The Sanitizing of War and...Star Trek?

When I was a teenager, I used to enjoy watching reruns of Star Trek. Not the new fangled remake from the 80s and 90s, but the original show from the late 1960s. I know, I know, for the non-initiated in such pastimes the cheese factor is high. But I can’t help it. Pop culture has always had an insidious way of informing my experience.

I want to tell you about this one episode (for sticklers out there, it’s an episode called “A Taste of Armageddon”) in which the crew of the Enterprise arrives on a planet where two countries have been fighting a lengthy war. The weird thing is that the crew doesn’t encounter a devastated and war-torn planet. You see, the warring groups had gone and made their war virtual. They’d set it up so that each attack and counterattack occurred via computer game. When each side lost in the game, they’d send a group of their citizens to die (for real) in a sort of sci-fi body-pulverizing gas chamber. There you go. No fuss, no muss, no mess.

Well, Captain Kirk is so upset by this he takes it upon himself to destroy this virtual war system, even though the two countries believe it’s made their war more humane. Sure, they haven’t had true peace or diplomacy for generations, but they believe they’ve been managing pretty well. But Kirk rails that this is exactly the problem: Because there’s no real physical aspect of their war, they’ll fight it forever. From Kirk’s point of view, if you decide to be enemies, you have to deal with the real-world consequences – the death and loss and hurt that war actually causes. The key takeaway of the episode: It’s irresponsible to sanitize war.

In the run-up to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I found myself thinking about this Star Trek episode. Why? Well, just listen to the TV and the radio, read our newspapers. How do we talk about war?

You know how it sounds. The language we use in the United States to talk about war uses a lot of technical and political terminology, words and phrases that didn’t really exist before WWII – things like “collateral damage”, “theater”, “actionable intelligence”, “non-state actors”, “unmanned drones”. Strange phrases that seem to have only vague meanings, and tend to just wash over those of us who go about our increasingly busy lives of school, work, family, community, and place of worship. Add to that the fact that we never see an actual war zone on the TV news (as people did during Vietnam), never see the bodies, the blood, the crumpled buildings, the coffins, the shell-shocked soldiers and civilians. It’s hard for people to get a real understanding of the consequences of war if they never have to come face to face with them. For better or for worse, human beings learn best by experiencing things.

I wonder sometimes if these sanitized phrases have come into existence – not just because of the media or political forces – but because it’s simply not that easy to talk about war (not even for soldiers) if you really confront it. Because confronting it involves looking at death. Not person-by-person death, say from disease, or auto accident, or old age. But mass death because of metal tearing apart flesh and buildings coming violently to pieces. It’s beyond disturbing and if you think about it too hard, if you put yourself there inside your mind, if you really use your imagination about what war is, you can quickly get overwhelmed with a whole host of unpleasant feelings.

If we, in our ostensible democracy, are going to make decisions together about stuff like war, it’s awfully hard to do what’s right for all of us if we don’t get a little more real in assessing the consequences. After all, they don’t go away just because we changed the names of some ugly things to make them sound not so bad and made sure some upsetting pictures don’t get shown in nice folks’ living rooms. You can blame the media or the politicians for our sanitized wars, but we also have ourselves to confront.

Getting back to the episode, I think what Kirk did was call out the cowardice involved in waging war while running from a reckoning with its brutality.

What language do you use when you about war? With your children? Family? Co-workers? What do you think about how war is portrayed in the media? Does it matter?

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/6/1/737752/-The-Sanitizing-of-War-and...Star-Trek