Read War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning for Free Online Page A

language. The Muslims during the war adopted words like shahid , or martyr, from Arabic, dropping the Serbian word junak . They begun using Arabic expressions, like inshallah (God willing), marhaba (hello) and salam alekhum (peace be upon you).
    Just as energetically the Croats swung the other way, dusting off words from the fifteenth century. The Croatian president at the time, Franjo Tudjman, took delight in inventing new terms. Croatian parliamentarians proposed passing a law that would levy fines and prison terms for those who use “words of foreign origin.”
    In Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, waiters and shop clerks would turn up their noses at patrons who used old “Serbian” phrases. The Education Ministry in Croatia told teachers to mark “non-Croatian” words on student papers as incorrect. The stampede to establish a “pure” Croatian language, led by a host of amateurs and politicians, resulted in chaos and rather bizarre linguistic twists.
    There are two words in Serbo-Croatian, for example, for “one thousand.” One of the words, tisuca , was not used by the Communist government that ruled the old Yugoslavia, which preferred hiljada , paradoxically, an archaic Croatian word. Hiljada , although more authentically Croatian, was discarded byCroatian nationalists; tisuca , perhaps because it was banned by the Communists, was in fashion.
    The movement, done in the name of authenticity, was patently artificial. It was a linguistic version of gingerbread hearts. It was a way in which a nation could find tiny specks over which to argue and establish an identity and go to war.
    The campaign soon included efforts to eradicate words borrowed from English, German, and French. President Tudjman dreamed up new tennis terms to replace English ones. International judges, forced to use the president’s strange sports vocabulary at tennis tournaments, stumbled over the unfamiliar words, like the unwieldy word pripetavanje , difficult even for Croatians, which had to be used instead of “tiebreaker.”
    It reached a point of such confusion that Tudjman began to slip up. When he greeted President Clinton in Zagreb he used the Serbian version of the word happy, srecan , rather than sretan , deemed to be Croatian. The gaffe, broadcast live, was quickly edited out of later news reports on the state-controlled television.
    Off-duty Croatian policemen in a nightclub beat up members of a Sarajevo rock band, No Smoking, after they sang a tune with Serbian lyrics. The police, who punched and kicked the musicians, had taken offense at the Serbian word delija , which means “a cool dude.”
    It was not the first time that the Croatian authorities tried to create a politically appropriate lexicon. In 1941, the fascist war leader in Zagreb, Ante Pavelić, also banned all words he deemed not to be of Croatian origin. Nor was this unique to the former Yugoslavia. The hijacking of language is fundamental to war. It becomes difficult to express contrary opinions. There are simply not the words or phrases to do it. We all speak with the same clichés and euphemisms.
    The myth of war creates a new, artificial reality. Moral precepts—ones we have spent a lifetime honoring—are jettisoned. We accept, if not condone, the maiming and killing of others as the regrettable cost of war. We operate under a new moral code.
    The political left in America and Europe, the intellectuals and artists, those who spent a lifetime outside of the mainstream, are equally susceptible. Many were rarely content with simply denouncing American foreign policy in places like Central America or the Middle East—a stance for which I have some sympathy—but had to embrace opposition forces with stunning credulity.
    During the Spanish Civil War George Orwell observed that “The thing that was truly frightening about the war in Spain was . . . the immediate reappearance in left-wing circles of the