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by JANET MCINTOSH

From boot camp battle cries to battlefield euphemisms, US military deploys ‘kill talk’ to suppress empathy and normalize violence

Night after night, the buses pull up on the tarmac outside the Parris Island Marine Corps recruit training center in South Carolina. Usually, they are full of young men—still boys, by some measures—with a nervous feeling in the pit of their stomachs. They will have sensed the air getting heavy and sticky, and they might have noticed a swampy stench. They’ve seen enough movies to know what comes next, but they still find it startling.

A drill instructor storms the bus, shirt tight around his muscles, belt seeming to float around his flat abdomen, roaring at the neophytes from under his circular hat brim.

“SIT UP STRAIGHT! From this point forward, you will only answer me with a YES, sir, NO, sir, AYE-AYE, sir. DO WE UNDERSTAND?”

“YES, SIR!” yell the recruits.

“Now get OFF MY BUS! NOW, NOW, NOW!”

The young men hustle to plant themselves on a row of yellow footprints painted on the road. The yelling follows them, an acoustic assault so thick and fast and strangely inflected that each recruit has to listen hard and use herd behavior to know what to do next.

They know they’re about to be transformed, but they are unlikely to recognize all the subterranean dynamics of this change and how the acoustic qualities of boot camp will reshape them into hardened killers. These qualities will also model the disintegration of their personhood and their necropolitical abjection—that is, their killability in the eyes of the state.

Military language

In the face of war’s brutality, language might seem like an incidental detail. But United States combat veterans who pay attention to it will attest that embodied ways of speaking—from yelling to cursing to joking, and beyond—can be intimately bound with experiences of kinetic violence.

By attenuating thought and agency, yelling can alter recruits’ sense of self. Drill instructors in the Marine Corps also tinker with recruits’ idea of selves by announcing shortly after their arrival that “the words ‘I,’ ‘me,’ ‘my’ are no longer part of recruits’ vocabulary. Instead, they are to refer to themselves as ‘recruit [last name]”. Drill instructors agree this lexical system is designed to foreclose egocentrism and stop recruits from thinking of themselves as individuals.

In 2016, Sergeant Jennifer Duke explained to PBS NewsHour, “We need to break down these individualities that they come with, of self and ‘me’ and ‘I.’ We need to break them down to basically nothing so we can build them back up… as one team, one element, to join our Marine Corps. It’s not my Marine Corps, or his Marine Corps, it’s our Marine Corps.”

In Marxist theorist Louis Althusser’s terms, we could say that recruits must “self-interpellate” as cogs in the military machine. Drill instructors never use recruits’ personal names; instead, official regulations permit them to call recruits “recruit [last name]” or to address them by their billet or job, such as “scribe” or “guide.”

This practice carries a whiff of military necropolitics, whereby each individual serves a role in the military machine and is easily replaced if they become ineffective or are killed.

To facilitate state necropolitics, US military culture is saturated by “kill talk” among those who serve as instruments of combat. The defining feature of kill talk is its refusal to acknowledge the full relational humanity of and the terrible loss suffered by those on whom potentially deadly violence is inflicted.

I think of kill talk as a kind of linguistic infrastructure—a loose collection of disparate verbal strategies that guide soldiers in how to perceive, feel, think, and ultimately act in combat. This infrastructure underpins the experience of having what the philosopher Judith Butler calls a “frame of war,” which, in simplest terms, is a structure that selectively carves up experience, fostering indifference to certain deaths.

These patterns of language matter partly because they make war more doable. Military combat asks too much of a human being. People’s minds are not well equipped to assimilate the full implications or the moral depth of killing or being killed; such a reckoning could debilitate one’s ability to live, let alone function on behalf of the military machine.

As psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton puts it, “There has to be some level of detachment”—some “psychic numbing”—to apply one’s technical skills in war. Military language offers a supreme instrument to facilitate this detachment. Such detachment can potentially enhance military force—the volume of fire in a firefight, the relentless pressure applied during a siege, and so forth—while offering a kind of rescue for the combatant.

