Casey Gilfillan

I saw a video of a journalist speaking with a woman at a Trump rally, in which he asks the woman her thoughts on the Iran War. The woman corrects him that it is not a “war” because war was not declared, and it is therefore a conflict. The journalist, Jordan Klepper, pushes her on this some, highlighting that Donald himself has used the term “war” while referencing it, and pointing out the laughably intangible line she seeks to draw, as she is attempting to constrain reality through description. He doesn’t put it like that of course, and instead frames it in the context of illegally avoiding procedure to “have a war and call it a conflict.”  (The Daily Show, 00:03:30)

As ignorant and cultishly loyal his supporters can be, this is phenomenon that continues to aggravate but no longer surprises me. Watching this interaction unfold planted a different sort of contemplative sprout, regarding the power of language and the restrictive control we see over communication in totalitarian states. This woman likely does not see herself as a missionary in Donald’s plight for censorship, but assumes this role in her active defense of his narrative and policing of any that would combat, criticize, or imply malicious intent upon it. She banally submits to the selfish ramblings of an aspiring autocrat as though they were commands from God. She and many others do this despite facts, truth, and media that prove his misinformation for what it is.

Partisan support aside – what about the events in Iran right now do not constitute a war? An ongoing military conflict is a war, is it not? Engagements that involve bloodshed, death, sprays of bullets that rain upon the innocent and targeted alike, soldiers in combat over international waters, onslaughts of aerial bombs and long-range missiles. A nation and its resources under attack by others with the threat of mass death, even extermination; Donald threatened that Iran would be “blown off the face of the earth” just a few days ago (Trey Yingst). What is this situation lacking that excludes it from that category, other than the declaration from a warmonger that he is waging war?

Anyone who would call this a “conflict” in the context that it is ‘only’ a conflict and not a war would be kidding themselves. Softening that distinction makes effect nowhere but in the pleasure of the ears hearing it; those on the receiving ends of bombs and bullets will suffer and perish no matter how you euphemize it. And this is precisely the intent of those pressing the buttons and summoning the fresh-faced soldiers, they craft and manipulate the tone of the message in a way that is more palatable. Donald ran on a platform that promoted “No New Wars” and putting “America First,” and now has us deployments-deep in another Middle Eastern slaughter, which sort of flips those campaign promises on their heads unless they call it something else. As they wage war and brand it as something less, language is intentionally misused and subsequently weaponized with the purpose of descaling social reaction to these politics of bloodshed. It disarms because “war” is a lot scarier than “conflict,” is a lot scarier than “taking out the trash,” as one woman phrased it in the same Klepper video.

While this may seem simple enough in that it is typical parroting of verbal propaganda, banal acceptance and propagation of what they are told, there is a more sinister shift occurring beneath the surface. These missionaries, the foot soldiers of Donald’s invasive nationalism – even as he does not stick to this euphemistic message himself – help to usher in the age of linguistic censorship. By prohibiting specific ways of characterizing something – it’s not a war, it’s a conflict – and going beyond mere disagreement to the point of demanding that others submit to the same specified, approved term, they are acting as police of a defacto speech law.

In George Orwell’s 1984, they abide by the Newspeak standard, in which the scope of speech is heavily restricted. “Good” remains itself, “bad” is dissolved and is instead “ungood,” while “very good” or “great” would be “plusgood,” and so on. In the novel, a character named Syme explains the principles of the philosophy to the protagonist, stating, “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it” (Orwell 50). The motivation behind language permittance clearly comes from a desire for control, one deeply embedded in the structure and functions of society. In policing what people are allowed to say, the resulting effect is often a reduction in the content of their thought, and even an alteration of the content due to the limited tools for transmission.

Restriction on language is often employed by authoritarian regimes in an effort to solidify control, instill obedience down to the very thoughts of their subjects, and to dilute the poignancy of truth that might contradict them. In our own timeline, we can see the very last of these phenomena happening before our very eyes. They drop bombs and send missiles, ship your neighbor’s son home in a body bag and scrub the body count, slaughter buildings full of school girls and create craters in the earth, and then they say, this is not a war, it’s just a conflict with guns and ammunition and the bottomless, blood-soaked budget of the taxpayers’ wallet. They do this and then audaciously stand for moral retribution, and cast shame upon us for referring to it as anything more than none of our business.