Journal about Metaphores and War by George Lakoff

Metaphores can kill everything

According to the story, one of the most central metaphors 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 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 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.
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 Estate as Person metaphor is pervasive, powerful, and part of an elaborate metaphor system. 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. 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.
There are individual people trying to maximize their "gains' and "assets" and minimize their "costs" and "losses." For a country's "assets" included its soldiers, materiel, and money. The "losses" 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. According to the Rational Actor Model, countries act naturally in their own best interests preserving their assets, that is, their own populations, their infrastructure, their wealth, their weaponry, and so on.
We really need a new Story and new metaphors. That and globally connected communities, new leaders, and, yes, the shortcut of money.
“Perhaps Lakoff thinks that coming up with new metaphors is too hard, a job for poets that we cannot reasonably demand, nor can we wait for. If not metaphors and facts, what's left? Values! Values apparently can do what facts cannot. But isn't it a common folk theory of progressives that "The values will set you free!" If only you can get all the real values out there in the public eye, then every feeling person will reach the right conclusion.” Quote by D. Weinberger.
I want to believe that. And yet I also have seen that the same values, the same human responses to suffering, result in radically different political outcomes. The same clips of the injured Iraqis in hospitals are used to dissuade us from war and to show us how compassionate we are towards the handful of unintended victims.

Mike Gutierrez.