Tag: rhetoric

Time management and scholars

I’ve been on sabbatical this semester, my first in twelve years, and I’ve long argued that we can get our jobs done averaging 40 hours a week. I over-committed myself. I agreed to writing or co-authoring six book chapters/articles, seven campus visits in the US, several days of talks in Czechia, and reviewing one article and two book manuscripts. I was still Director of the University Writing Center. I also kept track of my time (more or less). I thought it would be helpful to tell folks how it turned out, since I know that the first time I got a sabbatical I wished that someone had given me more advice about how to use my time. You don’t completely get away from teaching or service, but you can keep it reined in.

I counted my sabbatical as nineteen weeks, from just after New Year’s till the end of finals.

  1. I did pretty well at trying to average 40 hours a week (it was 40.5 average). That’s partially because I took about four weeks of vacation.
  2. The largest category was scholarship (which is where visits went), with 65% of my time.
  3. If I was at the Writing Center, I just clocked it as UWC–there’s no way I could have kept track of when I was teaching, when it was scholarship, when it was service. That was the second largest category, with around 13% of my time.
  4. I spent just over 8% of my time on “misc work” (email, planning, phone calls, organizing).
  5. Non-UWC service also took up just over 8%–some professional, some departmental, but mostly one university committee I didn’t realize would be such a time sink.
  6. The rest was really random–a few hours for dentist appointments or sick days, a few on things that mixed categories (such as writing undergraduate letters of rec–that always seems to me to be both teaching and service).

The reason I emphasize average is that I keep getting misunderstood on this point. Of course you don’t work 40 hours every week. If you take off the four weeks of vacation, then I was working around 50 hours a week for the weeks I was working.

There are also always things that are hard to figure. I didn’t count the time I spent cleaning up cat barf off my desk so I could work, setting up dog beds so they wouldn’t bug me, chasing down the shoes that Pearl stole, nor the time I spent walking a dog and thinking about my writing, or talking about my work. I did, however, count the time at the gym that I spent reading things for work (so not my Sunday gym visit when I’m usually reading apologetics or sermons or Jane Austen).

Stop calling for civility; lack of civility isn’t our problem, and more of it isn’t the solution

We are, once again, at a moment when people are calling for civility. My persistent complaint about American “political” discourse is that it is so rarely policy argumentation. Policy argumentation requires that participants argue (not just make assertions) on seven points: there is a need (aka ill), it’s serious, it won’t go away on its own, here’s what causes it; here is my plan; my plan will solve the need I identified, my plan is feasible, and my plan won’t cause more problems than it solves. American “political” discourse usually involves people arguing need and how it’s serious and then asserting a plan, and not even touching on the other points. (If that—sometimes they just assert need and engage in fear-mongering about it being serious.)

And the calls for civility are a perfect example of that truncated way of talking about important policy issues.

So, according to the “call for civility” argument, what is the need? Sometimes the need is political: we have a polarized Congress, in which any kind of compromise or finding common ground is demonized, when a Speaker brags about an unprecedented level of obstruction and is praised for it.

Sometimes the need is cultural: we are looking at a level of politically-motivated violence not seen since lynching was always on the table as a consequence-free way to terrorize dissent, with violent protests and calls to silence speakers (and sometimes the speakers are advocates of violence).

Sometimes the need is about tone: Kavanaugh’s temper tantrum was unprecedented and would have put the kibosh on any previous Supreme Court nominee (Dem or GOP), we have an Administration that engages in an unprecedented level of trolling, and major political figures and pundits who have accused the last four Presidents of being fascists, racists, and morally bankrupt. Thanksgiving dinners, social media interactions—it’s all ugly name-calling.

I’m willing to grant that the political and cultural needs are serious; the seriousness of the name-calling is a little more vexed. One of the reasons it’s vexed is that various kinds of “name-calling” are treated as equally serious because the need for this case is a little vague—the need seems to be that people are made uncomfortable, or have their feelings hurt. In this case, the problem with a major political figure saying something racist is that he hurt the feelings of members of that race. That “need” case makes hurt feelings the need/ill. In that case, anyone having their feelings hurt is a political problem that must be prevented. People who are called “racist” have their feelings hurt; people who are told that their information is false feel bad. Thus, if our “political” discourse defines the need or ill as having feelings hurt, then people who are racist, and are told they are racist, can present the ill of their hurt feelings as just as valid as a person who can’t get an apartment because of racism.

That’s a very clear example of the fallacy of false equivalency. But, if you accept the false case about the “ill”:  that our problem is that we have a public sphere in which people have their feelings hurt, it seems reasonable. It isn’t reasonable. Don’t accept that false case about the ill.

Our problem is not that people have their feelings hurt.

Every good policy case has a coherent narrative of causality—what caused our current situation? A few (but not all) of the political and cultural arguments have really interesting and plausible narratives about how we got here. The tone/name-calling argument is a very old and appalling one.

