Susan Sontag- AIDS and its Metaphors

As I'm trying to make sense of this and its connection to our course, I think of the war metaphor and how it motivates so many facets of our society. War is synonymous with victory, with patriotism and nationalism, and with the struggle against invasive "evil." Sontag's piece brings these associations into question by unpacking the assumptions or pretenses that underlie them. She begins by referencing the Aristotelian definition of metaphor: giving the thing a name that belongs to something else. Are the people of Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea, Chavez's Venezuela, or Castro's Cuba evil because of the actions and consequences provoke negative consequences around the world? No, but metaphors like "the Axis of Evil" that associate an entire country of people with a leader with violent tendencies brings unwarranted stigma to all people from that country. Further, the association of disease like HIV, syphilis or COVID-19 with objective evil ignores the fact that the disease is a biological organism without the capability to behave morally, and thus it can't be "evil." However, the differentiating between the things that diseases or leaders do that are synonymous with evil, allows the construction of a metaphor to become an appropriate method to describe the effects of these things on human society.  To illustrate the importance of separating people from evil, let's consider the construction of disease as an invasive enemy. This has clear implications politically in the realm of immigration, since an easy connection can be drawn to "invasive groups of people" infiltrating our borders and waging war on "our way of life." Such derogatory othering has had drastic effects on the perceived safety of Chinese immigrants when COVID-19 was called "The China virus." Spain was tagged with the burden of "the Spanish flu" even though they weren't involved with the initial outbreak. The LGBTQ+ community has been associated with AIDS due to a higher proportion of infection, as have drug addicts due to needle sharing. All of these labels create stigma and inhibit progress towards a more free and fair society. So, in short, how we talk about ideas matters, and we as human beings should be mindful of the metaphors we use, so that we wage war against actions and consequences that are truly evil, rather than the people that are affected by these actions.