The Battle of Semantics

I was cleaning my bedroom today and found a month-old editorial piece I had cut out of The Age, meaning to blog about it. It's a short piece about the decision by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to officially extinguish the term 'war on terror'.

The phrase, meaningfully meaningless, has always struck me as a brand rather than a historical event. Iraq - Just Do It. More Than a Feeling. Just for the Taste of It. Think Different. Snap, Crackle, Pop? Sort of evocative without pinning you down to any specific promises.

Lucky it wasn't called Project Definitive Victory, or there would be a lot of red faces right now. Wait, I can see a few anyway.

The problem with brands is that they are almost infinitely extendable. The 'war on terror' started in one country and switched to another in a way that the Vietnam War never could. Way to make one of the 20th Century's most hated wars seem not quite so bad after all. At least you knew where it was.

But we are left with the tricky situation of not having a name for whatever it is that is being done. When I stop to think about the scale of this evil, which is the worst kind, that perpetrated by people who are not entirely bad but hopelessly misguided, I am staggered by it.

More intelligent and informed people than me have written and will write about this historical non-war, will be personally touched by it, have a hand in ending it. I can't see a way of just pulling out now, that would be sentencing a country to rip itself to pieces. But as an entirely ordinary spectator who was just standing on the corner minding her own business, I'd like to register one vote of despair at what has been done.