Over here:
For those who feel (“ah! This world…is a tragedy to those who feel” [Horace Walpole quoted in Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1954), 315]), calling the two leggedhomo-sapiens in the war-zone as “population” is like calling one’s mother “a woman.” It is technically correct but emotionally explosive. A mother is invariably a woman unless die-hard feminists finally succeed in achieving gender-equality in sharing the godly burden of reproduction. But somehow use of the word woman destroys the spirit of the whole idea attached to the word “mother.” When I call the lady who bore me in her womb as “mother” or “mom”, there is a glow of attachment, love and care that shines through her blurry eyes. I cannot imagine calling her “hey this woman!” That is the difference between calling human beings caught in the war zone, torn between their sympathy for insurgents who belonged to them and the military that occasionally comes to them, as “people” as against “population.”
On the other hand, digging under the Urd-ish, you can sort of see his point.
There's a Dickens passage from Hard Times that seems to make a similar point (people as a bunch of individuals rather than a mass of "them").
Posted by: hellblazer | May 10, 2012 at 01:09 AM
Puts a new spin on child's resolute refusal from infancy to use anything but our given names.
Posted by: SF Reader | May 10, 2012 at 05:28 AM
Well, yeah, "we murdered some innocent people that just happened to live near what we wanted to bomb the shit out of" vs. "there was some unfortunate collatoral damage as we took out this target".
And as Tery Pratchett has often said, the root of all evil is treating people like things.
Posted by: Martin Wisse | May 10, 2012 at 06:58 AM
I see it, and I raise you the Green Beret in village-level stability operations, considered as a venture capitalist.
Posted by: Alex | May 14, 2012 at 07:30 PM
I see your venture capitalism, and I raise you the one about the UK COIN strategy in Malaysia considered as the making of a cup of tea:
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/journal/docs-temp/674-manea.pdf
Posted by: Chris Williams | May 14, 2012 at 09:39 PM