Euphemism is structurally necessary to sell wars in democracies

Evidence

Humans have long relied on a combination of verbal, geographical, technological, and temporal distance to shield themselves from the enormity of what Walt Whitman called war’s “red business.” How in a democracy could wars possibly be sold, justified, perpetuated without the softenings of euphemism? (“Death,” Donald Rumsfeld once noted, “has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.”) Each conflict brings together new euphemisms, new technologies, new strategies of temporal and geographical displacement that help us keep suffering at arm’s length, allowing us to live in states of denial distinctive to our age. One crucial displacement of this kind involves the official efforts to segregate—linguistically and thereby ethically—the barbarous landmine from the humane cluster bomb that, together with depleted uranium, has become a signature weapon in the contemporary battlefield discourse of “precision.” — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 665

Categorization

• SEED: The landmine-versus-cluster-bomb split is a ready-made essay hook on how humanitarian rhetoric launders ‘acceptable’ weapons.
• XREF: Whitman’s ‘red business’ and the language-of-denial thread across the book’s chapters connects to the ch1 rhetorical unmasking claim and the ch47 sequencing. — connects to: Military euphemisms recruit language to obscure the reality of killing — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2368; State violence is laundered through euphemisms that mask its banned nature — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2148; Euphemistic labels sanitized brutal torture practices in the war on terror (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Military euphemisms recruit language to obscure the reality of killing #corroborates (0.90) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2368
• State violence is laundered through euphemisms that mask its banned nature #corroborates (0.85) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2148
• Euphemistic labels sanitized brutal torture practices in the war on terror #exemplifies (0.85)
• Totalitarian rule deliberately maintains a gap between official words and actual deeds #corroborates (0.75) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 930