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    Montgomery - Semantic Asymmetries and The 'War On Terror'

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    5 Semantic Asymmetries and the “War on Terror’! Martin Montgomery Political violence, of course, is not new. Nor is terrorism new. Depending on. how the latter is defined, its history can be traced back to at least the middle ofthe nineteenth century (Burleigh 2007). What is new since September 2001 are changes in the discursive disposition of the terms adopted in the public sphere to describe terrorism and political violence. This chapter shows how the discursive lineaments of the present public reactions to terrorism have evolved since 9/11. Its purpose is not only to display the distinctiveness of ‘the current discursive disposition but by doing so to suggest how the dis- ‘cursive arrangements might have been and could still be different. In this way the chapter might be seen as a form of critical discourse analysis (Fair- lough 1993, 2003; Wodak and Meyer 2001; Widdowson 2004): its focus is ‘on the present and the immediate past but its intention is to act - in Bau- ‘man’s phrase ~‘as.a knife with the edge pressed against the future’ (Bauman, 1976; Bauman and ‘ester 2001). The argument in brief will claim that since 9/11 there has been a repetitive working and reworking of how the semantic contcurs of political violence are lexicalized, a process in which two words ~ war and terror ~ have been, particularly salient. The outcome of this discursive work can be condensed in a unifying proposition that ‘we do war; they do :error’. From this propo- sitional standpoint the violence that originates in actions of the state (our state) is by definition legitimate; the violence that comes from elsewhere is not. The two kinds of political violence, war and terror, are contrastively dis- ‘tinguished from each other in the proposition and presented as quite distinct in provenance and legitimacy. ‘The focus of the chapter will fall principally on the phrase war on terror, on. its constituent elements, and on the relations these elements contract with, other elements, such as attacks, groups, laws, suspects, and so on. In terms of methodology itis predicated on Wittgensteln’s suggestion that ‘the meaning ‘of a word is its use in the language’ (1953/2003: 18) ~ not dissimilar from Firth’s dictum ‘you shall know a word by the company it keeps’ (1957: 11). More particularly it employs some of the techniques of corpus linguistics a7 118 Globalization, Poltcal Violence and Translation Ginclair 1991; Stubbs 1996; Hoey 2005) to trace the company these key words have kept in the public domain of journalistic discourse and politi- cal utterance. In doing so, it builds on work presented in an earlier piece on ‘The Discourse of War alter 9/11’ (Montgomery 2005). Its focus therefore is principally on lexis and lexical patterning ~ the lexical shaping of meanings around political violence ~ in the pubile sphere. All of the texts incorporated into the analysis are either from the US in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 or from the British broadsheet press over the intervening period. Although it has not been possible to be completely comprehensive, the eatlier paper drew, for instance, on 183 US front-page newspaper headlines in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. And this chapter ‘draws upon LexisNexis® to access @ comprehensive archive of UK broadsheet newspaper articles published over the intervening years. Given the range of material, therefore, itis possible to make claims as to the nature of the patterning and lexical shaping taking place in the publicsphere with a certain degree of confidence, offering at the same time a sense of how to confirm further or disconfirm such claims. The claims do not, for instance, extend to ‘more general English usage (though this has been checked on occasion) but apply to output in a particular set of public genres with theit own stylistic norms and constraints. ‘The data are monolingual, drawn exclusively from English, so this chap- ter is not about translation in the strict sense of the transfer of meaning between distinct linguistic systems. It Is, however, concerned rather with the emergence and recycling of expressions in the public sphere and theit transfer from one domain of the public sphere, such as presidential addresses or broadcast interviews, to another domain, such as newspaper journalism. ‘This transfer (or translation) could be considered a special case of what jakob- son (1959/2004) calls intralingual translation, ‘an interpretation of verbal signs ‘by means of other signs in the same language’ - except that in the cases to be considered here we are particularly concerned with how key expressions are recycled in and through the news in ways that effectively broaden and nar- row their meaning. It is the contention of this chapter that beginning with responses to the destruction of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, the terms war and terror have transferred within and across domains ‘of the public sphere® (Habermas 1992) in such as way as to broaden the range of meanings that the item war can routinely embrace while narrowing the meaning of feror. In order to demonstrate this, we will consider both ‘war and terror independently but also their combination in the expression ‘war on terror. It is worth confirming at the outset that before 11 September 2001, the phrases war on ferror and war on terrorism were rare in journalistic discourse. ‘They had occurred intermittently but sparingly