[Fwd: SF Gate: Fighting war with words: Web site looks for a better way]

[Andrea Jacobs]

FYI - there was a discussion on the Philadelphia NPR station this
morning on the call-in talk show RAdio Times about the language of war -
this may have some useful "data" on it.

Andrea Jacobs

Joel Kuipers wrote:

> Some folks might find this useful....
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> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: SF Gate: Fighting war with words: Web site looks for a better
> way
> Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 11:44 -0800
> From: Joel Kuipers <kuipers at gwu.edu>
> Organization: SF Gate, San Francisco, CA
> To: Joel Kuipers <kuipers at gwu.edu>
>
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>This article was sent to you by someone who found it on SF Gate.
>The original article can be found on SFGate.com here:
>http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2003/03/25/state1539EST0094.DTL
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>Tuesday, March 25, 2003 (AP)
>Fighting war with words: Web site looks for a better way
>MICHELLE LOCKE, Associated Press Writer
>
>
>   (03-25) 12:39 PST SAN FRANCISCO (AP) --
>   The young and sometimes boisterous anti-war movement in the United States
>is learning something linguists already know: When fighting a war with
>words, it's important to choose your weapons carefully.
>   So far, it seems like a struggle is being waged for the heart of the
>movement, with some choosing largely peaceful means such as the crowd of
>more than 125,000 who marched down Broadway in New York this past weekend.
>Others have opted for rowdier tactics, such as the daily attempts to tie
>up traffic by blocking the streets of San Francisco.
>   It's a demonstrator's dilemma. The mellow approach runs the risk of being
>tuned out. But harsher tactics may turn off -- as when anti-war
>documentarian Michael Moore is greeted with cheers as he accepts an Oscar
>and then booed as he upbraids the president.
>   Getting the message, and the tone, just right, is key, says George Lakoff,
>a University of California, Berkeley, linguistics professor.
>   "Language matters a lot and the way that demonstrations are carried out
>matter a lot," he says.
>   Writer and educator Susan Strong has explored the power of positive
>phrasing by way of the Metaphor Project, a Web site that pushes the power
>of such positive phrases as "Save America, spare Iraq," and "Peace is
>patriotic."
>   "We need to reclaim the right to civil dialogue about the courses of
>action that our government takes," says Strong, who has a Ph.D. in
>comparative literature and has taught college classes in literature and
>communication. "Just saying no isn't enough. We have to be able to say
>what we're for."
>   Lakoff, who opposes the war, sees problems in the growing movement against
>it, not least being the name "anti-war movement," a negative approach and
>a cognitive mistake that Lakoff illustrates to his students with the
>simple instruction: Don't think of an elephant.
>   Framing the movement as anti-war also suggests it will end when the
>fighting stops, Lakoff says. In fact, "war is only a symptom here. What
>the Bush administration is trying to do is push a conservative agenda both
>within America and throughout the world. Progressives have an opposite
>agenda and they need to express it positively."
>   Disruption "just makes people mad at you," says Lakoff.
>   But Father Louis Vitale, who is pastor of St. Boniface Church in San
>Francisco and an active anti-war protester, says there "is a need to stop
>business as usual when we're involved in something that's just really
>immoral and unjust. We would say to people, 'Don't drive. Don't even go to
>work. Stay home and think through what do we need to change in order to be
>a society that lives without wars."'
>   Vitale, who teaches at the Franciscan School of Theology in Berkeley, says
>he's not crazy about some of the language being used by protesters. But he
>points out that in any popular movement you have many different voices,
>and that's a good thing.
>   "Where there aren't rough edges, there's some stifling of creativity," he
>says.
>   Protesters trying to get their view of war across may not know it, but
>they're fighting deeply ingrained metaphors that shape people's views,
>says Lakoff, whose most recent book is "Moral Politics: How Liberals and
>Conservatives Think."
>   Metaphors can kill, argues Lakoff, citing the idea of a "nation as a
>person," that is, Saddam Hussein equals Iraq, and, by extension, the idea
>of the world as a community of adult and child nations. The child nations
>are countries that are developing or underdeveloped, he says. That creates
>a scenario in which "the job of the adult nations is to tell the children
>nations how to develop and if they don't do it, to punish them."
>   Another deadly metaphor, Lakoff says, is that the war against Iraq is
>about rescuing the Iraqi people -- an idea that overlooks the fact that
>many will die in the bombing.
>   Meanwhile, conservatives have appropriated patriotic language and symbols
>as their own -- and liberals have let them, say Lakoff and Strong.
>   "It is patriotic," says Strong, "to be really concerned about our country
>and where this all leads and what kind of country we are becoming."
>
>On the Net:
>   www.co-intelligence.org/metaphorproject.html
>
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>Copyright 2003 AP
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