WAR: When a Single Word Becomes a Lie "More than guided missiles, all the world needs guided men."  Poem Helen Steiner Rice

War: When a single word becomes a lie by Daniel C. Maguire, Marquette University, maguired@juno.com

Words are like people: marry one and you get all the relatives in the bargain. Worse yet, words are promiscuous and also polygamous, and so you get more and more relatives and in-laws to deal with.

What this means is that words are mutants. They can take on new meanings. Eventually they can become so loaded with deception that they can no longer be used innocently. To say the word is to be so steeped in lies that to use the word makes you a liar.

Take "war" for example. Since ancient times the word has been spotted as a mischievous misnomer: Desertum faciunt et bellum appellant ...they create a wasteland, but they call it "war." In modern times Peter Ustinov put it this way; "Terrorism is the war of the poor; war is the terrorism of the rich." Putting the violence of war and violence of terrorism together represents a candor that is not welcome.

The word war in modern times has become a lie. It says something that is not true. It can't be used truthfully. "War" has been made to seem rational, productive, noble, inevitable, the path of honor, "an extension of statecraft by other means." War is now so transformed into respectability that we use it in all sorts of innocent and lovely contexts: "the war on poverty," "the war on cancer," "the war on illiteracy," etc. War is good and reasonable and we need lots of it.

What really helped all this to happen was the venerable "just war theory." Putting the word "war" alongside the word "just" helped to baptize war, making it seem rational and good.

There are some words that have finally become accepted as denoting an evil: torture, slavery, rape. War is not in their company. The reality it covers is sneakily hidden from view since "war" is no longer descriptive of the mayhem and slaughter we are wreaking when we "go to war."

If the "just war theory" were called the "justifiable slaughter theory" or "the justifiable violence theory," it would at least be honest. Maybe the slaughter and the human and ecological destruction and violence we are contemplating are justifiable, but at least we would be honest in admitting what it is we are justifying.

Military strategists, and ethicists embedded with them, drape an even thicker tissue of lies around military violence. They like to call it "the use of force." That sugar-coats it handsomely. "Force," after all is nice. A forceful personality, a forceful argument-these can be quite non-violent. But an atomic bomb hitting Hiroshima or Nagasaki or the leveling of Falluja in Iraq or of settlements in Palestine needs a more honest word than "force." "Force" is a malicious euphemism, as is war.

Maybe the horror that "war" fails to honestly describe can be justified. Or, more likely, maybe the horror it euphemizes is simply the pit we fall into by avoiding the tedious unglamourous work of peace-making and justice-building. Maybe some slaughter to prevent greater slaughter might have been necessary in 1994 in Rwanda because there was no international interest in supporting the peace and reform efforts in Rwanda in the years preceding that. But don't bring on deceits like "use of force" or "meeting the just war criteria" to dignify an unconscionable failure to do the advance work of peace and to disguise the total embarrassment of statecraft that state-sponsored violence is.

The bible pioneered the idea of a war-free world. You cannot build "Zion in bloodshed." (Mic. 3:10) "I will break bow and sword and weapons of war and sweep them off the earth, so that all living creatures may lie down without fear." (Hos. 2:18) "They shall beat their swords into mattocks and their spears into runing knives; nation shall not lift sword against nation nor ever again be trained for war." (Isa. 22:4; Mic. 4:24) In Isa. 25 we are told that the song of the military will be silenced.

Treating war as normal is biblical heresy.

Daniel C. Maguire 2823 N. Summit Avenue Milwaukee WI 53211 tel. 414 961 0139 fax 414 961 2150 Dr. Daniel Maguire (S.T.D., Gregorian University, Rome, 1969), teaches theological, social and cross-cultural ethics at Marquette Univeristy. His focus is on issues of social justice and medical and ecological ethics. He is the author of eleven books and the editor of three anthologies. Recent books: Sacred Rights: The Case for Contraception and Abortion in World Religions , (Oxford University Press, 2003); and Sacred Energies: When the World's Religions Sit Down to Talk about the Future of Human Life and the Plight of this Planet , (Fortress Press, 2000).  He is also the author of some 200 articles in professional journals and magazines, including Theological Studies , Cross Currents , Atlantic , The New York Times , Crisis: Journal of the NAACP , and Ms. Magazine. Reprinted by permission.

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