War & Peace Quote by Ulrich Beck

A metaphor, once weaponized, has a habit of demanding literal ammunition. Beck is pinpointing the slippery conversion of language into policy: “war on terrorism” starts as a rhetorical frame meant to signal urgency, unity, and moral clarity. Then the frame hardens. Institutions built for actual wars - armies, surveillance systems, emergency laws, alliances - snap into place because the word “war” carries an embedded script about what must follow. The brilliance (and chill) of Beck’s formulation is how it treats militarization not as a sudden moral failure but as a foreseeable outcome of a metaphor that quietly smuggles in permissions.

The subtext is a critique of modern states managing fear through what Beck elsewhere calls the “risk society.” Terrorism is diffuse, networked, and often statistically small compared to the scale of response; “war” solves that mismatch by offering a familiar narrative with enemies, fronts, victories, and sacrifice. It also shifts the burden of proof: wartime logic tolerates collateral damage, secrecy, and preemption in ways peacetime democracies are supposed to resist.

Context matters: Beck is writing in the long shadow of 9/11 and the subsequent global realignments - Afghanistan, Iraq, indefinite detention, normalized surveillance. His sentence is an autopsy of a political word choice. Call it war and you get war, even if the object (terror) is not an army but a tactic. That’s his warning: metaphors don’t just describe reality; they conscript it.