable expansion of military engagement the population of the affected area is merely witnessing “limited ground operations” or “special operations” where “killing” is “targeted” and conducted with “precision” airstrikes. Trust us, this operation will not hurt!
Sanitizing language goes hand in hand with masking the generalized criminality of war and shielding the public from the true human cost and ethical implications of armed conflicts. In the arena of modern warfare, precision strikes and surgical operations have become the preponderant and emblematic features of strategic military tactics. Behind these sophisticated terms, however, lies a complex web of disturbing linguistic manipulations aimed at shaping public perceptions, diluting the gravity and horrors of war, and invariably 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 21st-century armies has been reduced to a banal set of active measures resulting in nothing more than a “clash” between parties interrupted by a coordinated “targeted” “exchange of fire” with organized “pacification” efforts directed at enemy insurgents. Ah, what an idyllically pacific and sterile enterprise war has become! One could mistake the soiled battlefield for an impeccably clean laboratory, where the military uniform has been replaced by a lab coat and a gun turned into a scalpel in the highly trained and competent hands of surgeon-soldiers or the “expert” class of commanders whose authority is not to be questioned or undermined by the uninitiated lay public.
The celebration of “precision strikes” and “surgical operations” as strategic advancements, however, obfuscates criminal responsibility and legal liability for their many uses, misuses, and abuses in the theatre of war. After all, is a “targeted” killing a deliberate pre-emptive attack on an enemy combatant or a mode of self-defense? Are “precision” missile or drone airstrikes subject to the same legal evaluation and calculus as good old-fashioned “attacks” defined in the military manuals and codified in international humanitarian law of the century past? What does a medicalized conduct of war mean in legal terms? Can International law function effectively if it lacks a fundamental grasp of ever more perversely medicalized methods and means of warfare? If the methods of warfare are sterile, precise, and clinical and the means of targeting strategic, can there ever be any culpability or command responsibility for such impeccably sanitary military operations under international laws of armed conflict or international humanitarian law?
At its core, the manipulation of language is a conscious effort on the part of governments and their militaries to mitigate the legal consequences of armed conflicts; to avoid implicating morally the civilized societies who would not dare partake in such an otherwise malignant project, where despite their best “surgical” efforts only countless civilian casualties and devastating infrastructural damage can be calculated with outmost empirical exactness. The distortion of language is not merely a rhetorical camouflage but a seductively premeditated attempt to hide unpleasant truths and thus finesse and manipulate perceptions around modern warfare, fostering a sense of detachment and desensitization that allows conflicts to “freeze”, “thaw” and continue without widespread outrage, opposition, or legal liability. Recognizing and dissecting this linguistic subterfuge is especially critical to unveiling the appalling reality behind the carefully constructed façade of organized state killing and holding those responsible, accountable.
[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 Rozpedowski is a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy and an Adjunct Professor at George Mason University.
