The Language of Fear

How words we often think little of ingrain concepts within our collective consciousness.

Ian Whitman
Jul 25, 2017 · 5 min read

Language, whether written, spoken, or shown, is a vital tool of human creation and understanding. We use words to give context to the events around us and to generate contexts within which to place events we witness. At a certain point, much of our regular language becomes a part of us, to a point of intimacy shared by acts such as breathing. Try to think of something you’ve experienced, but cannot describe in words or gestures — it’s incredibly difficult. That indicates both the strength of our discursive abilities and how the lack of language around something results in a void around that thing by default. To put it simply, it is impossible to be aware of something of which one is currently unaware without an outside force acting upon oneself.

This battle between illusion and illumination within our language makes examination of our discourse a point of enduring importance. Without that critical lens, we will fall into grooves of understanding that we do not notice, perpetuating those designs without intention. For the purpose of this essay, there is one word I would like to focus on:

terrorist.

Definitionally, a terrorist is an individual who uses unlawful violence and intimidation against another individual or group of individuals, often civilians, for the purpose of political interests. Colloquially, we understand terrorist to mean someone who does not represent a specific, globally-recognized nation-state, and who enacts violence in often atypical ways, such as utilizing vehicles to cause destruction. Our Western media has been dominated by narratives around terrorism for decades, leaving most of us, especially Millennials, with a language around terrorism ingrained in our psyches.

Of course, terrorist almost always comes with another colloquial meaning:

Muslim. Middle-Easterner. Other.

The term terrorist is used to strip away the humanity from another individual, so that we may see them as distinct from us in their moral failings. The event of my lifetime that created the impetus for this discursive creation was 9/11. For my generation it created a perfect bad guy — someone who was both far away and alarmingly close, driven by a simple purpose: destroy our country. The narrative practically wrote itself, though, to be clear, there were plenty of authors willing to step up to the plate for it anyway. The U.S. has entered numerous wars now under the premise of opposing terrorism, and not consistently at the mass protest of its people (at least to start). The invasion of Iraq was met with 72% approval ratings in 2003.

Even now, with support of these wars fading, it is hardly because we have a more nuanced understanding of those whom we oppose. Consider this paragraph from Hannah Allam, a journalist covering Muslim life in America:

For me a pivotal point in understanding how foreign Muslims are portrayed in mainstream media came in the aftermath of the San Bernardino killings. When that cluster of reporters went into the shooter’s home and they were marveling over ordinary items of a Muslim household, as if they were evidence of extremism, when in fact it was like a Quran or a string of prayer beads or a prayer carpet. Those are things that many Muslim homes have all across the country. I just thought about how little the reporters knew about Islam to point to those things as, you know, “ooh look here’s evidence.”

When we use the term terrorist, we strip away the complexities of those that have done us harm and create a convenient enemy to position ourselves against. Our language creates a context into which we can arrange events. This is immediately evident when a non-Muslim individual acts out violently against innocent individuals with political motivations. That individual will receive the label extremist and be seen as driven by overly rigid ideological beliefs. It isn’t rare for there even to be consideration of the mental health of that individual in the context of their actions. Efforts are made to understand them more holistically, for they resemble those we’ve created a language of trust and safety around. They don’t fit within the terrorist context our culture has created. They are lone wolves, acting out, while a Muslim terrorist represents all of Islam and its greatest failings. And while there are increasingly more efforts to push back against this narrative, they are typically reserved for op-eds that allow for feelings of affirmation without meaningful changes within our day-to-day language.

Historically, this is not new. Nations have created simplified enemies for as long as they’ve needed to muster societal support for military actions. Whether the catch-all is Nazi, Communist, or terrorist, the end goal is the same: see them as different and see them as less than you. And while it’s true that individuals representing those factions have done truly unspeakably awful things, to focus on their faction itself is to miss the point entirely.

Over the past decade, the U.S. has executed drone strikes abroad that have killed somewhere around 3,000 individuals, and that is only what the Government has publicly acknowledged. Since Trump took over, the rate of drone strikes has almost quadrupled. This is done in the name of Democracy or Freedom or Security or whatever concept from our language is needed to put our minds at rest. It’s so that we don’t have to imagine the lives of people who hear or see drones overhead and wonder if it is coming for them. It is especially so that we don’t have to remember that the people wondering that are often civilians, such as the 8-year-old interviewed for this story in The Atlantic.

We are a nation-state enacting violence upon civilians, typically meant to intimidate and pursue a political agenda. That means that we are either a terrorist nation, or that we have narrowly constructed our definition of terrorist to permit our own actions and damn those done by others. Or, if we can understand the language of our culture, we can see that both are true.

I would encourage you to look at the language that has materialized around you and to challenge the assumptions we breath in and out every day. More importantly, should you find illumination, act upon it. Don’t be complicit in a discourse of violence that serves the needs of the powerful, both in the U.S. and abroad, at the expense of the vulnerable.

Ian Whitman

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Writings on politics, research, and culture.

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