Five Years After 9/11: Drop the War Metaphor

[Poiuyt]

Five Years After 9/11: Drop the War Metaphor

By George Lakoff and Evan Frisch

For a few hours after the towers fell on 9/11, administration spokesmen referred to the event as a "crime." Indeed, Colin Powell argued within the administration that it be treated as a crime.
This would have involved international crime-fighting techniques: checking banks accounts, wire-tapping, recruiting spies and informants, engaging in diplomacy, cooperating with intelligence agencies in other governments, and if necessary, engaging in limited "police actions" with military force. Indeed, such methods have been the most successful so far in dealing with terrorism.

But the crime frame did not prevail in the Bush administration. Instead, a war metaphor was chosen: the "War on Terror." Literal --not metaphorical -- wars are conducted against armies of other nations. They end when the armies are defeated militarily and a peace treaty is signed. Terror is an emotional state. It is in us. It is not an army. And you can't defeat it militarily and you can't sign a peace treaty with it.

The war metaphor was chosen for political reasons. First and foremost, it was chosen for the domestic political reasons. The war metaphor defined war as the only way to defend the nation. From within the war metaphor, being against war as a response was to be unpatriotic, to be against defending the nation. The war metaphor put progressives on the defensive. Once the war metaphor took hold, any refusal to grant the president full authority to conduct the war would open progressives in Congress to the charge of being unpatriotic, unwilling to defend America, defeatist. And once the military went into battle, the war metaphor created a new reality that reinforced the metaphor.

Once adopted, the war metaphor allowed the president to assume war powers, which made him politically immune from serious criticism and gave him extraordinary domestic power to carry the agenda of the radical right: Power to shift money and resources away from social needs and to the military and related industries. Power to override environmental safeguards on the grounds of military need. Power to set up a domestic surveillance system to spy on our citizens and to intimidate political enemies. Power over political discussion, since war trumps all other topics. In short, power to reshape America to the vision of the radical right -- with no end date.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-lakoff/five-years-after-911-dr_b_29181.html

This is a great article

[Garbo 2004]

1. Yes, Thank You! Today I heard maybe it was Candy Crowley on CNN talking

about another casualty in the "War on Terror" and I thought, what "war?" The Administration via the "news" tells us it's a "war on terror" so it is? And they use that to justify whatever they want to do, to designate whoever they wish as "the enemy?" And when they saw that it wasn't working and people increasingly saw through the bullshit of "fighting them over there," their rhetoric turned on Americans...dissent is "aiding the terrorists." The enemy is no longer "over there," its the American people who exercise their constitutional right to question and criticize their own government.

Yes, there is a war on freedom but those who are conducting it are here, in Washington DC. They hate us for our freedom. Who else is trying to take it away from us? Who else has that kind of power over us? Who else can spy on us, monitor our electronic conversations, come to our door, detain and question us for "suspicious" activity or speech? It ain't Osama.

And corporate media with their corporate masters go along with the bullshit and the "war on terror," using that phrase as if it meant something real, as if it meant anything other than a cynical justification for the Administration to violate the law and the Constitution, curtail our liberties and throw lives away in the service of Halliburton, Exxon, etc., and their other corporate cronies.