But there is a terrible cost to this facilitation: If kill talk makes violence more feasible for combatants, it spells more death, mayhem, and misery for the individuals and societies targeted by such violence, and sometimes for the combatants themselves.

While kill talk may feel to combatants like a necessary kind of detachment, it can be jarring—even incomprehensible—to civilians. Just consider, for instance, the public disturbance in 2023 when Prince Harry described his mindset in his memoir as he killed 25 Taliban.

Asia Times for more

by DANIELLA FERNANDEZ

On February 11, 2025, as more than 50,000 hectares of forests burned in Patagonia in the heat of the Argentine summer, the government of the southern province of Chubut, led by Ignacio Agustín Torres, ordered simultaneous police operations against 12 Indigenous Mapuche communities.

The raids were brutal: houses were sacked, elderly people were beaten in front of children, books were seized, community radio stations were pillaged, and Victoria “Vic” Núñez Fernández was arrested.

Núñez Fernández, a 37-year-old born in Ituzaingó, Buenos Aires, first arrived at Lof Pillañ Mawiza, a community located in Corcovado, Chubut, in 2020. The mere presence of a vehicle similar to theirs in the general vicinity of the raid was enough to implicate them as a co-perpetrator of the Amancay ranch fire on Route 71. They were charged with three criminal counts, including participation in an illegal association and disturbing the peace. Contrary to statements by government sources, Núñez Fernández is not of Mapuche descent.

Argentina’s judicial and media apparatus used Núñez Fernández’s arrest as part of a campaign of criminalization and disinformation they have been building for decades. In this narrative, the Mapuche and Tehuelche peoples of Patagonia are presented as “terrorists” and enemies of the state, as are allies who work in solidarity with Indigenous peoples. This has extended to include volunteer fire fighters, who, at the beginning of the year, tried to put out the fires the government ignored.

On closer examination, there’s a recurring pattern behind the fires and state violence. The objective is to clear the way for the handover of territories to real estate developers, extractive industries, and military forces. Without resistance from Indigenous peoples and activists, Patagonia could be made available to business interests and carved up to suit foreign investors.

Ojala for more

by TARIQ ALI & DAVID BARSAMIAN

In the following interview, Ali and Barsamian discuss the complex political dynamics between the United States and Pakistan, the historical context of U.S. foreign policy, and the broader implications of the global war on terrorism, emphasizing the manipulation of media narratives and the neglect of historical awareness in shaping public perception. (SOURCE: Ali, Tariq, and David Barsamian. “Tariq Ali.” Progressive 66, no. 1 (January 2002): 31-4.)

[In the following interview, originally conducted in November 2001, Ali discusses the relationship between the United States and Pakistan as well as the worldwide war on terrorism.]

Tariq Ali was born in 1943 in Lahore, in what was then British-controlled India. He was educated in Pakistan and then at Oxford. His opposition to the military dictatorship in Pakistan during the 1960s led to permanent exile in Britain. He was active in the anti-war movement in Europe during the late 1960s.

Ali is a longstanding editor of New Left Review and has written more than a dozen books on history and politics. His forthcoming book is The Clash of Fundamentalism: Crusades, Jihad, and Modernity. He also has been working on two sets of novels. Three novels of the “Islamic Quintet” have been published by Verso: Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, The Book of Saladin, and The Stone Woman. They portray Islamic civilization in a way that he says “run counter to the standard views.” His “Fall of Communism” trilogy has seen the publication of Redemption and Fear of Mirrors. Ali’s creative output extends to scripts for stage and screen. A short play of his on Iraq was recently performed at Cooper Union in New York. A veritable “all ’rounder,” as they say in South Asia, he is currently working on an opera on Ayatollah Khomeini.

