The Dying Language of War

Silent Truth

background photo Ehmitrich; field of crosses: Jametlene Reskp, both on Unsplash

The dead might lie beneath their crosses on a hundred wind-swept hill-sides,

but for us the difficult business of continuing the War must go on in spite of their departure.

〰  Vera Brittain 〰

Wary Warriors

Our ancestors have left us with sufficient memorable lines to spare us their experiences, to warn us of the evil warmonster.

“War is in truth an illness, where the juices which serve health and sustenance, are used only to nurture something alien, something incongruous with nature.” Johann W. Goethe (1749-1832)

“Peace is the virtue of civilisation. War is its crime.” Victor Hugo (1802-1885)

“The first three, four days in August 1914 I thought I saw the uprising of a monstrous God; soon after it was only the monster, but it had heads, it had paws, it had an all-devouring body ~ three months later I saw the phantom ~ and now, I can’t remember since when, it is only the evil evaporation of the swamps of humanity.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, 1915

“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
William Butler Yeats, 1919

“Mankind must put an end to war--or war will put an end to mankind,” John F. Kennedy said in 1961.

The following list of words shows the worsening of war in its linguistic mirror:::

13th century holocaust = sacrifice by fire
14 c. evacuation (= discharge from the body)
Late 14 c. trench (= track cut through a wood)
1500 trenches (= long narrow ditches dug for military protection)
1550s entrench
1710 evacuation (= military sense, the transportation of wounded soldiers from combat or battlefield to a medical centre)
1844 casualty (= an individual killed, wounded, or lost in battle)
1892 warbride
1901 warbaby
1906 warcrime
1915 shell-shock, shellshocked (= early term to describe war trauma)
1916 trench-coat (= coat worn by British officer in the trenches during WWI)
1918 trench warfare
1937 weapons of mass destruction
1939-45 (WWII) combat stress reaction (= war trauma)
1943 combat fatigue, war neurosis (= war trauma)
1944 genocide
1957 weaponize
1957 holocaust in the sense of genocide
1961 collateral damage (= euphemism for "the coincidental killing of civilians”)
1970s ecocide
1971 malicious code
1971 Creeper virus (= malicious code)
1972 Post-Vietnam syndrome (= war trauma)
1980 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), referring to the traumatic effects of war
1980s familicide
1980s cybercrime
1982 mass murder
1990 malware
1994 cyberterrorism
1995 cyberbullying

Fight, Flight, or Feed

Faced with War, we get swept up by the gales of rash attempts to discern ‘true facts’ from ‘fake news’.

Frantic efforts to grasp the ultimate bewilderment invite futile clutchings at straw questions.

Who did what first?

Who are the bad guys?

Who deserves support or condemnation?

Who is right and who’s wrong?

Taking sides and arguing about who has the best argument is yet another way to promote war. It spreads war into our lives, far beyond the warzones. All war-news, fake or otherwise, carry the deadly poisons by words and images, thoughts and emotions into the far corners of our psyche and to generations yet unborn.

If we use our powers to think, to know and to judge, we must realise that what we call war in Anthropocentric language has never made any sense. It certainly doesn’t make sense to continue.

”Anyone who fights monsters, should watch out that they don’t become a monster in the process. And if you gaze into an abyss for a long time, the abyss also gazes back into you." Friedrich W. Nietzsche warned in his book Beyond Good and Evil, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future.

Time and again we have a choice to make.

We can choose to (attempt to) fight our monsters ~ and risk becoming monsters in the process.

Or we can choose to ‘feed those monsters.’

Feeding your Demons sounds like the last thing anyone in their right mind would even contemplate.

And yet, feeding your demons  is a seasoned practice, rooted in an ancient Buddhist tradition, called Chöd.

The practice of Chöd is inspired by Machig Lapdrön ~ eleventh-century Tibetan yogini and founder of a female lineage of Buddhism. It was brought to the West by Lama Tsultrim Allione, former Buddhist nun and founder of the Tara Mandala Retreat Center in Colorado.

“Demons are not bloodthirsty ghouls waiting for us in dark places,” Lama Tsultrim explains. “They are within us… Demons are our obsessions and fears, feelings of insecurity, … anxiety, conflicts.”

“Demons are ultimately generated by the mind and, as such, have no independent existence.”

“By feeding, not fighting, our demons, we are integrating these energies, rather than rejecting them and attempting to distance ourselves from disowned parts of ourselves, or projecting them onto others.”

(Find more information on the Chöd practice in Tsultrim Allione’s book Feeding your Demons and on her youtube videos with the same title)

Let’s Call it 'Unpeace'

To have a word for ‘military conflict’ seems like a no-brainer. War is such a common feature in human history ~ a language with no word for it seems unfathomable. How could a country even survive without war? Or a military force to defend itself?

One small country in Northern Europe, just South of the Arctic circle, has proven that this is possible. And there is even a clue in its language.

Icelandic has survived for over a thousand years without an equivalent of the English W-word. Icelanders say ófriður in contexts and situations where other languages have to say war (or equivalent).

The Icelandic word ófriður means unpeace. For the past 15 years, the small island nation ~ aka the ‘Land of Fire and Ice’ ~ has held the title ‘most peaceful country of the world’.

As far as we know, Iceland is also the only country where elves ~ locally called ‘Huldufolk’ ~ are protected by the national Road and Coastal Administration. Perhaps the Huldu are protecting the Icelanders in return?

The word war and its current associations are clearly a reflection of the Anthropocene.

In the Symbiocene, there is no place for conflicts of this order ~ never mind a whole ‘war industry’ ~ not to mention the continued focus on the military as an entity that devours a massive share of our national resources ~ and threatens the hell out of humans ~ and causes endless destruction and war trauma…

The Symbiocene is rooted in the principles of symbiosis, symbiogenesis, and synergy. It must be an era ruled by trust, collaboration, honest communication, integrity and loyalty.

This doesn’t mean conflicts cannot arise at all. But they cannot escalate in the ways commonly associated with the Anthropocene, where the existence of warfare is justified, where war is virtually considered a 'natural law'.

Since all wars begin in the human mind and are fuelled by war-language, our mind and language must support, promote and serve our transition into the Symbiocene. To integrate the external ‘demons of war’, we must learn to reconcile our internal war-demons. When fully accepted, they can grow beyond their destructive and violent appearance and behaviours into more mature and constructive versions of themselves.

Independently of Tsultrim Allione’s work and the ancient Chöd practice, the same principles have been regularly re-discovered and mentioned. It is not too difficult to find such wisdom, if we care to look for it.

In the early 20th century, the Bohemian poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”

More recently, various trauma researchers and therapists have developed healing modalities based on the understanding that all parts of ourselves which we reject are ultimately ‘members of our own inner family’ yearning for acceptance and integration.

The human mind which rejects its demons, which attempts to distance itself from those disowned parts, and projects them onto others, becomes a breeding ground for war.

Feeding those underdeveloped, misunderstood parts, and supporting their healthy develoment, transforms any demons into our greatest allies. And as a beneficial feedback loop we become stronger, happier, healthier, and more peaceful humans ~ creating a win-win-win upwards spiral.