"The Power of Words in Wartime."

The use of language has the ability to create, separate, and destroy all kinds of people, places, and ideologies. Words, when used correctly and effectively, can create in our minds an idea, or stereotype if you will, of a certain person or group of people. During wartime, referencing the opposing force as “the enemy” instead of as Iraqis, Germans, or Japanese creates a mental separation between oneself and those that our politics—good or bad—have decided to pit us against; thus, making it easier for a soldier to be able to kill, and for those on the home-front to be able to hate. The people in charge of countries are there for a reason—they are hard-wired with the ability to perform nuero-linguistic programming on the masses. In the circumstances Lakoff describes, I feel that she is correct in arguing that language is a powerful weapon. The use of language is the starting point and stepping-stone for everything that happens thereafter. This essay is not focused primarily on language or on war, it focuses on the correlation between the two—that war cannot be separated from language. Without propaganda techniques the reason for a soldier to go to war seems avoidable and unimportant. You cannot tell a soldier he is going to go kill someone with a family; a wife, a baby, parents, brothers, and sisters. You cannot tell a soldier that the people he is bombing were once children too, that they eat, play, and love just like him. He—the soldier—as a compassionate human-being, would not do it. You tell a soldier that he is not killing a person; but that he is killing an idea, a threat, an enemy. This makes it easier for the soldier to do what he is supposed to do; and it makes those at home able hate and discriminate against those that we, as a part of the socio-political machine, are supposed to. The barrier created by linguistics coupled with the mental anguish caused by war, make the abuses such as the one at Abu Ghraib likely to happen. I agree with Lakoff when she says, “To make abuses at Abu Ghraib unthinkable, we would have to abolish war itself.” In response to the question of whether or not it is necessary to illustrate America as the victims of the power of words—I say—It doesn’t matter. At all. It really makes no difference. War is war and every participant, each side, is both the abuser and the victim of everything associated with war. We are the killers and the killed, we are the torturers and the tortured, we abuse and are abused. So victimizing America in this essay would only add to the feelings of “us” and “them.” It isn’t “us” and “them” it’s everybody and everything together—we are all guilty of the atrocities associated with war. We are also all victims of the atrocities of war, so it doesn’t matter who said what or who did what to whom—the fact is that we’re all basically the same and until we start expressing those ideas we’re sort of stuck in limbo.