In late October, he was detained at the Munich airport. “The inspector’s eyes fell on a slim volume in German that had been given to me by a local publisher,” he said. “It was still wrapped in cellophane. In a state of some excitement, the inspector rushed it over to an armed policeman. The offending book was an essay by Karl Marx, On Suicide.” Ali said he was rudely instructed to repack his bag, minus the book, and was then taken to police headquarters at the airport. The arresting officer, Ali added, “gave me a triumphant smile and said, ‘After September 11, you can’t travel with books like this.’ At this point, my patience evaporated.”

Ali demanded to call the mayor of Munich, who had earlier interviewed him on the current crisis at a public event in the city. The threat of the call was sufficient, and Ali was allowed to continue on his journey.

Ali lives in London, and I spoke with him in late November by phone.

[Barsamian]: A Pakistani general once told you, “Pakistan was the condom that the Americans needed to enter Afghanistan. We’ve served our purpose and they think we can be just flushed down the toilet.” That was in the 1980s, when the United States and Pakistan funded and armed the mujahedeen to defeat the godless Soviet Union. Is the United States again using Pakistan as a condom?

[Ali]: I think the Americans fished out the same condom but found it had too many holes in it. So they supplied a new one, and they’ve gone in again. But this time they couldn’t go in with the Pakistani army, since the Pakistani army created the Taliban and propelled it to victory. It could hardly be expected to kill its own offspring. The U.S. forced the Pakistani army to withdraw its support, which it did, reluctantly. But it had to. Once Pakistani support was withdrawn from the Taliban, they collapsed like a house of cards, though one hardline faction will probably carry on in the mountains for a bit.

Most Americans may not know the history of Pakistani-U.S. support for the Taliban. In a talk you gave in late September, you said, “People are taught to forget history.” What did you have in mind there?

Enotes for more

THE AFRICAN MIRROR

THE United Nations Human Rights Office has condemned Egypt’s use of a detention practice known as “rotation” that allows authorities to hold government critics indefinitely through successive charges, calling for its immediate cessation.

UN Human Rights Office spokesperson Thameen Al-Kheetan said the practice involves bringing new charges against individuals as they near completion of prison sentences or reach maximum pretrial detention periods, effectively preventing their release.

“Human rights defenders, activists, lawyers, journalists, peaceful protesters and political opponents have been targeted by this ‘rotation’ practice,” Al-Kheetan told reporters at the UN’s bi-weekly press briefing in Geneva.

The latest case involves poet Galal El-Behairy, who was detained after completing a prison term on July 31, 2021, for writing songs and poetry critical of the government. Since then, he has faced similar charges in two separate cases under counter-terrorism law and the penal code. New charges were filed against him on August 19, 2025, extending his detention for at least 15 more days.

Other prominent figures subjected to the rotation practice include writer and activist Alaa Abdel Fattah; lawyer and former National Council for Human Rights member Hoda Abdel-Moneim; lawyer Ebrahim Metwally Hegazy, who coordinates the Association of the Families of the Forcibly Disappeared; and political activist Mohammad Adel Fahmy Ali, former spokesperson for the April 6 Youth Movement. All remain in detention.

Al-Kheetan said most of those targeted “should not have been detained or jailed in the first place,” as charges often relate to exercising legitimate rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly. He described the practice as a tool for the Egyptian government to repress perceived critics.

The African Mirror for more

by ZARAH SULTANA

Zarah Sultana is among Britain’s most prominent socialist leaders. Born in Birmingham in 1993, she became politically active in the student movement and later in the upsurge of Corbynism: serving on the national executive of Young Labour, working as a community organiser for the party and eventually running for parliament, where she now represents Coventry South. Her election coincided with the beginning of Keir Starmer’s Labour leadership, which she has long excoriated for its reactionary outlook and petty authoritarianism. Over the past year her profile has increased significantly thanks to her trenchant opposition to the Starmer government’s complicity in the Gaza genocide. Her dissent led to her suspension from the parliamentary party, and since then she has become a standard-bearer for the nascent left alternative: one of the youngest and most popular figures involved in its formation. Sultana has proposed co-leading the new party alongside Corbyn, and is part of a group working on the founding conference this autumn. 

