Stop castrating the language

The BBC has always upheld its reputation for impartiality by balancing the right of the Labour party with the left of the Conservative party, while occasionally allowing the odd Liberal Democrat to say more of the same. Everyone was satisfied except socialists, nationalists and Thatcherites who had good reason to protest that the corporation's assumption that truth always lay in the centre ground was the bias of the complacent.

Not the smallest of Tony Blair's achievements is to put an end to all that. Since the Iraq war, ministers who were previously flattered as models of moderation have been savaged, while isolationists and excuse-makers for tyranny have been presented with questions so soft you could curl up and go to sleep in them.

It is against this crisis in the establishment that the BBC's censoring of its reporters should be seen. At first glance, it is an old story. Just as during the Falklands war, the Tory press accuses the BBC of siding with the enemy. As ever, the BBC replies that it is merely trying to be objective. Its editorial guidelines ooze caution and responsibility and appear to ask for nothing other than straight reporting. 'Our credibility is undermined by the careless use of words which carry emotional or value judgments. The word "terrorist" itself can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding ... we should let other people characterise while we report the facts as we know them.'

This sounds reasonable. Israelis condemn Palestinian terrorism while Palestinians say Ariel Sharon is the real terrorist. The apartheid regime in South Africa said Nelson Mandela was a terrorist and vice versa. In all 20th-century conflicts, you could guarantee that combatants would always say that the terrorists were in the camps of the enemy. 'Terrorist' appears to be a term of abuse rather than a useful description. The BBC avoids it because: 'We should use the words which specifically describe the perpetrators.' And so it should.

But the relativist wisdom that 'one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter' is not as secure as the saloon-bar sages and BBC managers maintain. White supremacists called Mandela a terrorist, but it was inconceivable that he would have responded to Margaret Thatcher's support for apartheid by ordering a follower with a pregnant wife to turn himself into a human bomb and blow to pieces travellers on the Underground.

It is equally implausible to imagine him approving of the slaughter of a group of 24 children who had surrounded a soldier and were shouting: 'Hello mister' and asking for sweets, as a suicide bomber the BBC will not call a 'terrorist' did in the al-Jedidah district of Baghdad did last week.

The deliberate targeting of civilians is a crime against humanity, full stop. As a study by Norman Geras, professor of politics at Manchester University, shows, this condemnation wasn't dreamed up by politically correct volunteers for Human Rights Watch over lunch in a vegan restaurant, but has been a constant of international law from the Hague Convention of 1899 through the Nuremberg trials to the present.

The Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court in 1998, defined crimes against humanity as the 'widespread or systematic' use of murder, extermination, enslavement, rape, deportation, imprisonment, torture or persecution against civilians.

You can argue that the lawyers are hair-splitting. Why is it reasonable to kill young soldiers, who may be conscripts, rather than civilians? The only serious reply is that if you shrug away what rules of war there are, your logic ends with total destruction.

The trouble is that the idea that some things are bad and some are good, not just for particular people at particular times but for all people, has become deeply unfashionable in the postmodern era. Philosopher Stuart Hampshire put the case against relativism well when he wrote: 'There is nothing mysterious or subjective or culture-bound in the great evils of human experience, reaffirmed in every age and in every written history and in every tragedy and fiction; murder and the destruction of life, physical pain and torture, homelessness, friendlessness. That these great evils are to be averted is the constant presupposition of moral argument at all times and in all places.'

If you agree but don't want to call the murderers of civilians 'evil terrorists' because the words have been debased by propagandists, there are plenty of others to pick from: commanders who order their fighters to destroy cities - war criminals; fighters who kill to overthrow a democratic government - fascists, Stalinists, Islamists and, in the past, CIA agents; fighters who enjoy killing - psychopaths, sadists; fighters who prey on the weak - mafiosi, extortionists, kleptomaniacs; fighters who use religion or ideology to justify mass murder - a combination of any the above. Cicero is credited with inventing the notion of crimes against humanity in the first century BC when he described Mediterranean pirates as 'hostis humani generis'.

But the BBC guidelines do not authorise staff to say that 'the enemies of all mankind' have massacred commuters in London or children in Baghdad. Instead, the censors instruct: 'We should use words which specifically describe the perpetrator, such as "bomber", "attacker", "gunman", "kidnapper", "insurgent" and "militant". Our responsibility is to remain objective and report in ways that enable our audience to make their own assessment about who is doing what to whom.'

But with the exception of 'kidnapper', none of the BBC's words is specific or objective. 'Bomber', 'attacker' and 'gunman' allow no distinction between fighters who assault military targets and fighters who assault civilian targets. The leaders of the rail unions are 'militants' in the sense they will call out their members in the private rail companies whenever they can. They don't put bombs on trains.

At the BBC and elsewhere, the pressure of events has pushed neutrality into euphemism and euphemism to the edge of outright falsehood. And nowhere more so than in the case of that pretty circumlocution - 'insurgent'. Imagine a totalitarian regime whose ruling party's ideology was inspired by the Nazis. Opposition or the suspicion of opposition means death. The leader is treated as semi-divine. His statue is in every town, his picture is in every newspaper and his pronouncements are hailed as the last word on every subject.

He has gassed an 'impure' ethnic minority in the north and used torture and murder to silence the country's majority in the south. After 30 years of pitiless rule, he is overthrown by a foreign invader. The men who served the prison system of his one-party state fight back and target civilians and occupying forces alike. They are joined by suicide bombers from the most extreme religious right of modern times. On the other side is every strand of opinion from traditional moral conservatives to communists. At enormous risk, they participate in elections to establish a representative government.

In theory, it would be clear to everyone that a struggle between fascism and democracy is underway, not a fight against 'insurgents'. But in practice, this is Iraq which was invaded by the woefully unprepared George W Bush. Solidarity with the victims of fascism was suspended as preparations for war began, which was understandable. But, with the honourable exception of the trade union movement, the indifference has continued, which is scandalous.

In these murky circumstances, filled with self-deceit and double standards, the corruption of language is inevitable. The statement that: 'Insurgents killed 24 children in Baghdad yesterday' is entirely different from the statement that: 'Al-Qaeda and the Baathists killed 24 children in Baghdad yesterday.' The latter at least allows those members of the audience who want 'to make their own assessment about who is doing what to whom' to find out what al-Qaeda and the Baath party believe in and whether decent people should be on the side of the victims or the perpetrators.

The former is castrated language which has been emptied of precise meaning. It gives the vague impression that what we're up against is the armed wing of Liberal Democrats: a regrettably violent force which, none the less, has understandable demands that may be met, rather than hostis humani generis.