throughout the 1980s and 1990s when they were used to refer to actions in response to a variety of ‘events that had included Reagan signing a bill to increase expenditure on safety measures at US embassies, Chirac’s response to a town hall bombing Martin Montgomery 119 in Paris, Clinton’s response to a perceived threat frcm al-Qaeda and Israel's response to Hamas. Although the incidence of either expression is rare before 9/11, itis also worth noting that the expression war om terrorism is more frequent than war on terror: although both are rar® the former seems the better established of the two. In particular, if we consider UK broadsheet coverage in the three months or so prior to the attack on the World Trade Center there were only a couple of instances and in each case these were to the war on terrorism, Items clear, then, that either phrase was available, but its only after 9/11 that the Incidence of the two expressions shows a rapid and immediate increase. In UK broadsheets, for instance, in the three weeks Immediately post-9/11 there were something like a thousand articles featuring the expressions war (ons terrorfwar on terrorism® Initially the two expressions work in tandem, as Figure 5.1 indicates. Thus, in the year following the attacks of 9/11, the phrases war on terror and ‘war on terrorism occur in UK broadsheets with similar frequency. Indeed, Ross, Glover, in an early discussion of their use (Glover 2002), simply treats them as for all intents and purposes equivalent ~ a reasoneble assumption to make at that time, As Figure 5.1 also demonstrates, however, the trend lines for the two phrases are very different: the use of war on terror continues almost ‘undiminished to the present, whereas the use of the phrase war om terrorism 40007 War on teror War on tororiorn Linear (war on terror) Linear (war on terersm) Jan-June 2002 JanJune 2004 lan-June 2006] ‘igue5.1._ Comparison of numbers of articles about warn ror vetsuswarantreisn, in UK broadsheets between 2002 and 2007 at yearly intervals with trend! In for exch’ 120 Globalization, Pottcat Violence and Transation has by now almost disappeared ~ at least from British broadsheets, Gradu- ally the expression war on terror takes over from war on terrorism, effectively flooding it out so that terror becomes over time unambiguously the preferred term, a movement that seems to represent a shift from the more specific and, ‘concrete (terrorism) to the less (terror) Ifa discursive trigger can be isolated for the upsurge in and widespread deployment of the expressions in public discourse it can be traced in pact at least to President Bush’s address to the nation on the evening of 9/11, where towards the end he sald: ‘America and our friends and allies join with all ‘those who want peace and security in the world, and we stand together to win the war against terror’ By the morning of the next day he is saying in a public statement to his national security team: ‘The deliberate and deadly attacks which were carried out yesterday against our country were more than acts of terror. They were acts of war." Although the phrase war against teror may not instantly have been echoed in the populist discourses of newspaper headlines across the US on9/11, there were frequent references to terror (as in ‘Terror Attacks’ and ‘Day of Terror’) ‘And by the next day, cued in part by Presidential statements, a common newspaper headline was“Act of War’ or ‘This is War’ (see Montgomery 2005), ‘Soon, and increasingly, they become coupled in the phrase war on terror. ‘This transition from war against terror to war on terror though apparently imperceptible is not without significance. In more general English both war against and war on are almost equally common. But their collocational environments are different. To declare war on is attested but not 10 declare war against; to make war on is attested but not to make war against; 10 wage war on is more common than fo wage war against. Thus war on__ tends to occur in more active, verb-like environments than war against__. ‘When war against with the definite article is compared with waren with the definite article (the war against versus the war on) a further contrast emerges. Here is the mst common collecational environment of the war against puso er el bore rerio the wr aunt ‘Amos ty et, We ‘eben nud half century bee the we opt acm we 300 8 4 ‘stay al cmrmandes ad ute nthe wa ie Te Deere aegis Agen) serving tesa Emp even daring the wr gant Geresny In 114-1, However tha the fusions were bnig the brunt fhe war pant Hed hee pli deta ‘neleaingcommancrson the bss ont inthe war agtnt ma oh hd, "Bh as re wl eno pn the war gt neh een ashton Weavers abut {702i sores 2 ny ne war ofa e Vet Cong an Nore Vina. The ‘foe the hot Bb Hao] The Wat aguas a as sen tog the jest 2 ‘oc oth needy Se as the war gst a ic, aera hat ‘te US an tah ote wer pla Ing The Renagon Spokes 20 nth Perse Guin the wae ofthe war sgn o's ld ney, np Geld ic of Me, hae eh rg the wa agate Tas, Acorn Ye Ft that he a ecomeended contin he wa opt ng, TR peg come one hy ae ‘Counc tr example that asthortae the wa se! gan gan eae as says enforcement ose waning the war it eid ct dew Maloney ‘woul be sed ai psu Sitio the wr agar Ssaa. ewes the Martin Montgomery 121 Compare this with the most common collocational environment for tite ‘war om: sore beis pO ot the ron Drags pe tmp of atte Seo types das Ren De ey th ek mp a scion 3}. 7 i ft th Won Dromore hat wen cnsocate ugg Athan inet he Vo regs pre eve 9 meet evn cnmestons ey mold hve St the wa ine semer ie Aes ee

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