The power of words

I realized something I had never thought of before: the incredible power of words. We recoil from words like ‘murder’ because the word refers to a single human being whose life was cut short by violence. We can identify with the victim as a human being because we all are. However, when the word ‘war’ or ‘genocide’ is used, we don’t think of mass murder on a grand scale because it’s impersonal.

Each victim is a human being, just like the murder victim was, each death is a horrible waste and tragedy, hidden in plain sight under cumulative labels like ‘war’ and ‘genocide’ and such. People say: “oh well, it’s a war, people get hurt”.

Nothing changes the fact that war is mass murder of individual human beings. War becomes a number game for politicians, presidents, and generals. They brag about how many enemy soldiers they killed during an ‘operation’. Each death is the same as it is in the case of murder. A life is snuffed out, a body is shattered, loved ones are devastated, children become orphans, accumulated knowledge, experience, future accomplishments become extinguished. The fact that they did it hundreds, thousands, or even millions of times does not justify the bragging. Rather the opposite.