Execution/Murder; Hero/Victim. The media are carelessly throwing around words of enormous importance, producing moral confusions in listeners. It's got to stop.
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Language matters. George Orwell (real name, Eric Blair), the British author of the classic parable Animal Farm and the cautionary tale 1984, wrote an essay we were required to read in college freshman English, in which he says that careless writing both arises from and contributes to careless thinking.
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The extreme case of language being used to affect thinking is Orwell's "Newspeak", in which words are so altered and restricted in meaning that they can be understood only in the context of the official government line. Examples from the book include:

War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is strength.

The most potent examples of Newspeak today are probably "liberation" for the invasion of Iraq and "HIV" or "the AIDS virus" for a virus that has nothing to do with human immunity.
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To invade a country and overthrow its government is not "liberation" if in the process you kill thousands or tens of thousands, impose a brutal military occupation, and replace an effective government with an utterly ineffective government, all of which produces chaos on the street and mass death from terrorism and murder of resistance fighters by the occupying power.
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"HIV" is an even more potent example of Newspeak, because its very name, "Human Immunodeficiency Virus", requires that one accept the idea that it is necessarily related to immune deficiency. Worse, its pair, "the AIDS virus", also requires one to accept that it causes immune deficiency, which it does not. See www.virusmyth.com, especially the articles by Peter Duesberg and John Lauritsen; this blog's entries of September 16 and May 6, 2004; and my layman's language presentation "Everything government says about AIDS is false".
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A concept related to Newspeak, also from 1984, is "Doublethink", which I confess I don't understand very well. It is explained thus at K1 Internet Publishing's 1984 website:

Doublethink is a kind of manipulation of the mind. Generally, one could say that Doublethink makes people accept contradictions, and it makes them also believe that the party is the only institution that distinguishes between right and wrong. This manipulation is mainly done by the Minitrue (Ministry of Truth), where Winston Smith works. When a person that is well grounded in Doublethink recognizes a contradiction or a lie by the Party, then the person thinks that he is remembering a false fact. The use of the word Doublethink involves doublethink. With the help of the Minitrue, it is not only possible to change written facts, but also facts that are remembered by people. So complete control of the country and its citizens is provided.