The basic argument behind blaming tone is that violent actions come from two sources: aggressive and defensive. People who have vehemently held beliefs engage in violence, and so vehement rhetoric leads to vehemently held beliefs, and therefore to violence. Therefore, to reduce violence, people need to care less. That’s an actively bad argument—caring passionately about our world is our responsibility. It is not a vice. It does not necessarily lead to violence. And much promotion of violence doesn’t come from people who care very much about the argument they’re making—sometimes passionate rhetoric is just a way to get votes, clicks, viewers, money.

The defensive one is even worse: it’s that vehement (and uncivil) rhetoric on the part of a marginalized group is responsible for the violent reaction on the part of the majority. This is, for instance, the logic behind the 1961 decision, the clergy who opposed King, and the current bizarre notion that saying something racist is just as bad as being called racist.

The whole argument for “civility” is that our problem is that people are vehement, and their vehement claims about their situation make other people get angry, and so now we’re all angry. So, we should all be less angry with each other by using nicer tones and being less vehement.

I see no reason for people not to be angry about the water in Flint, or unemployment rate in West Virginia, the number of unarmed people shot by police officers, discrimination in hiring, the use of torture in convictions, class sizes in public schools, an economy that seems to have no hope for advancement for people born into poverty.

Anger is rational under many circumstances, and many people are reasonably angry that they are not being treated as equals. Many people are unreasonably angry that they are not being treated as privileged. Many are angry that they are being treated badly because of complicated economic factors out of their control—that group is particularly prone to believing incoherent narratives of scapegoating. (For instance, they believe they are losing jobs to illegal immigrants when they’re losing jobs to automation or globalization.)

Our political problem is not that people are angry and therefore vehement and therefore seem uncivil. The “let’s be more civil” plan is completely incoherent—it doesn’t have a narrative of causality that would mean people being nicer to each other is the solution. It fails on the point of solvency.

After about 1835, it was common for people to say that the vehemence of the abolitionists caused slavers to become more entrenched in their position. That’s historically false, but rhetorically interesting. Were that argument true, then either there would have been a way to criticize slavery that slavers would have found persuasive, or a “civil” (as people are using the term now) criticism of slavery was impossible. It’s the latter.

There was no criticism of slavery that would not make slavers feel bad. There was no criticism of slavery that would not be an attack on what slavers were doing—profiting by trading in humans. Thus, if we aspire to a public discourse in which no one is criticized for what they’re doing, or made to feel bad about their actions, we have a discourse in which slavers should not have been criticized for their actions.

As long as we have some vague sense that what’s wrong with our current political situation is that people saying things that hurt the feelings of other people makes politicians engage in obstructionism (a narrative of causality that is tenuous at best) then we won’t solve the problem.

People are getting violent and engaging in obstructionism not because of people being rude, but because major media promote the notion that we are in a war, and that violence is our only possible response. In other words, we are in a world in which public discourse about politics is about a war of two identities—good versus evil. We are arguing about identities and feelings instead of about policies.

Calls for civility—meaning a world in which everyone is nice to one another, and no one’s feelings are hurt–are about a fantasy of a world in which there is no actual disagreement. We don’t need a world in which people feel good. We need a world in which people argue vehemently. But we need a world in which we argue, vehemently, about policies—not a world falsely bifurcated into two sides in a zero-sum relationship. We need democratic discourse.

The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’ and Hitler’s Rhetoric in Battle: “Where there is a will there’s a ferry”

Eighty years ago, almost to the day (April 28, 1939), Adolf Hitler gave a speech in the Reichstag (albeit directed at the world) in which he promised that he wanted only peace: [Slide 2] “Providence showed me the way to free our people from the depths of its misery without bloodshed and to lead it upward once again.” It was his second “peace” speech of the month; in both, he insisted he didn’t want war; he only wanted to make sure Germany got what it was rightfully due. And a surprising number of people believed him.

Benny Morris’ Roots of Appeasement shows that British policies of appeasement through the 20s and 30s came from the reasonable assumption that any rational person would know that the next war would be unthinkably devastating (largely because of the destructive capacities afforded by aircraft), and so various world leaders kept negotiating with Hitler as though he were a rational person working within what was thinkable. After the non-aggression pact was signed with Poland (April 6), even William Shirer—an American radio correspondent–believed that “this will halt Hitler for the time being” (Berlin Diary 163, a view he abandoned when Hitler tore up the agreement on the 28th). On April 23, Shirer said on his broadcast that, among other things, the Germans believed

that Hitler, whether they like him or not, will get what he wants in eastern Europe, and get it—as he got Czechoslovakia at Munich—without a war.[….T]here will therefore be no war, and that they—the German people at any rate—do not want war. And that war can only come if the “encirclement powers”, jealous of Germany’s success, attack the Reich (42)

In his 1984 memoir of his time in Germany, The Nightmare Years, Shirer would say of the spring of 1939,

Like almost everyone else I still clung to the hope for peace—despite what Hitler had said; despite what he had done, tearing up two more treaties; despite all his deceit. (403)

Hitler, who had, for years, spoken of war as a cleansing and necessary rebirth of Germany, was now saying he wanted peace. One of these two postures was a sincere and authentic expression of his values and the other was manipulative–and people had to decide which was which. A lot of people got the answer to the question wrong.

