RECENTLY, a colleague brought up the subject of the phrase 'war on terror'. The term and its consequences have defined not just what America has become, but to a great extent what the rest of the world has become too.

The 'war on terror' defined America's policies for nearly a decade. Under President Obama's administration, it was quietly dropped from the official lexicon. So the question my colleague raised was, should we continue to use the term even though the US administration does not, and if we should not, how else to refer pithily to the complexity of related matters in Afghanistan and Pakistan?

What particularly interests me, though, is how deeply entrenched the phrase has become in the world's vocabulary, and consequently, people's mindsets. This is not surprising, for it sums up in three short words the direction of the mighty America's even mightier propaganda machine during the Bush years, conducting a war as it was against not a state with borders, but a concept that could be found anywhere.

Constructed by the Bush administration, the term was perforce repeated by the news media, and bandied about until it became part of the framework of reality itself. That's really how simple it is.

But then, propaganda is usually simple. The mistake many people make is to discount its effects on the mere grounds of its being simple. It is sobering to reflect on how simplicity of tactics actually leads to insidious effectiveness.

If Dr Paul Joseph Goebbels, the minister of propaganda in Nazi Germany, was watching the world from beyond the grave in the post-9/11 era, he would have been delighted to see his theories bear such copious fruit once again. Whatever else he was, Goebbels understood how the media can be fed, manipulated and used to indoctrinate the people. He understood how effective propaganda works. “The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly — it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over,” he advised. “Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.”

It is hardly surprising that the phrase 'war on terror' was internalised by Americans and other people who feared harm. But the most interesting aspect of it is the manner it was also repeated and internalised by the media and people of countries that suffered as a result of its consequences, such as Pakistan. The phrase and its related terms continue to be used by the media and the people of countries that have been more or less labelled 'terrorist' by the US, Pakistan being the notable example. The 'war on terror' and the related metaphors used by the US administration have penetrated virtually every discourse.

'Flushing the terrorists out', 'striking deep into the heart of terror' and 'holed up' are phrases that draw analogies with the extermination of vermin. They entered the lexicon across the world so that now, statements delivered by even Pakistan's politicians or ISPR use the same references. So does the media, with newspapers and television channels using the metaphors freely and indiscriminately, thereby further entrenching the concept in people's minds. And the consequence of adopting the language is that the propaganda is ever deeply internalised.

Propaganda techniques work by being simple and repeating themselves. Pakistan has achieved the same thing in terms of nationalist mythologies.

Over the decades, the citizenry has been force-fed layers of related meanings that reinforce the same ideologies, to the point that at the level of the individual certain sets of assumptions seem entirely natural and self-evident. That is why, however, each one of us may choose to rationalise it, Kashmir actually 'belongs' to 'us', Mohammad Ail Jinnah is automatically referred to as the Quaid, and India is our primary enemy.

(I find the last particularly interesting: rationally, if I were Indian, the last thing I would wish would be for harm to come to Pakistan. If Pakistan went into meltdown, if people started fleeing as they did Afghanistan, the border at which hundreds of thousands of refugees would turn up would be that with India. As a country with aspirations for a place in the world's influential and well-regarded nations, what choices would that leave India? Shoot down the refugees?)

Propaganda works, and that is why it continues to be a primary weapon in the arsenals of governments around the world — against their own citizenries.

Ironically, Goebbels also wrote that “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it”. The issue, as he continued, is that “the lie can be maintained only for such time as the state can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the state to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the state.” Postscript:

The term 'war on terror' can be held to be grammatically incorrect. 'Terror' is an amorphous, nebulous concept; 'terrorism' and 'terrorists' are tangible, identifiable and specific. Therefore, grammatically speaking, it would follow that it is viable to declare war on terrorism or on terrorists, but not on terror. War against rape, or against hunger, by contrast, may be permissible because these are tangible and physical states of being.

That be as it may, governments' propaganda machines are not required to worry about the finer points of grammar. The phrase is now a part of history and when it is used, it probably ought to be used in the original form; copyeditors writhing in agony must refrain from changing it to 'war on terrorism' or 'terrorists'. In a similar fashion, 'First Women Bank' must perforce be reported as that, because that is its name, rather than the more grammatically correct 'First Women's Bank'.

The writer is a member of staff.

hajrahmumtaz@gmail.com