This Means War (and Peace)
A chapter from my book: The terminology of warfare is all around us. (The San Francisco Chronicle front-page headline on the day of this writing, for example, reads, “Battle looms over high court choice.” 1 ) The metaphor of war—one nation’s army of uniformed soldiers facing off against another’s on the battlefield—seems to apply to any and every struggle. But it is a strange kind of metaphor, considering the hazy lines containing modern warfare. Many wars are undeclared: they are covert or referred to as “military actions.” Nowadays the battlefield is everywhere, and civilians seem more often than not to be the targets. The definition of war seems to vary from person to person, some people sticking to officially declared wars and others including occupations and other acts of aggression. Gang warfare is a fairly obvious example of something happening on our own soil which is experienced as a kind of war. So are many attacks on the working clas...