Brook Hatch
English 102 Spring Quarter 1999
Instructor:  Joanna Reeve
5/6/1999

Polite Murder

	In this land of milk and honey we Americans have it made. Unemployment is at an all time low, national debt is down, and the stock market is going through the roof.   We’re the big kid on the block in world politics.   Things are so great here that we have pleasant ways of describing acts of destruction and mayhem our nation commits against the inhabitants of other countries.   We have the luxury of contemplating brutality and murder of the foulest sort in terms that we can share over dinner with our loved ones.    We condone violence by psychologically softening the blow with less confrontational words.   To point out one example of the evolution of this vocabulary, consider what we called the psychological effect that killing other human beings had on some soldiers.   In the Civil War, men suffered from “the shakes.”   In the “war to end all wars, World War II, we said that some soldiers upon returning to the USA were suffering from “shell shock.”   It became “battle fatigue” between then and the “police action” in Vietnam. Psychologically damaged veterans of that “military action” were said to suffer from “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.”   I’ve also heard the term, “the hundred meter stare.” That sounds relaxing and mildly contemplative, doesn’t it?
	The effect that this sanitizing language has upon our behavior is profound. By euphemizing violence, we largely ignore its ugly, brutish nature.   Haig BosMajian, a speech communication professor at the University of Washington, comments, “during the Vietnam war, when government officials talked of “regrettable by-products,” they meant civilians killed by mistake; “pacification” meant the forcible evacuation of Vietnamese from their huts, the rounding up of all males, the shooting of those who resisted, the slaughtering of domesticated animals and the burning of dwellings…”(218). The reality becomes clear if we replace these foggy terms with hard, raw, descriptive words.
 We “fight” for peace by sending military “peace keeping” forces into battle “theatres.”   It sounds as if we were launching a dozen aggressive doves into an empty concert hall.  The reality is that war is hell and it is a largely avoidable evil.   We condone acts of violence because we don’t think of the acts as truly violent, just firm or punitive.   We accept bloody war because we are not presented with the concept of human beings suffering the excruciating agony of being burned alive or torn to pieces by shrapnel.
	Recruitment posters suggest that young men and women can “be all you can be in the Army.”   Of course being dead falls a little short of that high ideal.   Becoming an emotionless mass murderer who is incapable of being assimilated back into suburban society is equally unacceptable.   Akin to words describing the condition of soldiers after combat and imprisonment, inserting an acronym further removes one the hard truth. As Bella English, a writer in the Boston Globe mentions, “you’re never “killed in action,” but you’re KIA, as if that’s kinder and gentler.”   In the gulf war, “allied soldiers who have been captured are… POWs, captured Iraqis have become EPWs, or Enemy Prisoners of War” (236). 
We have attempted to minimize if not completely circumvent the deaths and capture of our “allied forces” (read human beings here) by employing long distance weapons of destruction. We give them names like Patriot missile, Cruise missile, and ICBM.   What does global thermonuclear destruction, the eradication of all life on this planet have to do with IBM?   It may seem like a stretch of the imagination, but one could easily mistake the acronym for “Inter Continental Ballistic Missile” with an image of a room full of clever pre-teens infiltrating the computer systems of hostile nation states.   Of course the former invariably has a multi-megaton nuclear warhead attached with a destructive potential that dwarfs that of the first atomic bomb we dropped on the city of Hiroshima with its regrettable “collateral damage” extinguishing the lives of thousands of human beings.
We’ve heard the argument "guns don’t kill people, people kill people".   I think we should apply that same analogy to the words we use.   Words alone cannot kill, but the grossly negligent attitudes euphemistic words foster are the real instruments of polite murder.   

Works Cited
Bosmajian, Haig A.  “Dehumanizing People and Euphemizing War.”   Goshgarian 215-220.
English, Bella.  “When Words Go to War.”  Goshgarian 235-237.
Goshgarian, Gary, ed.  Exploring Language.  8th ed.  New York:  Addison-Wesley, 1998.