Originally a comment by Tim Harris on Bureaucracies love euphemism.

[“Kinetic”] could certainly be an abbreviation of “fucking hectic”, but what interests me about the word (in the way it’s used by Hegseth & others) is its scientific aura, its suggestion that what is happening is both violent and an index of overwhelming, god-like power, but also that it is mindless (which of course it is in a sense other than the sense I am trying to establish) and mechanical and has nothing to do with human intentions, decisions or responsibility (“kinetic energy” is, according to the OED, “energy which a body possesses by virtue of being in motion”), and so cannot be understood at all in human terms. War has been refined, as it were, into a sort of natural happening that can be understood only through physical laws. What violently happens just happens – it is what used to be called in more religious eras “an Act of God”, as at Sodom and Gomorrah. No-one is responsible for what is happening, particularly not the Trump regime and the Netanyahu regime, so no-one should feel upset or guilty.

I am reminded of how the interesting fascist writer Ernst Jünger represented in his book “Der Friede. Ein Wort an die Jugend Europas. Ein Wort an die Jugend Der Welt” (“The Peace: A Word for the Youth of Europe; A Word for the Youth of the World”) the Nazis’ seizure of power, the Shoah, the destruction of World War 2 as fundamentally a cosmic calamity for which nobody was responsible. That is why I characterise the word “kinetic”as “euphemistic” since it seeks, as does the term “enhanced interrogation”, to conceal actions taken by human beings, and the responsibility for these actions, beneath a quasi-scientific veneer.

“The Peace”, by the way, was intended for Allied readers, not for the German people. Typescripts were circulated, and the authorised version was finally published in Amsterdam in 1943. An English translation was published in 1948 from the right-wing publisher Henry Regnery Company, Hinsdale, Illinois,