Peacebuilding &conflict transformation A ... - Peaceworkafrica

to describe emotions or speak about human sufferings, total destruction of hope forgenerations, or burning flesh. What warfare language offers is a distance from andcontrol over weapons and the consequences of their usage.Military training includes the process of making the minds of soldiers militarized.Language is thereby the vehicle for shaping categories of thoughts and definesthe boundaries of the imagination. For instance, the use of metaphoric terms like“patting the missile” or “weapon systems can marry up” or “missiles taking outanother”… almost express a romantic relation of missiles that replaces the powerof destruction and harm to victims. 42Some more examples of using language to create a certain image:▶ Expressions like the following ones from President Bush during the war inAfghanistan: “We’ll smoke them out.”, “These are evil people”, “Our cause isjust”, “They get to meet my conditions. And when I said no negotiations, I meantno negotiations.” These expressions put the US in the Major‐position: the goodhuman, the right one, the boss.▶ The fact that after the war in Afghanistan, the US Secretary of DefenseRumsfeld declared “Americans” taken as prisoners should be considered as“prisoners of war” and be protected by the Geneva Convention, whereas opponentstaken as prisoners should be considered “only” as lawless fighters, and sonot be protected by the Convention.▶ Official names given for violent war‐operations like “Operation EnduringFreedom” for the war going on since 2001 in Afghanistan (+Philippines,+Horn of Africa) under the umbrella term global “war on terrorism”. Sincethen thousands of people have been killed, harmed, crippled despite the environmentaldestruction, these destructive activities far exceeded the sum of$150 billion for the military and humanitarian aspects.But violence does not only occur in times of war or in a military world. Violence isembedded in the language of our daily lives.It shapes our view of the world, it legitimates and naturalizes worlds that arebased on domination and violence. It occurs by means of communication throughthe fact that the Major‐minor system is either created or reinforced by the messageone person sends and another receives. Examples of gendered language might illustratethis statement:174 V. V I O L E N C E