That same spring, while so many people were hoping for peace, and believed that Hitler shared that hope, Hitler was preparing for exactly the kind of war he had long said he wanted. And Kenneth Burke was writing “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle,’” his analysis of Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric in the book Mein Kampf. Burke wasn’t fooled. He began from the premise of taking Hitler’s rhetoric seriously. And he got Hitler’s intentions right. This talk will take seriously Burke’s taking Hitler’s rhetoric seriously.

As Kathleen Hall Jamieson points out, the distinction between actual rather than apparent identity is a central topos in Americans’ assessment of political candidates, and it has a long history:

Resonant in Western culture at least since Plato’s well-known discussion of shadows in the cave, the appearance-versus-reality lens, in US politics, takes the form of questions about a candidate’s actual rather than presented self, real versus publicly expressed beliefs, diagnosed rather than self-proclaimed health, audited rather than feigned financial circumstances, and lived rather than conjured biography. (186)

A study of Hitler’s rhetoric isn’t just a study about Hitler, but, as Burke aptly said, a study of how he swung a great nation in his wake, and how such a person might come to power in the US. And we might wonder about the role of the appearance v. reality lens in such an ascent.

Part of Burke’s answer is straightforward: he lists the rhetorical strategies (some verbal, some not) that such a rhetor would use on the basis of what Hitler used. Another part is more complicated: he points out that Hitler’s rhetorical strategies were grounded in his and Germans’ ways of thinking and acting. Burke says, “The deployments of politics are, you might say, the chartings of Hitler’s private mind translated into the vocabulary of nationalistic events.” (210). Since Hitler’s rhetorical strategies and political actions were so aligned, Burke wonders, “Is such thinking spontaneous or deliberate—or is it rather not both?” (213) In other words, was Hitler authentic in his rhetoric, given that he lied so much but not always?

Robert Citino refers to the “common notion that the surface Hitler is false, that we must dig deeper to unpack his true motives” (406). But, Citino says,

He rarely lied about his intentions. Of all the world statesman of the twentieth century, he may have been the most honest of all. He proclaimed his goals to the German people and to the world, leaving a dense trail of written statements and public proclamations behind him that are still remarkable for their candor. (404).

He did lie, of course, but he was also absolutely truthful at times, including about his lying. Burke points out an odd paradox of Hitler’s “honesty” in Mein Kampf: he shows all his cards; he’s open about all his rhetorical strategies, including his willingness to lie and mislead. Yet, his being open about being a liar did not undermine his ability to gain and maintain trust: “He could explicitly explain his tactics in his book and still employ them without loss of effectiveness.” (212)

In “Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Batttle’,” Burke identified various rhetorical strategies:

    • Strategic misnaming
    • Repetition
    • Uniforms
    • Having thugs beat up hecklers in the audience
    • Unifying a diverse group by identifying a shared enemy
    • Attributing any resistance to him or his ideas as the consequence of the critic being on the side of evil in the apocalyptic battle between good (Aryans) and evil (the Jew)
    • Bastardization of religious forms of thought (i.e., Western European Christian eschatology and soteriology)
    • Appealing to the notion of inborn dignity
    • Describing Germany as in a symbolic rebirth
    • Scapegoating/Projection
    • Toggling between and intermingling material and spiritual explanations of events

In this talk, I want to pursue that question of spontaneous or deliberate by looking for these strategies in situations where there’s no obvious rhetorical gain from using them, where, in fact, they harmed deliberation: Hitler’s decision-making regarding the war he started. If repetition, scapegoating, and so on were cunning and strategic, then he wouldn’t have used them as bases of his decision-making when they hurt the war effort. But he did. And so did his generals, and so did many Germans. Burke didn’t just identify rhetorical moves, but ways of organizing and explaining the world.

Strategic misnmaming. Burke observes that in Mein Kampf, Hitler called his ideology of hate one of love. That strategic misnaming ran throughout his rhetoric: he called his invasions “counter attacks,” his war mongering “bringing peace,” and his chaotic polycratic system orderly. So did the Nazis generally, as in the now infamous Nazi language rules that Victor Klemperer describes so elegantly—language rules that Eichmann and his attorney were still following in 1960 as Hannah Arendt observed with some horror. One of Hitler’s most important misnamings was his persistent representation of himself and Germany as victims—something I’ll come back to later.

Repetition. Hitler was notorious for repeating himself in his meetings and speeches —something about which even his generals complained —but, more importantly, his military strategy was itself grounded in the notion of repetition. [Slide 5] His overall plan was to engage in a short, sharp war, in which Germany would retain the initiative, encircle entire divisions of the enemy, and capture massive amounts of land and material immediately. This is the traditional German/Prussian way of war, which military historians point out was Germany’s strategy dating back to Frederick the Great. In Hitler’s version, it relied on mastery of the air, a version that worked tremendously well through 1940. Hitler insisted on repeating that strategy long past the point when it was no longer working—when, for instance, the Luftwaffe was too weak to provide significant air support (really, any time after 1943), and he was in a defensive war of attrition (on both fronts after June 1944, but much earlier on the eastern front). For example, on December 28, 1944, he told his generals “Militarily, it’s critical that in the West we transition from this unproductive defensive posture to offensive warfare. Offensive operations alone can turn the war in the West in a successful direction” (557)