For the third instalment in this Sidecarseries, Oliver Eagleton spoke to Sultana about the new left party: why it is necessary, what kind of democratic structures it should have, its parliamentary and extra-parliamentary aims, its response to the far right, the case for co-leadership, and how the conference should be organised.

Oliver Eagleton: Let’s start with your political trajectory and relationship with the Labour Party. How has it evolved over time? What brought you to the decision to leave earlier this year? Do you think others on the so-called ‘Labour left’ will follow you? 

Zarah Sultana: I was formed politically by the War on Terror and the aftermath of the financial crisis. The first time I engaged with parliamentary politics was when the coalition government launched a direct attack on my generation by tripling tuition fees; I was part of the first cohort who had to pay £9,000 per year for higher education. I decided to join Labour at the age of seventeen, because at that time it seemed like there was no other party that could act as a vehicle for change. I never thought it was perfect. My local branch in the West Midlands was controlled by older men who didn’t want young people – especially not young left-wing women – to be involved. When I went to study at Birmingham in 2012, the Labour clubs and societies did nothing other than host talks by right-wing MPs, so I had to find other political outlets.

In my first week of university my dad and I joined a delegation of Labour councillors and activists who went on a trip to the occupied West Bank, and it changed the way I saw myself. I had never previously thought of myself as privileged, but I realised that because of the sheer accident of where I was born and what passport I held, I was treated differently by the Israeli authorities. I watched as they harassed and abused Palestinians and then related to me as a regular human being. I went to Hebron and saw the Jewish-only roads, the communities who were coming under daily attack from settlers and soldiers. All this was hard to fathom. But it was even more confounding that we – our country, our society – were allowing this to happen. So that ignited an internationalism in me: a deep opposition to imperial power, apartheid, settler colonialism and military occupation. 

Then when I got involved in the National Union of Students I realised that I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. That’s a really magical moment, when you discover that you’re not alone in your politics. I started campaigning on issues like free education, maintenance grants, anti-racism, housing, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. It was only after I graduated, though, that I learned just how broken our social contract was. I really struggled to find work. I would go to the Jobcentre, look through my CV and wonder why, despite my degree and my experience, I didn’t have a place in this economy. And of course I was also saddled with £50,000 worth of debt. 

Sidecar — New Left Review for more

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by SAKIB SHERANI

“Underdevelopment occurs not because of lack of capital: capital can easily be raised; it occurs not because of lack of skilled people: people can be trained; it occurs because of the failure of a society to organise itself for development…” Albert O. Hirschman (The Strategy of Economic Development, 1958).

On Pakistan’s 78th independence anniversary, we have to ask ourselves a sobering question — why is the country that was born on the wings of hope, between promise and peril, and seemingly prospered for decades, in its current dismal state? Why are its human, social and economic development indicators competing with Afghanistan and sub-Saharan Africa? Why have numerous promised ‘game changers’ over the decades, from CENTO and SEATO membership to CPEC and SIFC, failed to deliver for the people?

The answer is simple as much as it is uncomfortable. Pakistan is not organised as a polity for development, let alone inclusive development. It is organised for elite extraction, appropriation, expropriation and enrichment. And the two models are not just incompatible, they are mutually exclusive.

A society is organised for development when its laws, institutions, cultural norms and incentives are deliberately structured to expand opportunity, raise productivity and channel resources towards the most optimal use for the widest common good. Economies that have successfully climbed the ladder of development, at least over the past five decades, display common characteristics. These include an emphasis on human capital development, high savings and investment rates, an equitable and non-discriminatory tax regime, responsible governance, high levels of transparency and accountability, institutional checks and balances against executive overreach as well as policy and regulatory capture.

Pakistan’s current organising principle as a polity is incompatible with development.

This is in sharp contrast to how Pakistan has been configured as a polity. To adapt Lant Pritchett et al’s quote, countries such as Pakistan “look like a state” but do not exhibit the foundational characteristics.

