The term anti-personnel falsely implies mines target military organizations, not civilians

Evidence

According to the U.S. Air Force Dictionary, “anti-personnel” means “designed to destroy or obstruct personnel.” But who are these personnel that the mines are so anti? An Afghan girl, late for school, who takes a short cut across a hill. A Vietnamese herder, dreaming of dinner, while rounding up his pigs. An Angolan peasant clambering down a riverbank to fill her water jug. A Laotian farmer, stooping to harvest his rice, who reaps blindness and amputation instead. … Webster’s defines “personnel” as “the body of persons employed in an organization.” So to call mines “anti-personnel” flatters their accuracy by implying that they target an organization, military or otherwise. Yet four-fifths of landmine casualties are civilians: mostly peasants and, disproportionately, children. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 670

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines anti-personnel and personnel against their dictionary use, exposing the euphemism’s civilian-erasure.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s whole project on euphemism and the masking of dispersed harm — echoes ch1’s rhetorical unmasking and ch44-47 precision-warfare critique. — connects to: Technocratic military jargon euphemistically erases civilian bodies from weapons’ names — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 669
• SEED: The concrete vignettes (schoolgirl, herder, water-fetcher) show how enumeration can rehumanize statistics — a craft model for making slow violence legible.

Broader Connections

• Technocratic military jargon euphemistically erases civilian bodies from weapons’ names #expands (0.85) — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 669