More important, WWII was itself a repetition of The Great War.
Losing a war should cause a country to reconsider its processes of deliberation—the disastrous outcome should cause a country to try to understand how it made that bad decision, and how to prevent a similar decision in the future. Unhappily, the opposite is likely to happen. Effective deliberation about going to war is stymied by the nearly universal sense that admitting a war was a mistake dishonors those who fought in it, by making their sacrifices all in vain. Thus, we are likely to try to refight a war we’ve lost with an increased commitment to the very policies and values that got us into the war in the first place. WWI was caused by nationalism, irrational optimism, desire for European hegemony and, in the case of France and Germany, the desire to relitigate the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

Many German rhetors (Hitler was just one of them) proposed as a solution to Germany’s losing that war an increased commitment to nationalism, militarism, the desire to refight an old war, hopes of European hegemony, and irrational optimism.

Uniforms. Hitler paid careful attention to uniforms, with help from Hugo Boss, but not necessarily for the motives Burke infers (to convey authority)—I think he really liked uniforms. During his January 27, 1945 meeting with his generals—a time when the Soviets are rolling over German forces in the East and Anglo-American forces are rolling over them in the West, a time when careful thinking was desperately necessary—General Alfred Jodl mentions that Cossacks would participate in an action in the Papuk mountains (in Croatia), and Hitler responds:

The Cossacks are good. But why do we have to put them in German uniforms? Why don’t we have those beautiful Cossack uniforms?
Jodl: Most of them have Cossack uniforms.
Guderian. Red fur hats.
[Hitler]: Do they still have those?
Jodl: They have red trousers with silver stripes.
[Hitler]: We have to leave that. It’s wonderful. (Heiber, 650)

I think we have to consider that the brownshirt uniforms were so carefully designed not because Hitler had a cunning reason, but because Hitler really cared about uniforms, even when that concern was irrelevant, and possibly distracting.

Violence. Hitler continued the practice of public beatings of dissenters, intended to make his base feel like winners and intimidate potential critics.
Unification through common enemy. He unified Germany by making most of the major world powers his literal enemies (which worked up to a point—his popularity probably hit its height in 1941, with many people remaining or becoming loyal to Hitler and the Nazis because of the Allied bombings).
Accusing all dissenters of being Jewish. He, and the Nazis, characterized anyone who disagreed with them as either Jewish (their explanation of Roosevelt’s hostility) or controlled by Jews (their explanation of Churchill’s opposition).

Symbolic rebirth. The trope of symbolic rebirth turned up in virtually every speech, usually at the beginning (as it does in Triumph of the Will), but was also the basis of his remilitarizing Germany.

Inborn dignity. Hitler’s notion of inborn dignity—that Aryans/Germans are divinely entitled to world domination because of inborn superiority—informed his military decisions, to his detriment. As late as 1944, Hitler thought that he just needed one good win to get the US to sue for peace; David Stone says that Hitler

believed that the American soldiers were generally of poor quality, with potentially fragile morale, and were therefore vulnerable to a decisive counterstroke delivered as a complete surprise once they had over-extended the lines of supply upon which they depended. (Shattered Genius 328)

Hitler’s tendency to make bad military decisions on the basis of racist and nationalist stereotypes was shared with others. The Wehrmacht wildly underestimated the USSR because Nazis “looked down on Russians as untermenschen, racially inferior and therefore incapable of outsmarting the master race. As a result, the Wehrmacht continually fell for Soviet deception and was wrong-footed by most major Red Army offensives” (Dick 105-6).

That’s important: the Nazis’ (not just Hitler’s) belief in inborn dignity caused Nazis to make bad decisions, and the bad outcomes of those bad decisions never caused them to reconsider their racist premises.

Projection/scapegoating. Racist and nationalist premises directly relate to Hitler’s, Nazis’, and Germans’ propensity for projection and scapegoating. Germans were drawn to scapegoating Jews for the loss of The Great War partially because they couldn’t imagine that the Allies had superior military forces and strategies. Hitler’s tendency toward projection also meant that he assessed a situation in terms of what he would do, believing that everyone thought exactly like him—thus, the whole basis of Germany’s aggression (the terror of encirclement) assumed that all other countries had the same aspirations for European hegemony, and the same war-mongering goals.

Crucial to Nazi success was that the Nazi party relentlessly promoted a popular and comfortable narrative about its current problems. Germany’s decision to back Austria’s move in regard to Serbia (the catalyst of WWI) was grounded in aspirations for intra-European hegemony and a profound underestimation of their opposition. It was probably unwinnable for Germany the moment it became a war of attrition (after the failure to win the Battle of the Marne, or once the race to the sea turned into a stalemate), but definitely after the 1918 “Spring Offensive” failed (McElligott 21). Although Erich von Ludendorff had come to the conclusion that the war was unwinnable in September of 1918, he later—like Hitler and far too many other Germans–blamed the loss of the war on the mythical “stab in the back” (a reference to the ending of Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods) on the part of a liberal/Marxist/Jewish press and conspiracy.

