The Semantics of Killing

"To kill" could be defined as
To violently terminate the life of an organism with a central nervous system.
In our languages we have differentiated the action of killing.
The down-playing of killing helps to decrease the threshold of restraint. In most cases the playing down takes the form of palliation.

• A whaler killing a whale is merely "hunting" it
  
• When migrating lobsters are killed, they are "collected"
  
• When we think we have to kill a beloved pet, it is just "put to sleep"
  
• Sealers killing helpless young fur seals are only "harvesting"
  
• When the last representative of an entire species is killed, the kind has "disappeared"
  
• An executioner killing a fellow human being is "executing" him
• A soldier killing an enemy is simply "eliminating" him.

Nearly every army in the world claims to fight exclusively for the country's defence. Only in this way politicians can justify the existence and the cost of their killing machine to the people.
The "Ministry of Peace" in George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" is the ultimate consequence of "Newspeak".
Every country with an army attributes this "License to Kill" to the presence of potential enemies. Wars are said to be part of our culture since the dawn of mankind and therefore unavoidable. Today the resulting global hysteria no longer threatens isolated societies but the entire planet.
Warlords who have attained true mastery in their field, as for example a Donald Rumsfeld, know an even finer differentiation: Terrorism-suspects are potential killers to them and, moreover stand outside the Geneva Convention.

If we could at least bring ourselves to call a spade a spade, the threshold of killing would revert to its nature-given level. Many lives would be saved and the decimation of countless species checked.

When Japan kills whales for "scientific research", Japan is lying. When Japan uses economic pressure to keep members of the International Whaling Commission from signing the moratorium, Japan is guilty of bribery. Only the dreadful adherence to Political Correctness forces our media to use palliation instead of clear text.

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