War is not a computer game or a movie.

You don’t have to be mentally ill to be living in a fantasy world.

Mentally transforming the horrendous into the non-disturbing can come at a high emotional cost.

At the moment, our nation is at war. Much of what we may learn about this war will come from video imagery, which creates a problem that didn’t start with the Israeli-American war against Iran.

Beginning with the Vietnam War, it became possible to view actual images of fighting, wounding, and death. Since such sights are universally upsetting, metaphors were created borrowing from similar scenes and situations as depicted in movies and other visual media.

A whole vocabulary of mediaspeak terms applied to real life has gradually emerged. Included here, among others, are: collateral damage, neutralized, canceled, surgical strike, playbook, rules of the game, high-value target, and gamechanger.

All of these terms and many others are employed in the interest of moral distancing.

When this interchangeability between the vocabulary of media and real life progresses unchecked, events that ordinarily would lead to distress (widespread genocidal attacks on people competing for and with equal rights to the same land or resources, for example) routinely undergo an emotional flattening (the people depicted are “targets” who must be “neutralized”). Or an emotional reframing via terms such as “canceling” or “eliminating,” which arouse little or no emotion. When the word “neutralize” is applied, it is a buffer to reduce the normal distress associated with watching and reacting to carnage and destruction.

This shift from reality to the fantasy world of mediaspeak is made easier because we have become accustomed to employing media-associated terms in our everyday discourse. Some of us “cancel” people without any serious physical consequences; a salesperson frequently describes prospective customers as “targets.”

Further, the images and vocabulary share something with computer war games. In both computer-game wars and real wars, “targets” appear briefly on the screen before they are vaporized in an incandescent flash, truly a moment of “shock and awe.” Frequent exposure to such horrific events is mediated via a legerdemain that depicts and describes war in cinematic terms. This can lead to the perception that the image was “surreal” or “like something out of a movie,” and other phrases suggesting that a person is processing reality through video entertainment templates.

Watching images of death and destruction from a safe, comfy distance (“Pass the popcorn, please”) has a long history. We’ve seen so much violence and mayhem in movies and on television screens all our lives that when we encounter real-life depictions of battlefield horrors, we tend, as in a movie theater, to sit back and enjoy the “special effects.” Eventually, mediaspeak serves as our go-to defense against uncomfortable emotions.

Try this little thought experiment: Imagine watching a video of something really grisly, such as a clip of a young child being tortured and killed. Would you feel better if I told you that this deeply unsettling video was taken from a horror movie, as compared to your response if I told you that what you have just seen came from a video diary kept by a serial killer? I’m confident that you would feel a good deal better.

Now let’s take that same situation with a slightly different twist: i.e., it actually happened. A decade or so ago, I was lecturing at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, on the neuropsychiatry of serial killers. After my lecture, I was requested to watch just such a video as described above, made by a sadistic killer. Even as a trained professional, I had a very difficult time sitting through it and getting it out of my mind for days afterward; my sleep was disturbed over several nights.

When I mentioned my discomfort to one of the other consultant-lecturers, he suggested that I imagine that the video I had watched was not “real,” but an excerpt from a horror movie. In essence, he suggested that I would feel better if a true-life experience were reinterpreted in a movie or video context. The killer and his victim were still real enough, but I would feel less distressed if I transformed what I had seen into a video and thought of them as actors. To my surprise, he was right: Imagining a horrifying experience as “only a movie” enabled me to relax about the whole thing, and my sleep normalized. Now, despite the positive results, I am less certain I did the right thing.

Similar thought transformations are now taking place on a national scale. Many of us are choosing to accept media-inspired euphemisms that prevent us from seeing and, most of all, experiencing what is going on.

Thanks to our powers of imagination and creativity, we can take difficult, even horrific, events and transform them into something less disturbing. So far, so good. But a problem arises when carrying out these transformations: We slowly deplete our capacity to identify with others who are undergoing experiences that we would do anything to avoid ourselves.

It’s the accompanying vocabulary that creates the problems. In place of recognizing the horrific, no matter in what form it occurs, we increasingly employ mediaspeak to save us the pain of experiencing our own raw emotions. Worst of all, there doesn’t seem to be any respite from this process.

After Iranian civilians, many of them women and children, surrounded the power stations and other Iranian “high-value targets,” a temporary ceasefire was called.

Was the temporary ceasefire established to prevent the death of thousands of non-combatant civilians, along with the witnessing of these deaths by millions of people worldwide via videos? Or was it because no one had yet come up with a mediaspeak term to obfuscate at this scale such an outrageous moral transgression?

What can we do to help here? First, remind ourselves upon awakening every morning that we are not living in a video. This is reality! Second, check ourselves whenever we find we’re using the vocabulary of mediaspeak, lest our emotions become blunted and our judgment impaired: Killing is not “taking out” someone, and the willful homicide of non-combatant women and children is not “collateral damage,” but a war crime.

As George Orwell, who foresaw so many of these things over 70 years ago, put it: “Language (often spread through media) makes war more acceptable by disguising its brutality.”

Copyright Richard M. Restak, M.D., 2026.

Kamalipour, Yahya R. and Hamid Mowlana “War, Media & Propaganda: A Global Perspective”; Rowman & Littlefield, September 14, 2004:

War and media since 9/11. European Journal of Communication. October 2019. P. Robinson

Virillio, Paul. “War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception.” Verso, published July 17, 1989.

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