In other words, projection and scapegoating about WWI were not just rhetorical moves on the part of Hitler in Mein Kampf, but ways of thinking that formed the bases of actions on the part of people long before Hitler even began speaking in beerhalls. Burke identified ways of thinking that informed individual and national behavior not just limited to Hitler.
This leaves the materialization/spiritualization move—the one my students find most difficult and yet, once they get it, most powerful. And, again, Hitler’s shifting and mingling material and spiritual explanations wasn’t just a rhetorical move that Hitler himself sometimes cunningly chose in order to deceive, deliberately, his audience. When he shifted, it was because the shift confirmed a basis of belief beyond argument.

In “Rhetoric of Hilter’s ‘Battle’” and War of Words, Burke mulled over the way that people alternate between spiritual and material explanations of phenomena, and he identified something it would take cognitive psychologists thirty years to acknowledge. Essentially, what Burke noticed is that we can deflect disconfirming evidence and/or resolve cognitive dissonance by reframing our explanations (involving what Wayne Booth would later call “motivism”).

Burke points out the “ominous” temptation of transforming “material interests” into “their corresponding ‘ideals’” (76). This toggling between material and ideal explanations, and the deflecting of material considerations by reframing them as really idealistic, was typical of Nazi rhetoric, perhaps most notoriously in Heinrich Himmler’s “Posen” speech—when he tries to reframe concentration camp sadism as courage and idealism.

Hannah Arendt aptly described the Nazi explanation of the war:

the lie most effective with the whole of the German people was the slogan of ‘the battle of destiny for the German people’ […] which made self-deception easier on three counts: it suggested, first, that the war was no war; second, that it was started by destiny and not by Germany; and, third, that it was a matter of life and death for the Germans, who must annihilate their enemies or be annihilated. (Eichmann 52)

Although she doesn’t use the terms, she’s pointing to deflection through idealization.

Hitler’s careful calculations of material conditions (such as the need for oil, tungsten, and consumer goods) persuaded him that he had to have won the war within three years, and that could only happen if he could avoid a two-front war, or, if worse came to worse, if he could dispatch the USSR within six months. By the summer of 1942, it was clear that he had failed on all three points. He hadn’t won in three years, he had a two-front war, the USSR was holding a line, and, even worse, the US was now involved.

Initially, Hitler’s mastery of material conditions and factors was impressive (from 1933 to 1941)—but, as those conditions deteriorated (1941-1945), he shifted more and more to spiritual explanations, to the point of absurdity.
On December 12, 1942, Hitler discussed with his generals the very grim situation of the Sixth Army encircled in and near Stalingrad. His generals tried to persuade Hitler of the serious material problems in order to get him to order, if not a fighting retreat of the army as a whole, at least a series of strategic retreats that would reduce the number of vulnerable salients. At one point, General Kurt Zeitzler tells Hitler “we have received from here reports of deaths caused by exhaustion—14 cases within 6 days” (19).

Zeitzler goes on to explain that relieving troops wouldn’t be able to get there anytime soon (if at all), and that, despite Goering’s assurances, even the Luftwaffe wasn’t able to solve the issue through delivering supplies. He tells Hitler,

[T]hey have to sit on this narrow front day and night, and they’re on the alert all night and have to get out. An example: the men don’t even take off their pants anymore; they just leave them on. (37)

Hitler responds by giving a lecture about the relative value of the troops in terms of their racial purity (that is, inborn dignity), whingeing about how he was right when his generals were wrong (scapegoating and projection—he had been wrong), and ends with, “I have to say one thing in all of these cases, I get too few suggestions from the Army for the Knight’s Cross” (37).

Hitler appears to believe that the material problems of the 6th Army (cold, severe shortages of food, fuel, and supplies) could be solved if they were given more medals. Material conditions could be overcome with sufficient will (spiritual) which could be fostered by medals (material and spiritual?)

In May of 1943, Hitler’s generals pointed out that there were difficulties getting Nazi troops from Sicily to the Italian mainland because of the destruction of the ferries. Hitler said, “the decisive element is not the ferry, but the will” and “Where there is a will there is a ferry” (137).

Hitler made bad military decisions because he sincerely believed in the power of the will—the spirit’s ability to triumph over material conditions. And he wasn’t alone in that belief. Citino describes the leadership of the Wehrmacht:

One of the characteristics of Prussian-German field commanders over the centuries had been their notion that they were capable of mastering even the most difficult strategic situation, the worst imbalance of men and materiel, and they could do it through sheer force of will (Retreat 26)

One of the odder instances of Hitler’s mingling of material/spiritual frames is the literalizing of metaphors through historical/religious typology.

Burke’s argument is that Hitler’s rhetoric worked because it was a bastardization of religious forms of thought, and I completely concur. Burke didn’t mention typology, another religious concept bastardized by demagogues. Typology is a way of reconciling the Hebrew Bible and New Testament by saying that characters in the Hebrew Bible are types that will be re-presented in the New Testament, and in the end times of Christianity. Oddly enough (or perhaps not), it’s long been a way to rationalize unethical behavior on the part of political and religious figures. For instance, 17th century American Puritans justified genocidal policies toward the indigenous peoples through identifying their in-group figures as the same type as some Hebrew Bible figure who had killed other peoples—such as Joshua or David. And think of the number of religious figures caught in adultery who claim to be David (a seriously flawed use of typology, as even conservatives admit).

