George Lakoff’s article AlterNet: Metaphor and War, Again (via Metafilter) follows up on a similar piece he wrote about the previous Gulf War, which looks at the metaphors and conceptual frameworks used by US propaganda to build and maintain support for its illegal occupation of Iraq
In particular, this can help us understand why so many US citizens persist in clearly false beliefs concerning the alleged links between Iraq and Al-Qaeda and the even more preposterous idea that Iraq was somehow behind 9-11
“One of the fundamental findings of cognitive science is that people think in terms of frames and metaphors – conceptual structures like those we have been describing. The frames are in the synapses of our brains – physically present in the form of neural circuitry. When the facts don’t fit the frames, the frames are kept and the facts ignored.
It is a common folk theory of progressives that “The facts will set you free!” If only you can get all the facts out there in the public eye, then every rational person will reach the right conclusion. It is a vain hope. Human brains just don’t work that way. Framing matters. Frames once entrenched are hard to dispel. “Whilst this article has a political purpose, it also reinforces the importance of language and the control of conceptual models in any form of mass communication.