Unintended civilian casualties and damage to civilian property caused by a “mili- tary operation.” This highly dehumanizing, bloodless term is culturally sanctioned through a military logic no different from the folk saying, “You can’t make an om- elet without breaking a few eggs.” Manas Chakravarty pegs it as doublespeak: “When it happens to others it’s collateral damage, when they do it to us it’s terror- ism” (Kim et al. 2001, 64).
The deliberate targeting of civilians has a long history in warfare, though it is typically associated with terrorism, which Carr (2002, 6) defines as the “contem- porary name given to, and the modern permutation of, warfare deliberately waged against civilians” (see TERRORISM). Yet domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh, avoiding
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the term massacre, appropriated collateral damage in reference to the children he was found guilty of murdering in Oklahoma City (Thomas 2001). In U.S. military use, the same kind of avoidance of the bad-overtoned massacre or terrorism is typi- cally sought. During the American bombing of Cambodia in the 1970s, when the quantity of bombs dropped on that country exceeded by three times that dropped on Japan in World War II, psychological distance from the bloodshed was enabled partly through language. According to a member of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s staff: “Though they [the staff] spoke of terrible human suffering reality was sealed off by their trite, lifeless vernacular. . . . They spoke with the cool, de- liberate detachment of men who believe the banishment of feeling renders them wise and, more important, credible to other men” (Glover 1999, 301). (At the same time, governments can make their own military casualties sound good, as when the British government heroically declared their losses in the 1982 Falklands War as “the price of victory.”)
When answering questions about the number of civilian casualties, Pentagon officials, as during the U.S.-led “war” against the Taliban in Afghanistan, typically claim that they “don’t know.” Yet, curiously, government officials sometimes pro- duce specific figures for deaths supposedly caused by the enemy, as when the Reagan administration charged in the 1980s that the Russians were spraying toxic chemi- cals over Asian countries that killed 3,042 Afghanis (this so-called yellow rain turned out to be pollen-laden feces from swarms of honeybees). “The truth is,” writes Zinn (2002, 11) in regard to the government’s indifference to civilian casualties it has caused, “they don’t care. . . . The few reports on civilian deaths that come through the filter of media control are only a tiny fraction of the true figures.”
The 2002 U.S. war in Afghanistan was conducted by surgical strikes said to minimize collateral damage. However, Mahajan (2002) questions whether there is such a thing as a “surgical strike”: the most precise weapons miss 20 to 30 percent of the time (“about as surgical as operating on a cornea with machetes,” a Wash-
ington Post columnist once wrote). Moreover, only 60 percent of the ordnance
dropped on Afghanistan was precision-guided. Also used were such devastating weapons as cluster bombs and daisy cutters, indiscriminate in what they hit, and the bombing campaigns generally deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure. Col-
lateral damage cannot be controlled, contrary to what the military’s use of the term
often implies.
Lance Morrow (Time, May 7, 2001, 84) wrote that the term collateral damage suggests something secondary and unimportant, but it is the collateral damage “that most haunts us later on.” However, although Vietnam veterans such as former Sena- tor Bob Kerrey remember with pain their nights in the Mekong Delta, it is more likely that the use of the term does help suppress the ghosts. Timothy McVeigh didn’t want to feel sympathy for the murdered children. He was a terrorist, and his choice of a distancing abstraction was meant to deny the individuality and humanity of his victims. Demonization of the enemy helps, too (see also DEMON). Before the
United States began its bombing raids on Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein acquired the name “Butcher of Baghdad” among U.S. officials and
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in the press. As Parenti (1995, 92) points out, the Iraqi people were equated with their leader; “demonized by proxy,” they became “fair game for any ensuing on- slaught.” During the bombing of Afghanistan in 2002, that country was described as “harboring the enemy,” so few people thought twice about the human toll there. Even within an army, avoiding soldiers killed in favor of the depersonalized casual-
tiesrenders fellow soldiers as nonpersons.
Even though most citizens may fight indifference, at the same time most don’t want to feel burdened by sympathy for people killed by American soldiers protect- ing national interests or exacting revenge on nationally defined enemies. Language satisfies this need, though it is also important to keep the faces of the children (many Afghani children were maimed orphans) and others slain out of the media and their names from being published. CNN chairman Walter Isaacson considered it “per- verse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan” (Parenti 2002, 51). To ensure a lack of any such focus, the Pentagon bought the rights to images of Afghanistan taken by the satellite Space Imaging Inc. Government control of what we see of war, plus forgetfulness, inevitable in the vast flow of news informa- tion, wipe out any residue of compassion.
The cleverly named Campaign for Collateral Compassion emerged in 2002 in Evanston, Illinois, to persuade the Red Cross and The September 11 Fund to ex- tend financial relief to the families known to have been innocent victims of hate- crime backlash in the wake of September 11. See also MASSACRE.
Colonialist
SeeIMPERIALISM.Commando
A specially trained, typically highly motivated military unit sent on hit-and-run raiding missions in enemy territory; a member of such a unit. From Afrikaans
kommando(Dutch commando, “command”), from Spanish commando, the word was
originally used to mean a unit of the Boer army “commandeered” by law during the South African Wars of 1899–1902. The term, also used for British shock troops in World War II, may refer more generally to guerrilla operations conducted by small regular units.
