Peacebuilding &conflict transformation A ... - Peaceworkafrica

7. Violence and…7.1 Violence and communicationCommunication is the process of transmitting and receiving messages and due tothis it is a means of interaction and understanding. This implies that communicationis a process involving at least two people. If the speaker sends clear and comprehensivemessages intended for the full understanding of the receiver, the communicationpartners are in a position for a real dialogue — for communication.The following issues show how language is connected to violence, how languageis used to legitimize actions, how language serves as a medium to create certain realitiesrather than others and how language can create or reinforce the M‐m‐system.The medium of languageLanguage is a major communication tool. Language is the medium (means, method,channel) used to legitimize actions or decisions and therefore plays an outstandingrole in manipulation. Verbal manipulation using language can breed a culture ofviolence, can reproduce violence 41 .We could develop a long list of examples of how masses of people have beenmanipulated to execute violence by language, but we shall concentrate on some ofthe most obvious: manipulating people so that they will fight wars. Some of thearguments that leaders use as reasons to go to war, to make their societies accept andsupport a war are, for instance, ‘to better the lives of the population’ ‘to free a societyfrom bad regimes’, or ‘to create peace’. But who, among these leaders, politicians ortechnocrats, talks about and explains nonviolent alternatives and what a war reallyimplies? Who explains what it means for thousands of families when their homesare destroyed, how they struggle to survive or under what kind of terrible circumstancesthey die in refugee camps, how it is to be raped and infected with deadly diseases,how it is to lose an arm or have their legs amputated? Who talks about how itis to hear the screams when a bullet enters the body, to smell the burning flesh of afriend, to see your comrades being scattered by a mine? Don’t we know how manyreturned soldiers are suffering from their experience and even kill themselves asthey cannot stand the aftermath? Instead we listen to the words of the leaders whotalk about military warfare as ‘clinical operations’ and watch ceremonies in whichsoldiers are made Heroes for killing people and destroying communities. Do weabandon the principles of humanity in times of war?It is the abstract and specialized language used by technocrats and politiciansthat neither force the speaker nor enable the listener to touch the destructive realitiesof war that lay behind the words. Moreover, there are no words in warfare language7 . V i o l e n c e a n d … 173