Nazi typology regarding Hitler made him religious and historical: he was Charlemagne, Frederick Barbarossa, Frederick the Great, Napoleon, Jesus . As things got materially worse for the Nazis and Germany was clearly losing the war, Hitler seems to have started believing that the comparison to Frederick the Great was not just an analogy, or even metaphor, but a matter of fact—so true that Hitler could make plans based on Frederick the Great’s military career being a perfect prediction of his own. Because the Russian Empress Elizabeth’s death in 1761 caused the coalition of allies to fracture as they were advancing on Berlin (as part of what is commonly known as the Seven Years War), thereby saving Frederick from defeat, Hitler’s strategies for the war in 1945 were to hold out until Roosevelt’s death would cause the same fragmenting of the allies.

Speer describes the scene in Hitler’s bunker April 12, 1945 (less than a month before Berlin was over-run) when Hitler got news that Roosevelt had died:

Hitler caught sight of me and rushed toward me with a degree of animation rare in him these days. He held a newspaper clipping in his hand. “Here, read it! Here! You never wanted to believe it! Here it is!” His words came in a great rush. “Here we have the miracle I always predicted. Who was right? The war isn’t lost! Read it! Roosevelt is dead!”
          He could not calm down. He thought this was proof of the infallible Providence watching over him. Goebbels and many others were bubbling over with delight as they exclaimed how right he had been in his reiterated conviction that the tide would turn. Now history was repeating itself, just as history had given a hopelessly beaten Frederick the Great victory at the last moment. The miracle of the House of Brandenburg! Once again the Tsarina had died, the historic turning point had come, Goebbels repeated again and again and again. (Inside the Third Reich, 549)

It’s as though they lost track of the comparison to Frederick the Great being a typological interpretation—an idea—and saw it instead as a material fact.
As an aside, I should mention that much of his understanding of America came from the cowboy and Indian stories of Karl May, just as his understanding of German destiny was drawn more from Wagner than any historian—the real and ideal were more than a little muddled for Hitler and his followers.

I have to say that the most irritating aspect of this project for me has been Nazis’ persistent propensity to feel sorry for themselves. Eichmann, the Nazis on trial in Nuremberg, the generals in their self-serving and fundamentally dishonest post-war memoirs, Goebbels in his diaries, and Hitler at every opportunity—they all whined. Even Albert Speer, who at least had the grace to be genuinely shocked at the films of concentration camps shown at his trial, whined during his sentence in Spandau Prison, without ever acknowledging that, as boring as his incarceration was, no matter how bad the Russian food, how ugly the paint on the walls, or how petty the rules, it was worlds better than the conditions under which the slave laborers in his factories lived, let alone the conditions of victims in the concentration camps he helped to build.

Arendt remarked on that same “trick” (her term): “So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!” (Eichmann 106).
While I think that some of the victim posture is related to what Paul Johnson has called “the rhetoric of masculine victimhood,” I think that most of it is what Burke calls deflection. And deflection works by breaking one association and creating another.

Ernesto Laclau argued that populist reason works by “equivalential chains”—the demands of various people who are identified as “the people” perceive “an accumulation of unfulfilled demands” as essentially equivalent. Clean water is much like good wages is much like good schools (73). And, as he noted, as we move along the chain, the connections among the links might be tenuous, such as between clean water and good wages (75). He also observes that the creation of equivalential chains is part of a three-part process, including, as the second step, “the constitution of an internal frontier dividing society into two camps” and the third step is “the consolidation of the equivalential chain through the construction of a popular identity which is something qualitatively more than the simple summation of the equivalential links. “(77). That is, the in-group.

It’s that second step—the two camps move—that Laclau didn’t follow up in his discussion of equivalential chains; but it’s important. Equivalential chains, or the associations and identifications that Burke noted, aren’t just about who we are—it’s about who we are not. That insight is acknowledged, but also not really pursued, in Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s explanation of dissociation. To show dissociation, they have pages of maps of the paired terms that someone dissociates—they’re more interested in the dissociation, but I think the concept of paired terms deserves more attention.

What The New Rhetoric notes, although just in an aside, is that a valued term is valued because it is asssoiated with another valued term and it is not the devalued term. [Slide 10] For example, Jamieson describes the rhetoric of the 2016 pro-Trump trolls:

Those who endanger us include Muslims, illegal aliens, Black Lives Matter activists, atheists, demanding women, those who oppose gun rights, and Hillary Clinton, to name a few. Among those cast as ‘we’ were white males, Donald Trump, Christians, veterans, and workers whose jobs are threatened by bad trade deals and job-stealing ‘illegals’. (45)

That’s paired terms.

There are, as Laclau says, terms that are tenuously connected—advocates of the MOAR GUNZ NRA rhetoric are not particularly likely to be Christian, and there are feminist Christians, BLM activists are not necessarily opposed to gun rights, and atheists have little to do with Muslims—out-group terms only share that they are opposed to some value associated with the in-group.

