August 31, 2007
Fighting terrorism with metaphors
page 2 (Page 1 is here.)
Lakoff’s assertion that “thought is emotional” can be traced to the contemporary Left’s constant suggestions that the Islamist enemies of the United States are somehow misunderstood victims themselves. On September 12, 2001, Ward Churchill infamously described the victims of 9/11 as “Little Eichmanns.” Most commentators on the Left, of course, don’t take their arguments quite that far. They try to describe the scourge of Islamist terrorism as a big misunderstanding, as former President Clinton did a few weeks after 9/11:
“Those of us who come from various European lineages are not blameless. Indeed, in the first Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they first burned a synagogue with 300 Jews in it, and proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim on the Temple mound…. I can tell you that that story is still being told today in the Middle East and we are still paying for it. ..So terror has a long history.”
–President Bill Clinton, November 7, 2001
Even after an event like 9/11 the Left feels compelled to make excuses for the other side. To state unequivocally that al-Qaeda terrorists and their supporters are evil would, as its corollary, imply that the United States and Western Civilization must somehow be good. And this would be an anathema to the campus protestor of 1968. For in the eyes of the diehard Left, the only sources of evil in this world are the United States and Western Civilization.
In the 1960s, the Left embraced Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong, despite the fact that both men had murdered millions of their countrymen. The Left has not yet actively embraced Islamist terrorists, but the Left constantly implies that the terrorists are not the threat that the unenlightened public makes them out to be. The proponents of this idea are not persuaded by the fact that 3,000 people were killed on American soil on September 11, 2001.
The ultimate upshot of these arguments is that the real problem is not radical Islam, but the United States itself.
Don’t believe me? Well, check this out:
Speaking at the San Sebastian International Film Festival, Stone condemned what he saw as the politicization of the 9/11 attacks.
He claimed the "overreaction" to the attacks had wasted resources, encouraged fanatics and made him "ashamed to be an American".
"It is a shame because it is a waste of energy to see that the entire world five years later is still convulsed in the grip of 9/11."
He added: "It's a waste of energy away from things that do matter which is poverty, death, disease, the planet itself and fixing things in our own homes rather than fighting wars with others.
---BBC September, 2006
Interesting. Foreign-born Muslim terrorists kill several thousand people in New York, and Oliver Stone is “ashamed to be an American.” (Stone, incidentally, is also a veteran of the 60s counterculture, and enthusiastically embraces its ideals.)
George Lakoff does not go quite that far. But he does attempt to sneak in the idea that the War on Terror is one big misunderstanding---the overreaction of the simplistic conservative establishment. This is what he wants to believe.
And he wants you to believe it, too; because this is the conclusion that serves his larger ideological purposes: the conclusion that Bush and his fellow Republicans are a bunch of nincompoops.
According to George Lakoff, we can believe that the thousands of people killed by Islamist terror in recent years are just figments of our “state of mind.” We can believe this if we want to, so long as we frame it with the right metaphor. After all, as they used to say in the sixties, “thought is emotional, man.”