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War Rhetoric (war + rhetoric)
Selected AbstractsTales Calculated to Drive You MAD": The Debunking of Spies, Superheroes, and Cold War Rhetoric in Mad Magazine's "SPY vs SPY"THE JOURNAL OF POPULAR CULTURE, Issue 1 2007TEODORA CARABAS First page of article [source] Legitimizing the "War on Terror": Political Myth in Official-Level RhetoricPOLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 3 2010Joanne Esch This paper argues that mythical discourse affects political practice by imbuing language with power, shaping what people consider to be legitimate, and driving the determination to act. Drawing on Bottici's (2007) philosophical understanding of political myth as a process of work on a common narrative that answers the human need to ground events in significance, it contributes to the study of legitimization in political discourse by examining the role of political myth in official-level U.S. war rhetoric. It explores how two ubiquitous yet largely invisible political myths, American Exceptionalism and Civilization vs. Barbarism, which have long defined America's ideal image of itself and its place in the world, have become staples in the language of the "War on Terror." Through a qualitative analysis of the content of over 50 official texts containing lexical triggers of the two myths, this paper shows that senior officials of the Bush Administration have rhetorically accessed these mythical representations of the world in ways that legitimize and normalize the practices of the "War on Terror." [source] Hunting the Devil: Democracy's Rhetorical Impulse to WarPRESIDENTIAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2007ROBERT L. IVIE The rhetoric of evil, so prominently evident in contemporary presidential public address, articulates a primal motive for the war on terrorism by projecting democracy's shadow onto the external enemy. In this regard, the president's discourse is a manifestation rather than aberration of U.S. political culture, a reflection of the nation's troubled democratic identity. Upon close inspection, it reveals the presence of the mythos of a democratic demon contained within the republic, various ways in which the unconscious projection of this devil figure is rhetorically triggered, and the cultural significance of its lethal entailments. The diabolism of presidential war rhetoric, we suggest, functions as an inducement to evacuate the political content of democracy, leaving a largely empty but virulent signifier in its place, which weakens the nation by reproducing a culture of war. [source] Paradise Lost and the Question of LegitimacyRATIO, Issue 1 2004Wendy C. Hamblet This paper reconstructs the deficiencies of formal democracies to explain the internal injustices of the modern state, the self-righteous swaggering foreign policy of Western powers, and the dangerously over-simplified, polar logic characterizing the war rhetoric of the modern era. In a brief tour through the non-liberal tradition of democratic thought, drawing connections between the tragic mythological origins of Western understandings of self and world, the paper attempts to demonstrate that a failure to find alternate, healthier means of value-creation has caused Westerners, in their constructive identity work, to adhere themselves to their systems with a ritualized, ,religious' fervour. Legitimacy in the world becomes, in the final analysis, a simple matter of might. The possession of firearms and bread render self-sanctifying myths legitimating aggressions on the argument of ,good' powers fighting the battle against ,evil' contaminants. [source] | ||||||||||