There is something narcotic about the language now used to sell war…
There is something narcotic about the language now used to sell war.
Listen carefully to the rhetoric coming from Donald Trump and his attack dog, Pete Hegseth, and you notice a troubling potency to it. The words are small. Brutal. Blunt, punchy syllables delivered directly into the bloodstream of modern media.
Iran bad. America strong. Strike hard. Victory big.
Its messages are for people who can process an infinite stream of content but struggle heroically with a complete sentence.
This language asks you not to think, but to feel instantly. It’s the clean, muscular certainty of a story with heroes and villains. War translated into the grammar of the attention economy and propaganda redesigned for the age of TikTok. Pre-chewed rhetoric for a culture that now consumes geopolitics: emotionally, and preferably in under ten seconds.
But listen again to the verbs. That is where the real seduction lives.
“Crush”. “Destroy”. “Eliminate”. “Take out”.
This is less the elegant rhetoric of the diplomat and more the bodily threat of the street thug. The language of fists, fury, and domination. Words designed to land in the gut before the mind can wander into awkward territory, such as history, consequences or the inconvenient fragility of human life.
The result is a strange cultural mutation: war narrated less like history and more like spectacle. And somewhere in the process, something profoundly human has been lost. The moral gravity one hears in the speeches of Winston Churchill. Even when Churchill stirred courage, the words acknowledged the abyss ahead. War was not theatre; it was sacrifice. Blood, exhaustion, and grief were delivered to families one telegram at a time.
The language carried the shadow of death because the speaker understood that death was coming and the gravity of that sentiment.
Today, the emotional register has shifted. The rhetoric has mutated from tragic to triumphant.
This should worry us profoundly. Because when war is narrated like a blockbuster, the public begins to experience it as entertainment. The explosions feel distant. The suffering happens off-screen. The Zone of Interest comes with commentators and a viewing gallery. The moral imagination, that fragile human equipment that drives empathy and allows us to feel the weight of another person’s grief, begins – quietly- to shut down. The language numbs us before the first bomb even falls.
That is the real brutality of the propaganda now surrounding the confrontation with Iran. It anaesthetises the audience.
If the story sounds like a trailer, it becomes easier to forget than real cities in those missiles’ trajectories.
The new vocabulary of selling war may be small. But the consequences will be enormous. War should never be sold in soundbites.
It is experienced in hospital wards, in empty chairs at kitchen tables, in the rubble of broken homes, and in the long, quiet aftermath that arrives long after the politicians have finished their PR campaign to sell it.