"Collateral Damage," Once Again

by

James W. Harris

(Atlanta Press, September 1998)

"We did everything possible to minimize collateral damage."

That statement, or variations of it, was heard again and again from US government officials after the US bombings of alleged terrorist sites in Afghanistan and Sudan.

"Collateral damage," of course, is a military euphemism for the killing of innocent civilians -- in this case, the killing of utterly innocent people who might happen to be within range of exploding US missiles.

Regardless of whether you think the bombings were good policy or not, the use of such carefully crafted, blatantly deceptive language should chill you -- and put you on your guard. It indicates just how seriously the US government takes the business of manipulating American opinion and duping citizens about what it is doing.

The phrase "collateral damage" is worse than mere jargon, more sinister than a simple lie. It is an obscenity. It completely dehumanizes the innocent men, women, and children who are killed by US policy. It deliberately strips them of their humanity by describing them in vague, bland, antiseptic and business-like terms more appropriate to inanimate objects.

"Collateral damage" brings to mind images of damaged buildings or late bank payments. It is hard, almost impossible, for us to mentally picture "collateral damage" bleeding or screaming or crushed or mangled or writhing in pain or losing limbs or forever blinded. It is difficult to visualize children or parents or grandparents -- people like you and me -- sobbing and wailing over "collateral damage."

And that is exactly why the phrase is so useful for the government and military. It is also, perhaps, why so few Americans object to its use, despite its almost comical clumsiness. After all, who wants to think about dead mothers and maimed teenagers, paid for by our tax dollars? It's so much easier to simply cheer our side on, to pretend every conflict is just good guys (us) killing bad guys (them), with no innocent bystanders being annihilated.

Language like "collateral damage" helps keep consciences unconscious, helps banish potentially troubling thoughts. It anesthetizes our souls.

"Collateral damage" helps obscure political decisions that might otherwise be perceived as war crimes, or at the very least be denounced as cruel and uncivilized. After all, the civilian killings so neatly labeled "collateral damage" are not unexpected flukes or accidents. They are probabilities planned for in advance, part of the cold calculations done before weapons of mass destruction are launched into populated regions.

As The Nation magazine editorialized during the Gulf War: "The concept of 'collateral damage' is a monstrous sophistry -- in Anglo-Saxon criminal law, a man who throws a hand grenade into a crowd is rightly presumed to have intended the death of everyone he kills, not merely the individual he may have been aiming at."

Revealingly, I did not hear the phrase used once in regard to the terrorist bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. I heard no one refer to the hundreds of murdered and wounded men, women, and children as "collateral damage." Instead, the innocent civilian casualties were described as... innocent civilian casualties. This is to be expected. Terms like "collateral damage" have their places. They are only used to describe officially-sanctioned US killings of foreign civilians, not the killings of innocents by our enemies.

"Collateral damage" is a phrase George Orwell would have understood well. The nightmare totalitarian government he created in his novel "1984" used just such phrases to mold the thinking -- indeed, the souls -- of its citizen-slaves. In his classic 1945 essay "Politics and the English Language," Orwell observed: "In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible... Thus, political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness... Political language [is] designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable."

Precisely. And I fear it is working.