The Word Bombing Means Different Things Depending On Where It Happened

The Word Bombing Means Different Things Depending On Where It Happened

March 28, 2025

U.S. and ISRAEL IMPERIALISM - FOLLOW THE MONEY

Caitlin Johnstone

The word “bombing” is interesting, because it becomes a different word depending on what part of the world it’s being used in reference to.

If I look at you with a shocked and serious expression and say “There’s been a bombing,” you’ll immediately assume I mean there was an explosion in a city near you, or perhaps in some other western city like New York or London. If you see me reading the paper and casually stating “Wow there were dozens of bombings last night,” you’ll probably assume I mean military explosives being dropped on people in the middle east.

If I was in the UK in the nineties and said “There’s been a bombing,” everyone would immediately assume I meant an IRA attack on British soil and respond with grief. If I made the exact same noises with my mouth in the UK today, people would assume I’m probably talking about Gaza, Lebanon or Yemen, and they’d shrug.

The words have two different meanings in our society because western society does not regard non-westerners as fully human. An explosion of deliberate human origin taking place in our own neighborhood is an unacceptable outrage that we’ll speak about for the rest of our lives, but the exact same thing happening in a neighborhood in the middle east is just the natural order of things... even if it was perpetrated by our own leaders.

Someone exploding a building full of pale-skinned English speakers is an earth-shaking tragedy, while someone exploding a building full of darker-skinned Arabic speakers is just Tuesday.

They’re viewed as two completely different things because the victims are viewed as two entirely different species. The victims of the bombing campaigns the western empire perpetrates and sponsors are seen as sub-human. They are seen as sub-human because we’ve been propagandized to see them that way, and we are propagandized to see them that way because if we saw them as fully human, nothing about our society would make sense.

You can vote for a politician with brown skin or see someone of Asian ancestry play a character on a TV show and think nice thoughts about how far we’ve come as a society, even as your government drops military explosives on people on the other side of the world because they’re not seen as real human beings.

Reading by Tim Foley

Article with supporting links: https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2025/03/29/the-word-bombing-means-different-things-depending-on-where-it-happened/

Original: https://youtu.be/JNbBLQ4lSKY

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I write about the end of illusions. 100% reader-funded writer. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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