Pakistan has a Constitution but one that fails to restrain, to provide checks and balances; it has ‘law of the land’ without rule of law; governments without governance; buildings without institutions; projects without purpose; spending without impact; civil service without service; security agencies without security. Like many other Third World countries, Pakistan has been organised as a neocolonial project with local elites installed on behalf of former colonial powers. Two natural corollaries of elite capture are weakened institutional checks and balances, and extraction.

Dawn for more

by IBRAHIM ADEYEMI

In North-central Nigeria, terrorists are weaponising hunger as a strategy to recruit vulnerable children into their fold. They would ravage specific areas, destroying their crops and farming infrastructures, looting stores and private houses, and then position themselves as the only source of food for children. Ibrahim Adeyemi Follow on X June 2, 2025

Hassan Audu is lost in the past.

Tricked into a Boko Haram camp in Niger State, North-central Nigeria, the 16-year-old is mired in the mud of his traumatic experience as a child soldier. He is a witness to the terror and tragedy devastating his hometown of Shiroro. He struggles to move towards a glimpse of the future. Audu’s nine-year-old brother, Ja’afar Hassan, was caught in Boko Haram’s vicious net in 2022, with families and friends thrown into agony that the terrorists had conscripted their beloved son. For years, no one could trace Ja’afar’s footpaths to the camp; his parents wallowed in pain, begging local authorities in the Mashekeri village of Shiroro to help retrieve their son.

When Ja’afar’s captors sauntered into the village in 2024 for their exploits, they encountered a weary Audu, exhausted from his desperate search for his younger brother. The terrorists took advantage of his desperation, asking him to follow them into the forest to retrieve his brother. He hopped on a motorbike, wedged among the terrorists, as the rider zigzagged his way toward the forest’s edge.

“They asked me to come see my brother. When I arrived, they locked me up in a mud cell,” Audu tells HumAngle. “We used three motorcycles, two people each, including the one I was on. They asked me to come with them and see my brother. Since I knew my brother was with them, I went along.”

The boy wears a sour face and a sober appearance, beaming softness and stone-heartedness simultaneously. One minute, his eyes catch tears during the interview in a secured location in the Hudawa area of Kaduna State in northwestern Nigeria, and the next minute, he carries a terrifying face, stirring up a panic-stricken atmosphere.

Concerned that he might go rogue if allowed to travel alone, Audu’s stepmother, Laraba, accompanied him from Zamfara to Kaduna to speak with HumAngle. Since returning from the terrorist den, his chances of going berserk have been high, according to the stepmother, who noted that the boy has lost his tenderness as a teenager, occasionally displaying wild behaviour and betraying a civil demeanour. Blame him, but also blame the men who lured him into the valley of violence, keeping him in the logistics unit of the camp where he witnessed how terrorists planned attacks, brutally punished offenders, and detained civilians for ransom. 

The terrorists fed him enough tuwo, a local Nigerian meal made from maize, and a hastily prepared tomato soup. He had wanted to return home the same night with his brother, but fed like a cat, Audu stayed, with the terrorists promising more sumptuous meals if he swallowed their rulings. He had more than three square meals that he couldn’t have at home. Back in Mashekeri, a single solid meal daily was a luxury. The boy found that luxury in multiple folds in the terrorist camp and stayed glued to it, quickly forgetting his initial mission to bring his brother back home.

“I never missed home. Whenever I mentioned home, they would say, ‘Some other time.’ Since then, the feeling of returning home faded,” Audu tells HumAngle.

Human Angle for more

by JACK IZZO

John Calhoun’s “rodent utopia” experiments have been frequently used as evidence for “societal decay.”

The closest thing to utopia the world has ever seen might have existed in a Maryland barn for a couple ofyears during the late 1960s: a complex built for rodents as part of a science experiment.

