“Women have always been the primary victims of war.” – Hillary Clinton

Life is mind-bogglingly complex. And knowing that, and how engaging fully with that complexity every day would quickly exhaust us, we develop cognitive shortcuts for coping with it. One of the more common of these is to invest words, and the arguments we make with them, with a self-sufficiency and an invariability that they seldom possess. Though people often say, “I say what I mean, and I mean what I say,” things are never really that simple. 

One of the main reasons for this, as Saussure taught us, is that all linguistic meaning is relational in nature; that is, that the operative meaning of a given word is heavily dependent, on one hand, on its interplay with the other words in the sentence or paragraph in which it appears and, on the other, the set of semantic values “assigned to it” through repeated usage by those who fluently write and speak the language in question. 

Because most people, especially in the expert class of the US, live and work in a single semantic ecosystem day after day, and thus often have scant access to cultures and subcultures that might imbue the terms they use with a different semantic value, they tend not to think very much about the unstated assumptions embedded in them, or the many arguments that depend on these terms for their salience.

For example, the Cambridge Dictionary defines terrorism as “violent action or threats designed to cause fear  among ordinary people, in order to achieve political aims.” According to this definition, the US dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US invasion of Iraq, the NATO dismemberment of Libya, the current Israeli destruction of Gaza, and the recent assassinations of Iranian scientists and their families all qualify as acts of terrorism. And yet, you will seldom if ever hear anyone in the Anglo-American, Western European, or Israeli cultural spaces use the term to describe these actions. 

Why? 

Because the media and academic allies of those that have planned and carried out these actions have also executed campaigns of media repetition designed to imbue the term terrorism with an unstated but pervasively accepted limitation: that it only really applies to situations where the actions of the type mentioned in the dictionary definition of terrorism are visited upon people in the above-mentioned cultural spaces. 

To become aware of the hidden presumptions embedded in words and the arguments that are frequently attached to them is to gain much greater insight into the true, and often similarly obscured, strategic goals of those who most assiduously wield them. It is also........

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