From their introduction to Raritan on War, an anthology of writing from the journal Raritan, which will be published next month by Rutgers University Press.

War challenges the limits of language, confronting us constantly with its brutality, futility, and mendacity, descending ultimately into absurdity, sentencing us at last to silence—unless we take refuge in slogans. As Paul Fussell observed in The Great War and Modern Memory, a distrust of vacuous language was a hallmark of the words on tombstones at the Somme, not the solemn slogans written by Rudyard Kipling but the inscriptions composed by the families of the dead. “In addition to the still hopeful ones about dawn and fleeing shadows we find some which are more ‘modern,’ that is, more personal, particular, and hopeless,” Fussell writes. “And some read as if refusing to play the game of memorial language at all: ‘A sorrow too deep for words.’ ” This was a kind of modernist vernacular; it resurfaced in the attitudes of American soldiers during World War II. Many of them quietly refused the rituals of welcome for returning heroes. And they avoided telling war stories, saying they “just had a job to do” and “just didn’t want to talk about it.” Speechlessness in the face of the unspeakable underscored an inescapable paradox; sometimes there is nothing more eloquent than silence.

Still, the slogans survive in American public discourse, kept alive by politicians on their podiums and journalists at their keyboards, demanding military intervention abroad in the name of this abstract ideal or that anticipated crisis. The language of war ranges from the tired banalities of militarist rhetoric to visceral combinations of horror, tenderness, and irony that produce memorable evocations of modern combat. Consider the scene in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 when the protagonist, Yossarian, goes to the rear of the plane to tend to the wounded gunner Snowden. Yossarian is relieved to discover that Snowden’s wound is not as serious as he had thought at first. “You’re going to be all right, kid,” he says. “Everything’s under control. . . . There, there.” But then he notices Snowden’s gesturing downward with his chin: “Yossarian ripped open the snaps of Snowden’s flak suit and heard himself scream wildly as Snowden’s insides slithered down to the floor in a soggy pile and just kept dripping out.” Yossarian “wondered how in the world to begin to save him”: “ ‘I’m cold,’ Snowden whimpered, ‘I’m cold.’ ‘There, there,’ Yossarian mumbled mechanically in a voice too low to be heard. ‘There, there.’ ”

Even as he covers Snowden in the closest thing he can find to a shroud—the dying man’s parachute—Yossarian continues to mumble the words a parent would say to a frightened child: “There, there.” It is a kind of incantation, an ontological reassurance: everything is still in its place; the cosmos is in order; it was only a bad dream. When his hope is smashed into fragments by his exposure to horror, Yossarian continues the reassurance, ritually, blindly: “There, there.” This is tenderness in extremis, veering into absurdity, concluding in irony. Nothing is in its place; the cosmos is deranged; life, like death, is meaningless. Yet the impulse to affirm and express human connection survives, against all odds.

Catch-22, like all great literature of modern war, contrasts the carnage of everyday combat with the denatured idioms of military bureaucracy. Heller’s Army Air Corps deploys a language characterized by the absence of any expectation of explanation. Authority rather than evidence determines the way events are represented. The representatives of authority create an absurdist language full of pseudostrategic abstractions—such as the phrase “bomb pattern” that General Peckem keeps repeating in the hope that it will advance his career. By ridiculing such absurdity, novelists like Heller and Kurt Vonnegut helped to explain (and implicitly to justify) the silence of the men who returned from combat and “just didn’t want to talk about it.” Theirs was the only sane response to a world where unimaginable violence was encased in bureaucratic euphemism.

Yet even if, as Walt Whitman wrote, “the real war will never get into the books,” writers and artists keep trying to say the unsayable, in words and artifacts, sometimes with indelible results. Most of their works are grounded in particular places—as Ernest Hemingway wrote, amid the vacant slogans of the war makers, “finally only the names of places had dignity.” Others take aim at the vast and vapid abstractions used to justify armed conflict, down to and including nuclear war. Perhaps the most dangerous and duplicitous of those abstractions, at this historical moment, is the threadbare word “democracy.” It has been ritually invoked ever since Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare a war that would make the world “safe for democracy.” The great irony, as Randolph Bourne recognized in Wilson’s day, is that the making of modern war undermines democracy at every turn, beginning with the demand for civilians’ passive compliance with mass conscription. The state engages in systematic efforts to spread war fever by infecting the populace with the big lies of propaganda. These efforts culminate in the creation of a huge apparatus of secrecy that conceals government decisions from public view. Secrecy is the mortal enemy of a well-informed citizenry. Without informed citizens, democracy is an empty ritual. That is the strange atmosphere we inhabit today.

American secrecy came of age by 1947, with the refashioning of the U.S. government into a national-security state. This involved the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency, whose remit would soon include the systematic manufacture of “disinformation” (i.e., lies); it would also include the renaming of the Department of War as the Department of Defense—perhaps the foundational bureaucratic euphemism of recent American history. The Cold War nurtured a culture of secrets and lies that the population came to tolerate as a strategic necessity; at the turn of the millennium, the war on terror took that duplicity to new levels of sophistication. As the famous Downing Street memo revealed, the Bush Administration had already decided to invade Iraq by the summer of 2002; rather than make a decision on the basis of truthful intelligence, it concocted false reports alleging that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction to justify its course of action.

The United States is now engaged, overtly and covertly, in two overseas conflicts that threaten global conflagration. The first is the proxy war against Russia that uses Ukrainians as cannon fodder in a U.S.-led campaign to plant hostile NATO nations near Russia’s western border. The second is the Israeli campaign of mass murder and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, part of a larger strategy aimed at the erasure of all Palestinian presence from Israel-Palestine. American leaders, in seeking to justify their complicity in this carnage, have hammered a few more nails into democracy’s coffin.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to find out what is happening in Ukraine and Gaza, not only because of the inevitable “fog of war” but also because the U.S. government suppresses inconvenient facts and dissenting voices. Censorship has proved especially challenging with respect to Gaza, given the breathtaking scale of Israeli war crimes—the haunting photographs of dead, maimed, and orphaned children; the piles of rubble concealing who knows how many dead or dying Palestinians. Yet the broad bipartisan support of both wars within the ruling class and the near-universal compliance of mainstream media with official dogma have ensured that antiwar sentiment remains largely silenced, however pervasive it might be in everyday American life. When dissent has surfaced, as it did in the dozens of pro-Palestinian encampments that appeared on college campuses this past spring, in many cases the official response has been swift and sure: call in the cops, in full riot gear, to disperse the protest. So much for the right of the people peaceably to assemble—what we once thought was a core democratic principle.

These are sad times for our country. “Democracy” has become one of those skunked words, like “sacred, glorious, and sacrifice,” which Hemingway found at best embarrassing, at worst obscene, among piles of corpses. If democracy can somehow be resurrected, it will have to follow an end to censorship and the wars abetted by it.