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Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Gulf

2012; De Gruyter; Volume: 4; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1515/cogsem.2012.4.2.5

2235-2066

George Lakoff,

Language, Metaphor, and Cognition

This paper was presented on January 30, 1991 in the midst of the Gulf War to an audience at Alumni House on the campus of the University of California at Berke- ley. An earlier version had been distributed widely via electronic mail, starting on December 31 , 1990. Metaphor and War The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Gulf George Lakoff Linguistics Department University of California at Berkeley (lakoff@cogsci.berkeley.edu) Metaphors can kill. The discourse over whether to go to war in the gulf was a panorama of metaphor. Secretary of State Baker saw Saddam Hussein as “sit- ting on our economic lifeline.’ ’ President Bush portrayed him as having a “stran- glehold” on our economy. General Schwartzkopf characterized the occupation of Kuwait as a “rape” that was ongoing. The President said that the US was in the gulf to “protect freedom, protect our future, and protect the innocent”, and that we had to “push Saddam Hussein back.” Saddam Hussein was painted as a Hitler. It is vital, literally vital, to understand just what role metaphorical thought played in bringing us in this war. Metaphorical thought, in itself, is neither good nor bad; it is simply com- monplace and inescapable. Abstractions and enormously complex situations are routinely understood via metaphor. Indeed, there is an extensive, and mostly unconscious, system of metaphor that we use automatically and unreflectively to