"War is an abstraction"
About this Quote
War is an abstraction because a single word is made to stand in for a vast field of particulars that never occur all at once. Say the word and you see a map, a timeline, a headline; live it and you smell fuel and blood, count minutes in basements, brace at doors kicked in at 3 a.m., feel hunger gnawing in a line for bread that might be shelled. The abstraction makes an argument tidy and a policy legible. The reality is not a noun but a swarm of verbs and bodies.
Bruce Jackson, the American documentarian and folklorist who has spent decades chronicling institutions that do violence while hiding it in procedure and language, understands how public words can launder private pain. Prisons call isolation a unit; war calls killed children collateral. The rhetorical distance keeps the audience calm enough to consent. It also lets leaders widen the aperture of what counts as war: a war on terror, a war on drugs, a war on poverty. The metaphor migrates until it is everywhere, and everywhere it makes emergency powers feel ordinary.
Abstraction has its uses. Commanders cannot plan without reducing the chaos to lines and objectives. Laws require definitions. Historians need categories to remember at scale. But when the abstraction becomes the whole, responsibility thins. Casualty numbers substitute for names, drone footage for eyewitnesses, victory for justice. The result is not merely misunderstanding; it is a moral numbness that enables escalation.
The remedy is not to abandon concepts but to anchor them in witness. Attend to the granular: the checkpoint, the queue, the hospital without gauze, the soldier who cannot sleep, the mother who cannot find her child. Refuse the anesthetic of the word when it erases the wound. If war must sometimes be spoken of from a distance, it must also be narrated up close, so that the abstraction cannot quietly absolve the people who wield it.
Bruce Jackson, the American documentarian and folklorist who has spent decades chronicling institutions that do violence while hiding it in procedure and language, understands how public words can launder private pain. Prisons call isolation a unit; war calls killed children collateral. The rhetorical distance keeps the audience calm enough to consent. It also lets leaders widen the aperture of what counts as war: a war on terror, a war on drugs, a war on poverty. The metaphor migrates until it is everywhere, and everywhere it makes emergency powers feel ordinary.
Abstraction has its uses. Commanders cannot plan without reducing the chaos to lines and objectives. Laws require definitions. Historians need categories to remember at scale. But when the abstraction becomes the whole, responsibility thins. Casualty numbers substitute for names, drone footage for eyewitnesses, victory for justice. The result is not merely misunderstanding; it is a moral numbness that enables escalation.
The remedy is not to abandon concepts but to anchor them in witness. Attend to the granular: the checkpoint, the queue, the hospital without gauze, the soldier who cannot sleep, the mother who cannot find her child. Refuse the anesthetic of the word when it erases the wound. If war must sometimes be spoken of from a distance, it must also be narrated up close, so that the abstraction cannot quietly absolve the people who wield it.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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