Terrorists are known for similar tactics and may be called commando, as was the “Black September” terrorist group that climbed the fences of the Olympic Village in Munich in 1972, shooting and taking hostage Israeli athletes. But their enemies typically knew them as terrorists. The label terrorist (or other negative terms, such as gunman), however, tends to go by the way under two kinds of circumstances: first, when a sovereign nation commanding the violence against an outside enemy officially sanctions the violence, making the once irregular tactics regular and le- gitimate in the context of soldiers making war, even though those carrying out the tactics do exactly what they were doing before; and second, when the U.S. gov- ernment refers to terrorists or others who commit violent acts by the positive term
commandos because their acts are consistent with or supportive of U.S. policy. See
alsoARMY REFERENCES;FREEDOM FIGHTER;GUERRILLA;SOLDIER;TERRORISM;WARRIOR.
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Communist
Dating to 1840, someone who adheres to communist theory or belongs to the movement founded on that theory; (usually capitalized) a member of the Commu- nist Party. Communist theory is derived primarily from the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who wrote during the Industrial Revolution, when urban squalor and labor conditions were brutally oppressive. Communist theory asserts that his- tory is leading inexorably to a stateless, classless society without private property and where labor will be organized for the common good.
Although America is socialist in certain ways, communism clashes with many espoused American values, especially individualism and free enterprise. As such, America has typically represented communism as an evil. Communist was the West’s mantra for much of the twentieth century, much like terrorist has, in many ways, become today. During the heyday of Soviet communism, the “International Com- munist” was regarded as a monolithic enemy (compare with Islam today), and com- munist “plots” have been found in the most predictable and mundane places. The antisemite’s “international Zionist plot,” for example, has often been construed as communist, while anti–Equal Rights Amendment activist Phyllis Schlafly was re- putedly concerned that the ERA was a communist plot to require same-sex bath- rooms. (Such Stalinist fears as those of Wall Street plots in turn only exacerbated America’s paranoia about “Communist delusion”).
Even after the Cold War, the word communist retained its negative charge. Those who wish to discredit a group regarded as politically or economically threatening or just “inconvenient” have found use for it. For example, a 1995 letter to the edi- tor of the New York Times justified efforts to push small Indian tribes in South America off their land. After all, the writer argued, the Indians were “communists” (Cohen 1998, 115). (In fact, the nonmarket styles of exchange practiced by the Indians have very little in common with Western communism.)
The West has tended to identify communists with terrorism. This identifica- tion has a basis in Soviet practice, at least. Russian Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin became the “high priest of terror,” and Stalin brought Lenin’s terror to a new pitch. Marxist-Leninism was a major contributor to terrorist doctrine throughout much of the twentieth century. For decades the Soviet Union offered itself as a training camp to pass on the skills and arms of terror to the “enemies of the class struggle” or “the people.” The Soviet Union practiced international murder; supported national liberation movements practicing terrorism; and established a biological warfare program, some of whose scientists reportedly were recruited by other terrorist-sponsoring states. Like many other revolutionaries, the communists ac- quired deep-seated habits of violence.
The association of communism with terror, however, can be exaggerated. Marx, as well as many twentieth-century communists, generally denounced terrorism: Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote an article entitled “The Bankruptcy of Terrorism,” and communist intellectual Karl Kautsky, in Terrorism and Communism, wrote that the humanist ideals of Marxism cannot sanctify violent means. Cold War Americans’ attempts to formulate notions of “terrorist networks” linking
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disparate terrorist groups under Moscow’s clandestine direction (“tools of Moscow”), or of “narcoterrorism” (drug trafficking organized to support communist regimes), gave way by the end of the twentieth century to other theories of terrorism (Hoffman 1998, 27). Conservative charges that Irish, Basque, and Japanese terror- ist groups, for example, had Moscow links also turned out to be insupportable. Ter- rorism cannot be construed as a left-wing phenomenon, a sort of “Marxist disease” (seeTERRORISM AS DISEASE), as Richard Clutterbuck made it out to be in Living with
Terrorism (1975). This stereotype ignores, for example, nationalist movements such
as that of the Basque or Croatian separatists; terrorism linked with the Middle East; the long tradition of right-wing racist violence in the United States; and U.S. state- sponsored terrorism, such as U.S. support (through covert means enlisting the aid of international terrorists) of mercenaries to launch terrorist attacks on Nicaragua in the 1980s (Chomsky 1988, 39–40).
At the same time that the Soviet Union was supporting terrorism, Senator Jo- seph McCarthy’s 1950s anticommunist crusade, which exploited the similar mood of the American public, spread its own brand of intimidation among government employees and other citizens. However, not just American demagogues, but for- eign tyrants and terrorists with claims to being anticommunist, have attracted U.S. support. For example, Jonas Savimbi—the Angolan rebel-terrorist who sowed land mines and bombed a Red Cross–operated factory that made artificial legs for the victims of the mines—cynically posed as a warrior fighting communists. Jeane Kirkpatrick, former U.S. representative to the UN, toasted him as “one of the few authentic heroes of our time.”
The synonym Marxist-Leninist (Lenin expanded on the ideas of Marx) evokes the “evil” both of Marxist dogma and of the Kremlin or “Red Army” terrorism. The slang commie has found contemptuous use, not only for a communist party member but also for anyone to the Left or, even more indiscriminately, for foreigners or outsiders (“agitators”), traitors (see TRAITOR), and political enemies in general.
Commie dismisses someone, whether communist or not, as subversive and un-
American. For example, a college history professor, in his classroom on September 11, 2001, made a disturbing joke: “Anyone who can blow up the Pentagon gets my vote.” He confessed the insensitivity of the quip, but nonetheless received ver- bal abuse that included hate mail addressed to “You commie.” The historian claimed in fact to be relatively conservative regarding most domestic issues (Glenn 2001, 12). See also ANTICHRIST; BOLSHEVIK;ENEMY;EVIL;NEW WORLD ORDER;PLOT;SUBVERSIVE; TERRORISM;UN-AMERICAN; ZIONISM.