Language grumble

(The first in an occasional series.)

Am I alone in being pulled up short by the proliferation of the expression “innocent civilians” in newspaper reports? It’s odd if you think about it, because the term implies that there are non-innocent civilians around, otherwise why mark the word, why emphasise the innocence?

Let’s assume that the civilians so marked are really, genuinely innocent, but then how is their innocence determined and by whom? By the journalist in question or is there some – to me unknown – judicial or other process that establishes some civilians as innocent and others as, what, complicit, guilty, sinful? Can innocence be declared without some judicial or analogous process? Or is it enough to be a non-combatant in a war zone and to suffer “collateral” damage (there’s a weasel word now, if ever there was one) from belligerency and thereby automatically qualify as innocent?

Or is it innocence in its other meaning, not knowing that hostilities are taking place? That does seem far-fetched. When bullets are flying and shells are exploding around you, that seems hardly plausible.

Digging a bit deeper, belligerency nowadays necessarily involves the entirety of a population, all-people’s war is currently the norm, we’re a long way from the 18th century when (mostly) professional armies fought it out and tried (often failed) to keep the civilians out of it. Indeed, it is safe to say that 20th century warfare – and the current century has not seen any changes – targeted civilians as much as soldiers in uniform.

The implication, of course, is that no belligerent will regard civilians as innocent, but will see them as part of the environment that sustains combatants. Not for nothing is Mao Tse-tung supposed to have said, “the guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea”. This does rather suggest an absence of innocence, if nothing else.

Maybe I’m making a meal of this, that all we are looking at is journalistic laziness, the love of a cliché, a phrase that arouses sympathy for those caught up in a conflict. There is, after all, no end to such laziness and fixatedness on clichés. But that rather does put the onus on journalists and questions their assumption of innocence or, at any rate, of objectivity. So, are there “innocent journalists” around?

Sch. Gy