Semantic War In The Space Of A Key Symbol: Towards The Theory Of An Actual Phenomenon[Семантическая Война В Пространстве Ключевого Символа: К Теории Актуального Феномена]

The purpose of the article is to clarify the concept of semantic war as a special kind of symbolic politics, which should not be confused with the broader concept of propaganda (information) wars. Placing semantic wars on the lower levels of cognitive legitimation of power (according to the typology of P. Berger and T. Luckmann), the authors interpret them as a kind of semantic struggle waged in the space of the same key symbol (concept) (H. Lasswell). The article emphasizes that the main cognitive strategy of the semantic war is the management of polysemy/multivaluedness of the key concepts of public discourse, because of which the interpretation of the concept desired by a given political actor is «naturalized» as part of common sense. The authors point out that semantic wars are conducted both for separate lexical concepts and for conceptual metaphors. This thesis is illustrated in the article by the experience of studying the concept of «the West» in the discourse of the German parliamentary debates, as well as by the interpretation of the metaphor «the third world war without powder smoke» in the Chinese blogosphere during the COVID-19 pandemic.