War Has Never Been Called War — A Reflection

Language is the first casualty of war.

Not soldiers. Not civilians. Not truth — though truth follows close behind. It's language that falls first, quietly, without ceremony. Words get hollowed out, dressed in uniforms they don't recognise, and sent marching across headlines before anyone stops to ask what they actually mean.

I've been thinking about this for days. Sitting in my wheelchair in Tirana, scrolling through news feeds that smell of smoke even through a screen, I keep returning to a single, devastating observation: "Throughout history, war has never been called war". That line hit me the way a diagnosis hits you — not with surprise, but with the sickening clarity of something you already knew but refused to name.

The Dictionary Lied to Us

Let's talk about the word "legitimate."

The Israeli attack on Iran, carried out in collusion with the United States, has set the Middle East ablaze. And certain newspapers — with straight faces and steady hands — have labelled it "legitimate". The dictionary agrees, technically. Legitimate: done according to the law. But here's the thing that keeps me awake at 2 a.m. — there is no law that sanctions the right to kill even the worst of tyrants.

I'm a physicist by training. I spent years at the University of Bologna and then Milan, learning that precision matters. A decimal point in the wrong place changes everything. So when I see a word like "legitimate" applied to bombing campaigns, I don't just feel angry. I feel the same vertigo I'd feel watching someone misplace a decimal in a nuclear equation.

The consequences of imprecision are catastrophic.

Preemptive: The Most Dangerous Adjective

Here's where the linguistic gymnastics get truly acrobatic. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained that the American attack was preemptive — because Israel intended to bomb Iran, and Iran "would have immediately reacted against us, and we could not have stood by and absorbed the blow before responding".

Read that again. Slowly.

The logic is circular enough to make your head spin. We attacked because our ally was going to attack, and the enemy would have reacted to that attack, and we couldn't wait for that hypothetical reaction to a hypothetical provocation that we did nothing to prevent. The idea that the US could have simply told Israel not to bomb Iran? That hypothesis "did not even cross the White House's mind".

I've had surgeries — multiple ones, including a Deep Brain Stimulation implant and its eventual removal between 2011 and 2018. I know what it's like when someone tells you a procedure is "necessary" and "preventive." You learn to ask: preventive of what, exactly? And who decided the risk was real? In medicine, at least, there's an ethics board. In geopolitics, the ethics board is apparently on permanent holiday.

The Liberation Myth

Now comes the part that makes my stomach turn.

"Certain shameless newspapers are pouring out litres of ink to invite jubilation" . They claim this violence will lead to the liberation of women and children from oppression. Liberation! The word tastes like ash in my mouth.

Because the supposed liberators — let's name them plainly — include the Israeli government, which history will condemn for the systematic massacre of women and children in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank . This is not opinion dressed as fact. The evidence is overwhelming, documented by international organisations, captured on camera by journalists who risked (and lost) their lives.

You don't get to slaughter children in one territory and claim you're saving them in another. That's not liberation. That's marketing.

Words as Weapons, Silence as Complicity

I run FreeAstroScience, a science and cultural group with tens of thousands of followers. We talk about stars, about physics, about the structure of the universe. And one thing I've learned from studying the cosmos is this: the universe doesn't care about our adjectives. A supernova doesn't call itself a "controlled energy release." A black hole doesn't rebrand as a "gravitational wellness centre."

Reality doesn't need euphemisms. Only humans do.

And we reach for them — "preemptive strike," "legitimate defence," "collateral damage" — not because reality is too complex for plain language, but because plain language would force us to feel what's actually happening. Plain language would say: we bombed people. People died. Children died. We chose this.

I've spent my life in a wheelchair. I know something about the gap between how the world describes you and how you actually experience your own body, your own life. People call me "brave" or "inspiring" when I'm just… living. The words they use say more about their discomfort than about my reality. War works the same way. The adjectives tell you everything about the speaker's need to look away — and nothing about what's actually on the ground.

The Shamelessly Quiet Part

The source text I'm reflecting on ends with a single word, standing alone like a verdict: "Shamelessly" .

That word — unfinished, dangling, raw — says more than any paragraph of analysis. It's the sound of someone whose voice broke mid-sentence. Someone who ran out of polite ways to describe the indescribable.

I respect that silence. I've felt it myself. When you've watched enough news cycles sanitise enough atrocities, there comes a moment when the only honest response is to stop mid-thought and let the emptiness speak.

What Science Taught Me About Honesty

Let me simplify something for those who aren't neck-deep in physics (and honestly, even for those who are). In science, we have a principle: a model is only as good as its honesty about what it doesn't explain. A theory that claims to account for everything is almost certainly wrong. The best scientists are the ones who say, clearly and without shame, "Here's what we don't know."

War propaganda works in the opposite direction. It claims total certainty. It explains everything. The enemy is purely evil. Our side is purely good. The bombing is purely necessary. The casualties are purely unavoidable.

That's not analysis. That's religion without the grace.

Never Give Up — Even on Language

My life's philosophy is simple: never give up. I didn't give up when dystonia tried to define my body. I didn't give up when surgeries left scars that ache on cold mornings. I didn't give up when people assumed a wheelchair meant a smaller mind.

And I won't give up on words.

Because if we surrender language to the war-makers — if we let "legitimate" mean "powerful enough to avoid consequences," if we let "preemptive" mean "we attacked first but it's fine," if we let "liberation" mean "we killed your neighbours for your own good" — then we've lost something no ceasefire can restore.

The fight for honest language is the fight for peace. Not the abstract, bumper-sticker kind. The real kind. The kind where a child in Gaza wakes up tomorrow.

A Final Thought from Tirana

I'm writing this from Albania, a country that knows something about propaganda. We lived under one of the most isolated dictatorships in Europe for decades. We know what happens when words are emptied of meaning and refilled with ideology. We know the texture of lies repeated until they feel like truth — smooth, polished, almost comfortable.

So when I read that war has never been called war, I don't just nod in agreement. I feel it in my bones. In the bones that have been cut open and reassembled. In the bones that carry me through a world not built for my body.

War is war. Call it what it is. And then — only then — can we begin the honest, painful, necessary work of stopping it.

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Gerd Dani is the President of Free AstroScience.