Today’s Plan:
- Class cancelled: October 4th
- Project Two Talk
- Project Four Update
- Katz’s “Ethics of Expediency”
- Homework
Project Two Talk
I want to talk about WordPress and CMS.
I want to talk about the project update memos from last week. I think I can be most helpful to you if you give me specifics: what did you learn? what questions do you have? etc.
Project Four Update
We have a client! They answered our call.
Katz’s “Ethics of Expediency”
The Holocaust is primarily responsible for renewing Western academic interest in rhetoric. How does a tyrant convince one of the most intellectually sophisticated countries on Earth to help him–or at the least allow him–to scapegoat and eradicate an entire race of people?
The best answer to this question lies in Kenneth Burke’s essay “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle.” What always blows me away about Burke’s essay is the publication date: 1939, before we “knew” of the extent of the Holocaust. Burke had been warning of Hitler’s power and persuasiveness since the early 1930’s and was one of the most important American thinkers of the early 20th century.
Burke’s analysis (in short): Hitler was able to create a scapegoat, the Jew. This process of scapegoating might fall under what Molly calls “objectivity”–the Jew becomes less a human than a devil, a monster, an abstraction of evil. Burke:
Once Hitler has thus essentialized his enemy, all “proof” henceforth is automatic. If you point out the enormous amount of evidence to show that the Jewish worker is at odds with [Hitler’s description of] the “international Jew stock exchange capitalist,” Hitler replies with one hundred percent regularity: That is one more indication of the cunning with which the “Jewish plot” is being engineered. (RoHB 167)
Hitler’s ability to decimate public confidence in existing political institutions:
So you had this Babel of voices; and, by the method of associative mergers, using ideas as imagery, it became tied up, in the Hitler rhetoric, with “Babylon,” Vienna as the city of poverty, prostitution, immorality, coalitions, half-measures, incest, democracy (i.e., majority rule leading to “lack of personal responsibility”), death, internationalism, seduction, and anything else of thumbs-down sort the associative enterprise cared to add on this side of the balance. (172)
What was needed then was a strong voice, an authoritative figure, who could drain the swamp. Err. Who could silence the babble, get things done, and restore Germany’s economic, military, and cultural power.
Restoration of national/spiritual dignity (fueled by our inborn desire for unity):
A people in collapse, suffering under economic frustration and the defeat of nationalistic aspirations […] have little other than some ‘spiritual’ basis to which they could refer their nationalistic dignity. Hence, the categorical dignity of superior race was a perfect recipe for the situation. It was ‘spiritual’ in so far as it was ‘above’ crude economic interests, but it was ‘materialized’ at the psychologically right spot in that the enemy was something you could see (the Jew). Furthermore, you had the desire for unity […]. The yearning for unity is so great that people are always willing to meet you halfway if you will give it to them by fiat, by flat statement, regardless of the facts. Hence, Hitler consistently refused to consider internal political conflict on the basis of conflicting interests.
Rather, Burke explains, Hitler argued that political differences were the result of conflict between good people, the right people, “us” and bad people, the wrong people, “them”–all political conflict was, at its root, the fault of them bad people] Back to Burke:
People so dislike the idea of internal division that, where there is a real internal division, their dislike can easily be turned against the man or group who would so much as name it, let alone proposing to act on it. (176)
Finally, at length from Burke’s conclusion:
As for the basic Nazi trick: the “curative” unification by a fictitious devil-function, gradually made convincing by the sloganizing repetitiousness of standard advertising technique–the opposition must be as unwearying in the attack upon it. It may well be that people, in their human frailty, require an enemy as well as a goal. Very well: Hitlerism itself has provided us with such an enemy–and the clear example of its operation is guarantee that we have, in Hitler, and all he stand for, no purely fictitious devil-function made to look like a menace by rhetorical blandishments, but a reality who ominousness is clarified by the record of its conduct to date. […] But above all, I believe, we must make it apparent that Hitler appeals by relying upon a bastardization of fundamentally religious patterns of thought. In this, if properly presented, there is no slight to religion. There is nothing in religion proper that requires a fascist state. There is much in religion, when misused, that does lead to a fascist state. […] Our job, then, our anti-Hitler Battle, is to find all available ways of making the Hitlerite distortions of religion apparent, in order that politicians of his kind in America are unable to perform a similar swindle. The desire for unity is genuine and admirable. The desire for national unity, in the present state of the world, is genuine and admirable. But this unity, if attained on a deceptive basis, by emotional trickeries that shift our criticism from the accurate locus of our trouble, is no unity at all. (188)
Homework
Follow your Gantt chart.
For those who want to get a head start, next week we will be discussing Jim Corder’s “Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love”
