Collateral isn’t marketingese
Posted on:: September 17th, 2004
A US reporter on BBC radio this morning said something about “what the US military calls ‘collateral damage.'”
The phrase is not an invention of the US military. It’s got a venerable history as part of Just War Doctrine that was codified by Augustine and Aquinas. Nevertheless, the phrase does soften the fact.
Bob Harris over at This Modern World has a great post on what he calls “Our savage numbness”
http://www.thismodernworld.com/weblog/mtarchives/week_2004_09_12.html#001749
“Yesterday, I’m working and unpacking, and I’ve got CNN on in the background. And I hear Wolf Blitzer, barking in that constant breathless get-the-kids-excited-for-Christmas, here-comes-another-shiny-pebble pacing of his, mentioning a video of a civilian journalist, Mazen al-Tumeizi, and about a score of other civilians (reports vary) getting killed in a U.S. airstrike. About 60 other civilians were injured.
I didn’t actually see the report live — Wolf had already moved on to his next story — but I was struck by how casual this was: innocent civilians killed in a U.S. airstrike, and it wasn’t even the news hook; the death of the reporter was. (CNN doesn’t have a transcript up for the report I saw. They do, however, have one for a later, similar report. Scroll down, or just search for the words “I’m dying.” The entire mention of the U.S. inflicting over 70 civilian casualties is exactly four sentences long. The Batman guy, meanwhile, got thirty.)”
The rest of it very much worth reading as well.
There is also something I don’t understand about the American national psyche that regards death delivered from a distance by technology as not as bad as death delivered in person. Killing 70 people with a missile from a helicopter is unfortunate — killing one person with a knife across the throat is barbaric.
I don’t understand the difference, and I’m sure the people who are killed don’t.