The term “weaponizing” has been in the modern military jargon for nearly 70 years.
But, for better or for worse and for centuries, armies around the world have been “weaponizing” objects, animals – even people.
Livius Drusus describes how animals were used as “warheads” or “delivery systems” to terrify the enemy. They included pigs (“burning pigs”), venomous snakes (“snake bombs”), horses with lit incendiary rags tied to their tails and the use of limestone dust and earth as a form of “makeshift tear gas.”
In the 10th and 11th centuries China, Russia (Olga of Kiev) and the Vikings described and used birds as incendiary weapons. Almost one thousand years later, during the final years of World War II, the U.S Army went one step further and considered using bats, “millions of them,” weaponized with small incendiary charges to “bring Japan to its knees.”
More recently, the military is weaponizing or trying to weaponize artificial intelligence, cyber technology, the weather, robots, drones, etc. In the late 1960s, the U.S. Army even considered weaponizing a Nerf football.
There is now a race to (further) weaponize space. Trump’s Space Force, “a silly, dangerous idea,” is sure to contribute to that folly.
Talking about Trump, he and his minions have mastered the art of weaponizing everything and everyone with disinformation and intentional falsehoods in the sinister context of creating anxiety and division, inflicting fear and prejudice – even violence — using what can be aptly described as a “weaponized narrative.”
Brad Allenby and Joel Garrea in Defense One describe “weaponized narrative” in a broader, more global political-military context:
[Weaponized narrative] attacks our group identity – our sense of who we are, our privilege of not being identified as ‘other..’ [It] furnishes emotional certainty at the cost of rational understanding…In the hands of professionals, the powerful emotions of anger and fear can be used to control adversaries, limit their options, and disrupt their functional capabilities…In such campaigns, facts are not necessary because…truth does not necessarily prevail. It can be overwhelmed with constantly repeated and replenished falsehood…Weaponized narratives can only increase the possibility of soft authoritarian outcomes if they are not understood and engaged.
Sticking to such a “narrative,” Trump and his administration have weaponized and exploited political, ideological, religious, ethnic, cultural and other differences – even the pardon power and the Bible.
At one end of the spectrum, Trump has weaponized language, using loaded words such as “fake news,” “crooked,” “low IQ,” “rapists,” “animals, “low-life,” “sons of bitches.”
At the other extreme, it can be said that the Trump administration is not only weaponizing politics but also weaponizing government “bureaucracy itself in order to use it against everyone they don’t like, whether it’s immigrants or poor people or Democrats.”
But weaponizing desperation and grief?
Trump and his staff have already targeted people desperate to seek refuge, a better life in the U.S., when they weaponized the asylum and immigration process by cruelly separating children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border and publicly calling such a Nazi-like tactic “a tough deterrent.”
But perhaps the most grotesque “weapon” Trump has used is the politicizing of the tragic killings of young people and others by “criminal illegal aliens.”
Already during his presidential campaign, Trump paraded the families of such victims to incite anger and fear, to energize his base for self-serving purposes, “a caravan of causticity that passes itself off as a living, breathing Pietà.”
In the latest attempt to exploit grief, Trump and his eldest son have shamelessly used the death of University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts, allegedly abducted and killed by an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, at rallies, in tweets and statements and in an op-ed piece.
In a macabre reference to his own pre-meditated act of separating children from their parents, Trump said, “The Tibbetts family has been permanently separated.”
All this was too much for the grieving parents.
In a column in The Des Moines Register on Saturday, Mollie Tibbetts’ father, Rob Tibbetts, lamented how some have “chosen to callously distort and corrupt Mollie’s tragic death to advance a cause she vehemently opposed,” and pleaded “do not appropriate Mollie’s soul in advancing views she believed were profoundly racist. The act grievously extends the crime that stole Mollie from our family and is, to quote Donald Trump Jr., ‘heartless’ and ‘despicable.’”
Tibbetts adds, “Please leave [Mollie and I] out of your debate. Allow us to grieve in privacy and with dignity. At long last, show some decency. On behalf of my family and Mollie’s memory, I’m imploring you to stop.”
Referring to a conversation Tibbetts had with the owner of a Mexican restaurant last Saturday night, The New York Times quotes Tibbetts saying, “We can get our country back, but we have to call out the bully on the playground once and for all.”
We must stop weaponizing fear, grief, our differences. We must stop the bully if we are to survive as a nation of liberty and values.
Lead image, credit x1klima flickr.com
