Quote:
Originally posted by james t kirk
I don't know if this is true or not, but i once heard that Robert Openhiember (spelling), the lead scientist behind the Manhattan project went mad after he saw what his invention had done. He never thought they would use it.
Maybe someone can tell me the story if there is one there.
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I don't know the story but I can relate to what I've read in the research literature on how scientists justify their actions and attempt to rationalize their responsibilities:
The scientists (and military planners) use words and phrases that minimize human destruction, such as, "collateral damage" versus "civilian casualities", "objectives" versus "targets" or "attacks", "sanitizing areas" versus "bombing" or "killing people in a building", "friendlys" and "non-friendlys" versus "combatants", "effective range" or "areas of dispersion" versus "killing radius", and a wide range of other
neutral language.
This is usually accompanied by a dehumanization process that allows people to shut off natural processes (guilt and remorse, for example) that would otherwise inhibit them from building their "devices" (not "weapons" or "bombs") or "utilizing their technology" or "defending themselves" (not "shooting" or "killing").
This is extremely effective but, if used too long, will fall out into the general public discourse creating apathy and violent repurcussions against members of the enemy. This also tends to make it more difficult for soldiers to react objectively in battle scenarios where they need to make split-second decisions.
One of my critiques against the embedded reporters is that, since they went to training with the units, lived with them, and saw the world through their viewpoints (a journalist's dream, I'm certain), they began to use the same language and gave us an extremely biases view of the operations in Iraq.
This bias is one of (false) "objectivity" since everyone was using such neutral language. But from what I just described you can start to imaginge that the ramifications of war are anything but neutral so this doesn't do us a very good service since it eventually undermines empathy for the foreigners (which would eventually run counter to our attempts to do things for someone else's good and will blind us to particular activities we think are positive but actually interpreted as negative).