War Is A Form Of Murder

Has it ever become evident to your mind that society influences you? It certainly plays a major part in your beliefs: what you consider to be deviant or not. For instance, we are socially conditioned to behave in a certain manner and to have similar insights on controversial topics to avoid violating social norms. In Robin Lakoff’s article, “From Greece to Iraq, the Power of Words in Wartime,” and John Berger’s essay “Hiroshima,” the concept of social conditioning has caused Americans to suppress the reality of things and consider them to be justifiable without acknowledging that war is a form of murder.
Robin Lakoff is a linguistics professor at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of The Language War. She published an article in The New York Times on May 18, 2044 titled, “From Ancient Greece to Iraq, the Power of Words in Wartime.” Her purpose for writing the article was to give a snippet from her book, in which argues that the usage of nicknames makes it easier for someone to kill another human being because it makes them appear to be inferior. Lakoff uses example such as, “In World War I, the British gave the Germans the nickname “Jerries” (Lakoff 15). Therefore, it makes it easier for soldiers to kill their enemies.
John Berger is a European writer, artist, and intellectual. He published “Hiroshima” which first appeared in 1981 in the journal New Society, and later in his essay collection The Sense of Sight in 1985. He argues that we should look beyond the statistics to see the reality of the events that occurred during the bombing of Hiroshima. As Berger declared, “I refrain from giving the statistics: how many hundreds of thousands of dead, how many injured, how many deformed children” (Berger 11). The...

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...ead. As soon as I saw this miserable scene with the pitiful child, I embraced the girl close to me and cried with her, telling her that her mother was dead” (Berger 11). Multiple people lost their lives and their families. They were distraught and had to suffer from deadly burns and radiation sickness as a result of the bombings. Berger acknowledged, “My friend in the United States looks beyond the nuclear holocaust without considering its reality” (Berger 12). In realization, most Americans consider the events justifiable because it ended the war and they got their vengeance.
To conclude, Americans suppress reality. In order for them to progress, they need to take a step in a positive direction and recondition themselves to take charge of their own lives. Moreover, they need to acknowledge that they are socially conditioned in order to end suppression altogether.