The dangers of language as a weapon of war

As the involved parties want to control the narrative for their own purposes, it is a cliché that ‘truth is the first casualty of war’

- CONRAD KUNAL BARWA

One of the most alarming concerns surrounding the discourse of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ever since the war on Gaza began has been the pervasive degradation of the transmission of knowledge and critical-thinking representations of the conflict. These have severely impacted the ability of many recipients to understand the empirical reality of the conflict, thereby restricting the room for any reasonable debate on this critical issue. This has been systematically done through three broad mechanisms, which have fatally contaminated so much of the discussion on the events succeeding October 7th of last year and making any attempt at an impartial analysis extremely difficult. Language is a key part of the social construction of reality and is one of the most important tools through which we filter information of the outside world to understand it. The perversion of language is a dangerous threat to our ability to do this and can lead to atrocious outcomes; violating Godwin's law, it is pertinent to mention that in my first German lesson, my language teacher wrote on the blackboard "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work makes one free) the slogan appropriated by the Nazis and placed at the entrance of the detention camp at Oranienburg to house political dissidents and other social undesirables. Later, it was notoriously placed at the entrance of several extermination camps such as Auschwitz and Dachau.

It is this perversion of language that we must guard against and which is being so cynically deployed in this conflict. An understanding of these mechanisms is essential to steer through the distortions being disseminated.