Every war leaves its mark on the landscape, as anyone who has visited the artillery-pocked and trench-scarred fields of Northern France can tell you, even a century after the Battle of the Somme. Wars clearly leave their mark, too, on the people who fight in them, on the people who return. But a third and oft-missed way in which wars stay with us is in our language.
Booby trap, shell shock, police action, bikini, over the top, fubar (look it up), and goat rope are just some of my favorite things that have entered our language from military speak and either muddied how we use English or colorized it. Whether what the language absorbs from a war is useful, effective, slang, or obscurant euphemism depends a great deal on whether the political culture is processing the war in a healthy or unhealthy way. Which brings us to Iraq and to a week in which the political language of the Iraq War era has been violently abused and shoddily applied to Venezuela, where it just doesn’t belong.
Witness the once-internationalist Left, which decided en masse this past week to invoke terms such as “regime change” and “imperialism” promiscuously to describe the new American policy on Venezuela. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., the Green Party’s Jill Stein, and a who’s who of the British far-left in an open letter in the Guardian could be found using these terms to justify standing against Western support for the tenuous, ongoing, potential overthrow of the nightmare Maduro regime. Rep. Ilhan Omar, the freshman Democrat from Minnesota, spent the week endorsing and being endorsed by Russian agitpropist Rania Khalek for casting developments in Venezuela as an American-led, right-wing “coup.”
What, exactly, were they describing with these terms? Not what they evoke. They evoke, with “regime change,” a major military operation to topple an Iraqi government. But they describe a policy of diplomatic recognition of the government of Juan Guaido and his Popular Will Party, which happens to be a member organization of the Socialist International, over the tyrant Maduro in light of popular protests aimed at ousting him.
They evoke, with “imperialism,” America’s Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latin American history of occupation and of supporting or installing friendly autocrats rather than allowing countries to self-determine. Yet what has happened in Venezuela was hardly a top-down Yanqui imposition; states from Argentina to Brazil to Costa Rica went the same way as Washington diplomatically at the same time.
“Coup?” This one is hardly worth combating. The military is among the only forces remaining loyal to Maduro — along with Russia and Omar.
History leaves its mark on our language. But our language also leaves its mark on our understanding of history. Misusing language in this way means, for the far-left, radically misinterpreting events.
