Language and war

Bertrand Russell, in his preface to Wittgenstein's "Tractatus," writes that, although a language cannot describe its own form, its form can be described in another language. Indeed, a language as an attempt at communication is put to its most severe test in a war. When differences between classes or states reach a stage where they are prepared to raise the level of violence to the absolute, language ceases to exist. However, it is still needed to carry the whole of the class or the entire population of the state in support of the war to the extent where the ordinary person would be prepared to risk his life or, at least, not to find that demand unacceptable.

The Good War by Studs Terkel, Phoenix Press, (1984), is what it calls "an oral history of the Second World War." Here soldiers or members of their families remember their experiences of the war, with which the mankind made a transition from the age of the gun-powder to that of the nuclear bomb.