"Metaphor and War, Again"

Tue Mar 18 22:33:59 CST 2003

"On sidewalks and walls the very first printed slogans
start to show up, the first Central Asian fuck you
signs, the first kill-the-police commissioner signs
(and somebody does! this alphabet is really
something!) and so the magic that the shamans, out in
the wind, have always known, begins to operate now in
a political way, and Dzaqyp Qulan hears the ghost of
his own lynched father with a scratchy pen in the
night, practicing As and Bs. . . "
(GR, 355-356)

Metaphor and War, Again
By George Lakoff, AlterNet
March 18, 2003

Metaphors can kill. 

That's how I began a piece on the first Gulf War back
in 1990, just before the war began. Many of those
metaphorical ideas are back, but within a very
different and more dangerous context. Since Gulf War
II is due to start any day, perhaps even tomorrow, it
might be useful to take a look before the action
begins at the metaphorical ideas being used to justify
Gulf War II. 

One of the most central metaphors in our foreign
policy is that A Nation Is A Person. It is used
hundreds of times a day, every time the nation of Iraq
is conceptualized in terms of a single person, Saddam
Hussein. The war, we are told, is not being waged
against the Iraqi people, but only against this one
person. Ordinary American citizens are using this
metaphor when they say things like, "Saddam is a
tyrant. He must be stopped." What the metaphor hides,
of course, is that the 3000 bombs to be dropped in the
first two days will not be dropped on that one person.
They will kill many thousands of the people hidden by
the metaphor, people that according to the metaphor we
are not going to war against. 

The Nation As Person metaphor is pervasive, powerful,
and part of an elaborate metaphor system. It is part
of an International Community metaphor, in which there
are friendly nations, hostile nations, rogue states,
and so on. This metaphor comes with a notion of the
national interest: Just as it is in the interest of a
person to be healthy and strong, so it is in the
interest of a Nation-Person to be economically healthy
and militarily strong. That is what is meant by the
"national interest." 

In the International Community, peopled by
Nation-Persons, there are Nation-adults and
Nation-children, with Maturity metaphorically
understood as Industrialization. The children are the
"developing" nations of the Third World, in the
process of industrializing, who need to be taught how
to develop properly and to be disciplined (say, by the
International Monetary Fund) when they fail to follow
instructions. "Backward" nations are those that are
"underdeveloped." Iraq, despite being the cradle of
civilization, is seen via this metaphor as a kind of
defiant armed teenage hoodlum who refuses to abide by
the rules and must be "taught a lesson." 

The international relations community adds to the
Nation As Person metaphor what is called the "Rational
Actor Model." The idea here is that it is irrational
to act against your interests and that nations act as
if they were "rational actors" – individual people
trying to maximize their "gains' and "assets" and
minimize their "costs" and "losses." In Gulf War I,
the metaphor was applied so that a country's "assets"
included its soldiers, materiel, and money. Since the
US lost few of those "assets" in Gulf War I, the war
was reported, just afterward in the NY Times Business
section, as having been a "bargain." Since Iraqi
civilians were not our assets, they could not be
counted as among the "losses" and so there was no
careful public accounting of civilian lives lost,
people maimed, and children starved or made seriously
ill by the war or the sanctions that followed it.
Estimates vary from half a million to a million or
more. However, public relations was seen to be a US
asset: excessive slaughter reported on in the press
would be bad PR, a possible loss. These metaphors are
with us again. A short war with few US casualties
would minimize costs. But the longer it goes on, the
more Iraqi resistance and the more US casualties, the
less the US would appear invulnerable and the more the
war would appear as a war against the Iraqi people.
That would be a high "cost." 

[...]

One of the most frequent uses of the Nation As Person
metaphor comes in the almost daily attempts to justify
the war metaphorically as a "just war." The basic idea
of a just war uses the Nation As Person metaphor plus
two narratives that have the structure of classical
fairy tales: The Self Defense Story and The Rescue
Story. 

In each story, there is a Hero, a Crime, a Victim, and
a Villain. In the Self-Defense story, the Hero and the
Victim are the same. In both stories, the Villain is
inherently evil and irrational: The Hero can't reason
with the Villain; he has to fight him and defeat him
or kill him. In both, the victim must be innocent and
beyond reproach. In both, there is an initial crime by
the Villain, and the Hero balances the moral books by
defeating him. If all the parties are Nation-Persons,
then self-defense and rescue stories become forms of a
just war for the Hero-Nation. 

In Gulf War I, Bush I tried out a self-defense story:
Saddam was "threatening our oil life-line." The
American people didn't buy it. Then he found a winning
story, a rescue story – The Rape of Kuwait. It sold
well, and is still the most popular account of that
war. 

In Gulf War II, Bush II is pushing different versions
of the same two story types, and this explains a great
deal of what is going on in the American press and in
speeches by Bush and Powell. If they can show that
Saddam = Al Quaeda – that he is helping or harboring
Al Qaeda, then they can make a case for the
Self-defense scenario, and hence for a just war on
those grounds. Indeed, despite the lack of any
positive evidence and the fact that the secular Saddam
and the fundamentalist bin Laden despise each other,
the Bush administration has managed to convince 40 per
cent of the American public of the link, just by
asserting it. The administration has told its soldiers
the same thing, and so our military men see themselves
as going to Iraq in defense of their country. 

In the Rescue Scenario, the victims are (1) the Iraqi
people and (2) Saddam's neighbors, whom he has not
attacked, but is seen as "threatening." That is why
Bush and Powell keep on listing Saddam's crimes
against the Iraqi people and the weapons he could use
to harm his neighbors. Again, most of the American
people have accepted the idea that Gulf War II is a
rescue of the Iraqi people and a safeguarding of
neighboring countries. Of course, the war threatens
the safety and well-being of the Iraqi people and will
inflict considerable damage on neighboring countries
like Turkey and Kuwait. 

And why such enmity toward France and Germany? Via the
Nation As Person metaphor, they are supposed to be our
"friends" and friends are supposed to be supportive
and jump in and help us when we need help. Friends are
supposed to be loyal. That makes France and Germany
fair-weather friends! Not there when you need them. 

This is how the war is being framed for the American
people by the Administration and media. Millions of
people around the world can see that the metaphors and
fairy tales don't fit the current situation, that Gulf
War II does not qualify as a just war – a "legal" war.
But if you accept all these metaphors, as Americans
have been led to do by the administration, the press,
and the lack of an effective Democratic opposition,
then Gulf War II would indeed seem like a just war. 

[...] 

One of the fundamental findings of cognitive science
is that people think in terms of frames and metaphors
– conceptual structures like those we have been
describing. The frames are in the synapses of our
brains – physically present in the form of neural
circuitry. When the facts don't fit the frames, the
frames are kept and the facts ignored. 

It is a common folk theory of progressives that "The
facts will set you free!" If only you can get all the
facts out there in the public eye, then every rational
person will reach the right conclusion. It is a vain
hope. Human brains just don't work that way. Framing
matters. Frames once entrenched are hard to dispel. 
[...]  

George Lakoff is the author of "Moral Politics: How
Liberals and Conservatives Think," University of
Chicago Press, Second edition, 2002. He is Professor
of Linguistics at the University of California at
Berkeley and a Senior Fellow of the Rockridge
Institute.

<http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15414>

Lakoff co-authored, with Mark Johnson, a book I highly
recommend:
_Philosophy in the Flesh : The Embodied Mind and Its
Challenge to Western Thought_. 

=====
<http://www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com/>

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