At War with Metaphor: Media, Propaganda, and Racism in the War on Terror. Erin Steuter and Deborah Wills. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008. 244 pp.
Erin Steuter and Deborah Wills, who teach sociology and English at Canada’s Mount Allison University, are commited to raising the level of public understanding about the role that media play in bringing people into and through a seemingly endless string of wars. Although this book is focused primarily on U.S. media constructions of the so-called “War on Terror,” its emphasis on the role that metaphor plays in the strategic “othering” of countless enemies helps to establish the historical roots of this discursive practice.
Although the authors acknowledge the important contribution to our understanding of various “wars” that have been provided by the alternative media, this book is primarily a critical assessment of the complicity with which the “mainstream media” support their government’s use of propaganda as a strategic resource.
The book begins with an accessible introduction to the nature, role, and routine use of metaphor within communications in general, and within mass media in particular. Because of its concern with the call to war and the metaphoric construction of the enemy, most of the book’s examples have been chosen to illustrate the use of readily interpreted images of the “Other” as subhuman, dangerous, and worthy of little short of annihilation. In one chapter, this metaphoric othering is associated with Orientalism as an especially extreme form of construction that frames the other as not only different, but essentially the opposite of all that we value in ourselves.
The dehumanization of the enemy is accomplished routinely in the nexus of racism and genocide, and it is in this context that Steuter and Wills provide historical examples of the use of metaphor to justify the most extreme treatment of slaves, Jews, Rwandans, and Asian enemies of wars past.
The second of three sections in the book is focused on three contemporary case studies that identify some of the common threads that tie the process of dehumanization together. The first, and perhaps most familiar, discursive strategy is the use of animals and disease, and the implied links between them to invite us to accept extermination as an appropriate military response. The strategic use of images and labels of particular animals is quite common in part because of the deeply engrained aversive responses that most of us have to rats and other vermin. Similarly shared impressions of the “character” of individual animals like weasels help to reinforce the impressions of the enemy as treacherous, sneaky, and cowardly.
One chapter is devoted to the use of these constructions of the enemy as vermin, and their actions as infestation, in order to justify eradication through extermination. These examples come primarily from the political cartoon, a communicative resource that they place “at the intersection of popular and political culture.” In this chapter, we find a rare example of a counter-hegemonic cartoon, one in which the links between the construction of enemies as pests, worthy only of an extreme response, and collateral damage to people and infrastructure are creatively drawn. Although the messages behind most of these cartoons are really quite hard to miss, Steuter and Wills’ interpretive comments are designed to reinforce key lessons about how metaphors actually do their work.
And, although they demonstrate how a picture is worth a thousand words, they also devote a chapter to the destructive use of hateful words in the background environment provided by talk radio. The apparent popularity of right wing talk shows with audiences that actually think of themselves as liberals or moderates is initially presented as evidence of non-responsive corporate control, rather than something more troublesome. In dealing with the spreading influence of this form of cultural pollution, the authors appear to be a bit befuddled about how we ought to resolve the conflict between the values of free speech and the need to counter the corrosive effects they describe.
It is in the third section of the book that their attention is turned from descriptive critique to the identification of some of the institutional constraints that make limiting the harmful impact of the metaphors of war both necessary and difficult at the same time. One chapter identifies the “filters” that operate to a considerable extent on the supply of metaphors used to frame the debates about a nation’s wars. Familiar structures and systems of influence include government sources, media owners, advertisers, and the organized interests that take advantage of existing frames within the ideological core of national political culture to amplify the especially resonant tones. Critical events like the attacks on September 11th provide additional heat to the smoldering fires of nationalist anxiety about enemies within and without.
The book ends with a somewhat hopeful expression of faith in the emergence of a new form of journalism, one with a commitment to peace that will have to rise from outside the boundaries of the mainstream that they have so well described. I am not sure that such faith can be justified on the basis of the few examples of oppositional and alternative journalism they provide. At the same time, I believe that this book would be quite helpful in motivating students of the media, including those who aspire to write the narratives of our future, to work toward the development of some alternatives to the ones we have developed so far.
Oscar H. Gandy Jr.
University of Pennsylvania