On one of the earlier threads -- Report Card -- some of the commenters were talking about the use of "sanitation" metaphors as a precursor to genocide -- i.e. "our enemy, the hated [insert minority group here] are vermin, spread disease, poison the wells, etc." Well, having followed that conversation, I definitely did a double take when I came across this quote:
It is critical that we confront those organizations and those elements that want to use mob violence and intimidation against the Iraqi people. It's critical that we confront them now rather than after June 30th. It is critical that we cleanse the Iraqi body politic of the poison that remains here after 35 years of Saddam Hussein's totalitarian rule. (emphasis added)
Coalition spokesman Dan Senor
Press Briefing
April 12, 2003
I don't think Dan Senor is a Nazi, or even a particularly evil person -- although he does strike me as exactly the kind of bureaucratic toady that tends to thrive in a totalitarian system. The health of the American political system is inversely related to the degree to which people like Senor rise within it, and right now, as in Nixon's time, it's definitely on the critical list.
But what struck me is how easy it is for simple-minded hacks like Senor to slip into the rhetorical style of fascism -- using depersonalized biological or medical terms for the bloody business of killing people on a large scale.
[...]
But the title of the piece -- "How to Squeeze a City" -- also reflects the same emotionally detached, morally neutral tone, as if Fallujah was just a big pimple that had to be popped.
I've used these kinds of distancing techniques myself -- writers often do when they want to highlight the horror of a situation by understating the actual details. Hemingway's descriptions of World War I trench warfare, or Joseph Heller's matter-of-fact treatment of a dying airman in Catch 22 are examples. But what's at work here seems to be just the opposite: Senor wasn't trying to highlight reality, he wanted to deaden it. It's the corporate PowerPoint warrior's classic urge to give the customer (in this case, the American public) nothing but happy news, combined with the classic totalitarian impulse to replace real verbs -- "kill", "destroy", "bomb" -- with artificial ones -- "reduce", "degrade", "neutralize" -- when talking about enemy dead.
Friendly casualities may or may not qualify for such sanitizing, depending on the propaganda objectives. Thus the steady toll of American combat deaths (which the administration wants to hide) are described as dispassionately as possible, while the four contractors in Fallujah (which the administration wanted to personalize in order to justify retaliation) got the works: "burnt corpses", "savage killing", "mutilated body parts." etc.
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