(This also gets us into the realm of false memories, which raises the issue of "recovered memories" that have produced criminal complaints and lawsuits against parents and others for "crimes" against children that were "forgotten" for decades but eventually "recovered". But that's another topic, for another time.)
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How, you may wonder, can people "accept contradictions"? Easily, apparently. In the Jewish Book of Genesis in the Bible (part of the Torah, in turn part of the "Old Testament"), which many Christians pretend to believe is the literal word of God, Adam is the first and only human being created by God. Adam becomes lonely, so God then creates Eve out of Adam, but no other human being whatsoever. The human race descends from these two unique people. Their children do not have sex with either their parents or each other, yet a human race descends from them.
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If Adam and Eve were really the only people created by God, then it is inescapable that the human race is based on incest! Yet incest is reviled as unacceptably sinful. This biblical fable thus produces two unreconcilable contradictions: that is, two sets of mutually exclusive beliefs. To believe one precludes believing the other. Yet, hundreds of millions of people claim to believe both sets of contradictions. That's part of what Archie Bunker meant when he said, "Faith is something you believe that nobody in his right mind would believe."
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How is it possible for the human race to reproduce without incest if there are only two people and reproduction is sexual? It's not. And if the very existence of humanity, an obvious good (one would think), depended upon incest, how can incest be evil? Hmm.
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How does the Old Testament explain these obvious contradictions? It doesn't. It simply says, on page 2 of my reference version of the King James Bible, that "God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. [Gen. 2:7] * * * It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a help meet for him so created Eve from one of Adam's ribs [Gen. 2:18-23]. On page 3, Genesis says "Adam called his wife's name Eve; because she was the mother of all living." Seems pretty clear, doesn't it, that one woman was the ultimate mother of all future human beings.
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By page 4, a scant two pages after God creates man in the form of Adam, one person, Cain, who is banished from his parents' home for murdering his brother Abel, says, "My punishment is greater than I can bear. ... It shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me." [Gen. 4:13-14] Huh? Every who? There isn't supposed to be anybody else on the whole planet at that point in time except Adam, Eve, and Cain. Yet Cain is afraid that other people will slay him. What other people?
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Cain "went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden." [Gen. 4:16] So he was nowhere near his mother, the only woman on Earth. Yet the very next phrase in the Bible is "And Cain knew his wife". Huh? What wife? How did he find a wife? There weren't supposed to be any other people on Earth except Adam, Eve, and Cain, and Cain didn't marry Eve.
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How does the Bible explain this? It doesn't, unless you take this cryptic passage and interpret it loosely: "In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created." [Gen. 5:1] Clear as mud.
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"Adam", then, is a collective? for male and female human beings of unstated number? That doesn't solve the problem, because Adam was supposed to be the name of the man who was alone, without a helpmate, until God created a woman out of his rib. [Gen. 2:20-22]. One man, one rib, one woman. And that one woman was "the mother of all living" [Gen. 3:20]. That's the premise. But it does assuredly not square with Cain being able to find a wife in Nod, who was not his sister and not related to Adam and Eve!
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Was there just some ambiguity in the King James Version that later translations fixed? Well, here's the same passage, Genesis 3:20, in the New Living Translation: "she [Eve] would be the mother of all people everywhere."
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Plainly, then, if Adam and Eve were the only two people "in the beginning", then the human race could not have arisen save thru incest, yet we are supposed to think incest evil — and the Bible itself says that Cain married a woman from Nod, when there weren't supposed to be any people in Nod!
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It is not possible for people to believe two mutually exclusive things. Either Adam and Eve were the only two people, and the human race arose in incest; or the human race did not arise from incest because there were other people, which means that the "original sin" of Adam and Eve has no bearing on people not descended from them. Yet there are people who claim to believe in the literal truth of the Bible.
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The Bible contradicts itself endlessly. The Adam-and-Eve vs. Cain's-wife contradiction is just one of many blatant contradictions and logical absurdities. So the only person who can possibly believe in the literal truth of the Bible is a lunatic. That would be okay if such people just sat quietly in a room somewhere and listened to their deluded nonsense inside their own heads, but they don't. They go out into the world and try to impose their lunacy on others.
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This brings us back to the insane and evil widespread misuse of the words "execution" and "hero" by media today. We are endlessly assailed by news reports of terrorists "executing" hostages by beheading, or of "Mafia-style executions". Ordinary people who die in fires, or the woman who died a week after she identified the body of her son just shipped back from Iraq are "heroes". No.
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Murder is not execution. Execution is the rightful taking of life as punishment for crime. Murder is one of the crimes, the most common crime in fact, for which execution is the punishment.
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Terrorists who kill hostages seized off the street for no reason but that they are from a foreign country do not perform executions. They commit murders. Gangsters who tie people up and shoot them in the back of the head do not "execute" them. They murder them.
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The other half of this particular, and despicable, moral confusion is the notion, stated or tacit, that execution is murder. This is a common assertion by the anti-capital-punishment crowd, that the state has no right to take a human life, no matter how terrible the thing(s) a person may have done. That is moral blindness that almost the whole of the world rejects.
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There are some people so afraid of dying that even to think of anyone being killed by the state makes them fear for their own lives. Mind you, most of these fearful people would never commit a crime that would bring the death penalty to them. Many would, in fact, be so guilt-ridden if they did in fact violate their own moral code to murder someone that they would want to die for their crime. But all taking of life is equally evil — to the simpleton. Whether a person is victim or victimizer makes no difference to them. It does to every decent person on Earth, but not to them. We must not let them influence our judgment, and the judgment of morality: there are some things so wrong that only execution even begins to equate with justice.
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Hero/Victim. A person who dies in a fire or traffic accident or from a broken heart at the death of her son is a victim. A hero is someone who risks danger to help others. A hero doesn't necessarily suffer any negative consequence from a heroic act.
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Conversely, a victim's injury does not necessarily arise from anything s/he tried to do for anyone else. Merely suffering harm, even death, does not make a person a hero. And dying in the commission of a crime assuredly does not make a person a hero.
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It has become commonplace, in this age of Newspeak — which has another sense today, "news speak", the language of news media — to talk of our soldiers in Iraq as "heroes". No, aggressors are not heroes. The brave soldiers of Hitler's Wehmacht who invaded Poland were not heroes. The brave soldiers of the U.S. military who invaded Iraq were not heroes.
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They did not storm into Iraq to help the people of Iraq. They went 6,000 miles and more out of their way to attack a country that had never attacked us and was not preparing to attack us. They have killed tens of thousands of Iraqis in their own "homeland", and continue to kill dozens a month in an unlawful and immoral occupation that Iraqi patriots are resisting by force of arms; and pretend that their brutal occupation is "liberation". That's disgusting.
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Our soldiers are, let us be blunt, killers. They are trained to kill; they have killed large numbers of Iraqis and their allies, and continue to kill, all the while pretending that they are doing good things for Iraqis and that Iraq is "better off today" than before their vicious, murderous invasion and brutal occupation.
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That occupation has brought chaos and mass death from terrorism in addition to the deaths inflicted by Americans who seem to think that tho they were not invited into the country by Iraqis and Iraqis plainly want them out, they have not just the right to stay but even the right to kill any Iraqi who resists their occupation. They, foreigners, have the right to kill Iraqis in Iraq! The very notion is insane.
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Iraqis have every right to fight back against foreign invaders, and to welcome foreign fighters to help in the struggle just as Spaniards welcomed foreign fighters in the Spanish Civil War. If the circumstances were reversed, if Iraqis had invaded us without any conceivable justification and were daily killing our resistance fighters, we wouldn't regard the Iraqis as "heroes", would we?
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What's sauce for the goose really is sauce for the gander. American soldiers in Iraq are not heroes but villains. They don't know why they are there, but are killing Iraqis every day anyway. They are not heroes but criminals. Every one of them who is killed deserves to die, and should not be given any honor when they return in a body bag.
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I am not a hypocrite. I don't condemn the war and occupation but pretend that the people who are prosecuting that war and continuing to crush Iraq under a hobnailed boot are somehow not responsible for what they're doing. Yes they are! "I was only following orders" didn't save German soldiers at Nuremberg. It won't save American soldiers from, at the least, devastating pangs of conscience for the rest of their lives, and it might not save them from an international war-crimes tribunal five years from now.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:06 PM