When people make judgments simultaneously by association and opposition, then all sorts of odd things get connected. Burke notes the paradox that Hitler, in Mein Kampf, condemns Jews as both communists and capitalists—that association works because, for his audience at the time, capitalist (meaning people who oppress the working class) and communist (meaning anything to the left of Hitler) were both on the “them” side of paired terms. They aren’t logically associated with each other, but only associated through a similar place in the associational/binary method of reasoning in which we too often engage. I think one of the best examples of this associational/binary method of reasoning is the German/Nazi victim stance.

The set of paired terms that enables that stance is:

Because there are only two possible positions—victim or persecutor—and those two are completely opposed, if you can show that you are, in any way, a victim, you have shown that the other side must be the persecutor.

What the Nazis did, prior to every invasion, was publicize or fabricate acts of aggression against “Germans” (such as discrimination against speakers of German in Czechoslovakia, the faked attack in Poland, lies about the number of Soviet tanks on the border). Any action against any “Germans” (such as German-speaking Czechs) justified any violent response on the part of Nazi Germany—regardless of provocation, regardless of proportion. It’s interesting to me that, even after the war, when every reasonable person would have concluded that the Nazis lied, and nothing they said should be believed, many people still cited Nazi claims of victimizations as justifications for what Germany did. And that included people who believed that they had rejected Nazism and seen the light.

Hannah Arendt argued that language was important for self-deception, and that one kind of self-deception was the failure to think. Her argument on that point was misunderstood and misrepresented—she never said that Adolf Eichmann was an automaton, or mindless, and certainly not stupid. In Life of the Mind, she described what she saw at the trial:

It was not stupidity but thoughtlessness. [….] Cliches, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality (Life 4).

Eichmann thought—he thought very carefully about what trains to use, where to send them, how to rob Jews more effectively, how to send as many as possible to camps. He thought a lot about his career. Hitler thought very carefully about how to conduct a war of annihilation, what weapons should be developed, what troops should be sent where. And his generals also thought very carefully about how to do their jobs.

But, as far as Arendt was concerned, Eichmann wasn’t thinking because he had an “almost total inability ever to look at anything from the other fellow’s point of view” (48). He, like Hitler, thought he knew what others were thinking, but he didn’t, because he just assumed they thought the same things he did. For instance, he whinged to his Jewish guards about his failure to advance as far in the SS as he had hoped, and he expected the guard to sympathize. He engaged in projection.

The strategies that Burke identified weren’t just deliberate rhetorical strategies of Hitler’s: they were ways of thinking shared with enough people to put and keep him in power. And the notion that Hitler was authentic, despite, or perhaps even because of, his persistent inaccuracy and dishonesty, was important to that success. When we ask if Hitler was sincere or manipulative we ask the wrong question because we falsely assume that there is a distinction between being authentic and being deceptive, and there isn’t.

Jamieson points out the importance of the perception of Clinton as disingenuous and Trump as authentic for voters in 2016:

Unlike Trump, whose freewheeling rhetoric was consistent with the assumption that ‘what you see is what you get,’ Clinton’s wariness of the press, caution when speaking extemporaneously, and discomfort with personal narrative all invited audiences to read between the lines while also asking, what wasn’t she saying. (206)

I’m saying that the concept of paired terms explains the paradox of someone deciding that someone who has a book in which he talks about his reliance on dishonesty to get good deals would seem authentic and trustworthy. Telling someone that you lie to others should make you less reliable, but, as Burke said, by including you in the scam, the scammer might get you to think that he wouldn’t lie to you. A self-confessed liar can seem authentic as long as s/he seems to care, sincerely, about the in-group, and that is signaled through having the right paired terms.

What paired terms enable is the deflection that Burke noted is done through shifting between spiritual and material explanations. Clinton’s admission of saying different things to different audiences is given a different spiritual explanation—it’s a sign of who she is; it’s a consequence of her being a bad person. Trump’s admission of saying different things to different people is explained as made necessary by external factors, as coming from sincere concern for in-group members. Clinton’s deceptiveness means she can’t be trusted; Trump’s means he can.

For in-group members, a logically incoherent argument that plays the paired terms effectively—that signals a shared understanding of in-group and enemy, through what terms are associated, and which ones are set in opposition—resonates with a base looking for someone who really gets them. Whether that leader is being accurate doesn’t matter—his shared in-group identity is authentic, and that’s enough.

There is a conventional view of Hitler as a magician with a word wand who hypnotized, seduced, or scammed passive Germans. He wasn’t. He was a grifter who made millions from Mein Kampf and never paid taxes, who said he would use his personal wealth to pay for various government expenditures (he didn’t, but people might have thought he did), and who persuaded the conservative (left-phobic) elite and middle class that he unapologetically believed in the inborn dignity of whites to dominate in Germany and for Germany to act without restraint on the part of the goals of other countries.