The study had an interesting premise and shocking results — a failed society that pushed itself into extinction. Almost immediately, scientists and laypeople alike began suggesting it could be apocalyptic prediction of the future of humanity. In other words, it was almost tailor-made for internet virality.

Snopes readers have written many emails over the last few years asking us about the notorious rodent utopia experiment, sometimes called “Universe 25.”

The Background

Before explaining the experiment, it’s important to understand why itwas performed. While environmentalism as a political theory had been around in bits and pieces since the early days of the Industrial Revolution, it was not until just after World War II that people truly began to politically organize around the environment.

One of the largest fears at the time was overpopulation — sometimes called Malthusianism after an 18th-century demographer, Thomas Malthus, who proposed that population would eventually grow faster than food production, meaning that, eventually, humanity would be unable to feed everyone. Many early environmentalists proposed similar ideas.

In the 1950s, an animal behaviorist named John Calhoun started working at the National Institute of Mental Health. He had long worked with rats, the subject of his Ph.D. thesis, and was interested in studying how a rat society would develop over time when it was limited onlyby space. In other words, he wanted to test the effects of overpopulation.

In order to run his experiment, Calhoun designed complexes, which he named “Universes,” that would provide his rodent subjects all they needed to survive — food, water and protection from predators and disease. The only thing that would limit the population growth would be space. 

As he watched the rodent societies grow, he began noticing strange trends:

Pregnant females began having problems raising offspring. Dominant males became incredibly territorial and overactive, while subordinate males increasingly withdrew from the larger group, coming out “to eat, drink and move about only when other members of the community were asleep.” Rats became so conditioned to eating with others that they would refuse to eat alone. Some males became hypersexual and attempted to mate with anyone and everyone. Fighting was frequent. Rats began cannibalizing other rats. At one point, the infant mortality rate reached an astonishing 96%.

As one of Calhoun’s assistants put it, “utopia” had turned into a “hell.”

Snopes for more

by RACHEL FIELDHOUSE

In a rare move for a US public official, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr called for a Danish paper finding no link between aluminium in vaccines and disease to be retracted.

US health secretary and vaccine sceptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr has called for the retraction of a Danish study that found no link between aluminium in vaccines and chronic diseases in children — a rare move for a US public official. Aluminium has been used for almost a century to enhance the immune system’s response to some vaccines. But some people claim the ingredient is linked to rising rates of childhood disorders such as autism.

Public-health officials in Kennedy’s position rarely request that studies be retracted, says Ivan Oransky, a specialist in academic publishing and co-founder of the media organization Retraction Watch. Through this request, “Secretary Kennedy has demonstrated that he wants the scientific literature to bend to his will”, says Oransky.

The study¹ in question, published in Annals of Internal Medicine in July, is one of the largest of its kind, looking at 1.2 million children born over more than two decades in Denmark. The authors reported that no significant risk of developing autoimmune, allergic or neurodevelopmental disorders was associated with exposure to aluminium compounds in vaccines.

In an opinion piece published on TrialSite News on 1 August, Kennedy called into question the study’s methodology, analysis and results. Since his appointment as head of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Kennedy has bypassed normal scientific review processes to change vaccine recommendations and terminated grants for projects on mRNA vaccines.

Annals of Internal Medicine says it stands by the study and has no plans to retract it. Christine Laine, editor in chief for the journal, wrote in a comment on the study’s web page on 11 August that “retraction is warranted only when serious errors invalidate findings or there is documented scientific misconduct, neither of which occurred here”.

The Department of Health and Human Services said that Kennedy’s article spoke for itself, and that the department did not have any further comment in response to Nature’s questions about Kennedy’s request for a retraction.

Widely used

Aluminium, in the form of salts, such as potassium aluminium sulfate, have been administered in vaccines — for diseases ranging from whooping cough to pneumonia — to millions of people worldwide, and the vaccines have been widely studied for safety issues^2,3. Gary Grohmann, an independent virologist in Canberra, says there is no evidence of significant side effects caused by the small amount of aluminium in vaccines.

Nature for more