the term 'collateral damage'

[0rganism]

I was thinking about this earlier today when Wolf Blitzer had some Pentagonian general on to explain the bombing of Qana. He used the term in answering Wolf's unusually pointed questions, and I changed the channel immediately. It's gotten to the point, for me, where I'm just about ready to discount the statements of anyone who would use the term in any kind of apologetic sense, no matter what their position. What do you think about the words "collateral damage" and its use in public discourse?
(edited to fix the double-quote word deletion in polls)

[Finder]

1. Tim McVeigh's favorite term....n/t

[Marie26]

2. Double plus ungood

Newspeak, words "deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them."

[0rganism]

5. I wonder if the words still have that same propagandistic effect

Originally, while I'm sure that was the intent, it's now regardable as a "technical" term, with little market power. Seems to me that while people who (ab)use it would like to have a tool to spin a tragedy, it's no longer as easy to separate the "collateral damage" from the images of those "collaterally damaged". And from the poll results so far, I'm not the only one who's thinking along these lines -- granting, of course that this is a rarefied polling population that is probably not representative of the population as a whole...

[Marie26]

7. Why not say "civilian casualties?"

Which is accurate. The term "collateral damage" implies unintended damage to property, or things. Like I was just sandblasting the house, & there was some collateral damage to the garage. It denies the humanity of the people who are injured & killed in wars. I agree that most people don't use the term w/the intent to promote a specific POV, but the term itself creates a certain POV. You're right, though, that images have much more power than words anyway. And when those images collide w/the words, people will usually conclude that the words are the lie. That makes the spinners sound even worse. So it could be that the images are turning the tide in this war. DU is hardly representative of the public, though; most people I know just seem to shrug at how crazy the Mideast is w/o really trying to figure out why it's all happening.

[0rganism]

11. Why even say "casualties" instead of "dead or wounded"?

ca-su-al-ties = 4 syllables
dead-or-woun-ded = 4 syllables

Casualties, to me, has a kind of embedded connotation of "mellow and unserious, restful", like "casual Friday", but there is nothing mellow about the way the dead were "put at rest" in these cases. And for the wounded, there is little peace or rest to be found, outside of the temporary solace of an anaesthetic or the paralytic numbing of physical shock.

All of this is making impressions on the survivors that will last a lifetime, permanently affecting their outlook on the world and its inhabitants. We make a big deal out of sheltering children from violent movies and videogames, but tend to ignore the causal chain that results from letting children in "brown" countries witness the violent destruction of their families, friends, and homes. For some reason, all the resulting behavior is somehow completely disconntected from the policies that created it in the first place. *sigh*

Reminds me of the part in Apocalypse Now where Kurtz is saying, "We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won't let them write 'fuck' on their airplanes because it is obscene."

[Marie26]

12. *pondering*

I probably object less to casualties because it's the same word we'll use to describe our own dead & wounded. But an American would never call another American's death "collateral damage". In war, there's always an attempt to dehumanize the other side so we don't have any lingering feelings of guilt. And that'll creep into the language as well - each war has a series of derogatory terms for the opposing countries. And that'll creep into the portrayal of events as well - there are many stories about the psychological damage people suffered after 9/11, but you won't see a story about the damage many Iraqis & Lebanese must feel. We'd rather not think about that. And we'd rather not think about the cause & effect between the pain we inflict today & the pain inflicted on us tomorrow. We use words to hide the truth from ourselves.

[JAbuchan08]

3. n Collateral damage - an unavoidable civilian death due to miliary

action. An acceptable degree of civilian casualties "If I had known there was an entire day-care center, it might have given me pause to switch targets. That's a large amount of collateral damage,"

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

4. IMO it's even worse than "Gooks", "Ragheads", "Japs", etc.

It's the "polite" way of dehumanizing people and justifying their deaths at the hands of murderers.

[genie_weenie]

8. Every "Group" labels the enemy

and the labels are always intended to dehumanize them.

"They" are godless (whichever faith you prefer),
"They" are inhuman butchers and rapists,
"They" do not possess the rich and varied cultural history of "Us",
"They" are using illegal tactics,
"They" are fighting to subjugate "Us" to destroy our way of life,
"They" started it

This is to ensure your troops fight their hardest and that they cobbler on this side of the river kills the cobbler on that side of the river...

[AlwaysQuestion]

9. Well stated

eom

[stevedeshazer]

6. No matter how one parses it, it means death.

A Google search using 'collateral damage' got me 15,200,000 hits.

Search 'war casualty' and you get 12,000,000.

[sandnsea]

10. It's a horrible term

Collateral damage should only refer to buildings, not people. Civilian deaths is accurate and about as sanitized as it ought to get because politicians and generals do need to remember real people are dying.