Hitler didn’t magically convert people to that point of view—he gave expression to what a lot of Germans thought. Nazi rhetoric provided ways of thinking about German actions that made people more comfortable with something they already wanted to do. Persuasion is always really self-persuasion, and deception is always self-deception—the rhetoric of others just gives us the tools we can choose to use to persuade ourselves. [Slide 13] In regard to the 2016 election, Jamieson says, “When voters integrate their own assumptions into content, they become accomplices in their own persuasion” (83). Or, in Burke’s words, “

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 be unable to perform a similar swindle (219)

Teaching a class on Hitler

I mentioned elsewhere that, after years of avoiding it, I decided I should teach a course about racism.  I was hesitant because I think there are too damn many white people telling non-white people about their experiences. I decided to teach it when I realized my goal wasn’t telling non-white people about their experiences, but about trying to get people currently on the winning side of institutional racism to understand why and how we’re winning, and how to talk to other people of privilege about racism without falling into the thoroughly useless slough of white liberal guilt.

My area of scholarly interest (sometimes I say “expertise,” but I really shouldn’t, since there is no way to be an expert on this) is train wrecks in public deliberation (aka, pathologies of deliberation). Cases that I thought would be really different turned out to be very similar: evasion of policy argumentation in favor of factionalized zero-sum thinking; the reduction of the varied array of available policy options to This Policy or Doing Nothing; the assumption that the course of action is obvious, and motivistic dismissals of anyone who criticized This Policy, or even wanted time to think (they’re on the side of the enemy, they want us to do nothing, they’re cowards, they’re effeminate); faith in The Will, so that a plan is completely impractical is irrelevant because Real Americans (Athenians, Germans, Whatevs) who beleeeeeve enough can make it happen (meaning political discourse is now reduced to the scene in Peter Pan when the audience claps enough to make Tinkerbell shine again); and, well, a lot of other things.

Those things (scholars of rhetoric would call them topoi) show up in all sorts of places. I’ve listened to people appeal to the “if we commit with full will to this plan it must succeed” topos in gatherings of political groups, MLA Delegate Assembly meetings, far too many State of the Unions or political speeches generally, Sunday school, faculty meetings, Fourth of July speeches, homeowner association meetings, even a random guy who stopped to talk to me while I was weeding appealed to it. It’s in self-help rhetoric, pickup artist rhetoric, the entire world of make money fast, any incarnation of prosperity gospel, weight-loss ads, and far too much discourse about politics.

My goal in teaching, like my goal in scholarship, came to be to persuade people that what matters about what people argue is what it means for how they think about political argument. And, it’s pretty clear that certain topoi are consistently problematic, such as the “if you have enough will” topos.

It’s hard for people to see the problems with many of the most consistently disastrous topoi since it often took years before the disastrous outcome happened. (And, as with the slaver state commitment to slavery, when their commitment turned out to be disastrous, they just pretended they’d never had it—a not uncommon response to profoundly disconfirming evidence.) And even now, many generations later, many descendants of the people who made the disastrous decision to go to war over slavery won’t admit it’s a mistake.

War, famously, has a way of testing theories very quickly: no battle plan ever survives contact with the opposition, and the enemy has a vote. Someone might argue that the CSA was right to go to war to protect slavery and get some supporters, but they’d have a very hard time getting anyone to support the argument that they won that war.

I developed a course, “Deliberating War,” that was an attempt to: 1) complicate students’ understandings of public discourse, especially to disentangle deliberation from compliance-gaining; 2) get them to see some of the patterns about disastrous public decision-making; 3) get students to see that, just because someone says “We have to go to war because otherwise the enemy will destroy us, so this is self-defense” doesn’t mean it is. And, of course, Hitler figured in that course. (Most of that course was about the Peloponnesian War, but that’s a different post.) Hitler also figured in the “Rhetoric and Racism” course I teach. And, consistently, in anonymous end-of-semester evaluations, students said they wanted to know more about Hitler.

I’m not Jewish. I’m not German. I was once translation fluent in German, but I now struggle. So, once again, there is an issue of feeling like an interloper.

Talking about Hitler is always talking about persuasion. And it’s also, interestingly enough, talking about how false models of persuasion mean that people get persuaded.

So, I girded my loins, and created a course on Hitler and Rhetoric. It’s a funny course in a bunch of ways. It gets a huge number of students who sign up, get the syllabus, and then drop. A large number get as far as when the first paper is due, and they drop. It is, fundamentally, a course about the distinction between deliberation and compliance-gaining models of public discourse, and so student papers have to be deliberation. Students are well-trained in papers oriented toward display (as though that is compliance-gaining), and so can be intimidated when you ask for deliberative papers.

My goal in the course was to have students begin with Hitler’s rhetoric, then move to the rhetoric that supported him, and then have the third paper about the Hitler comparison, but that never happened. Here is what did happen.

I explain elsewhere why I write prompts the way I do. Here’s the information I gave students about the papers:

The prompts are designed to get more complicated and more time-consuming as the semester progresses—you’ll need a lot of time just for research for the final paper. I’ve made an effort to come up with topics that are comparable in terms of work and difficulty. Sometimes we can work out other topics, but only if you come talk to me at least two weeks before the paper is due.

Whether or not you do outside research, remember that you have to cite the sources of ideas as well as language–it doesn’t matter if the source is another student, another class, a paper for another course, the Internet, a book, or an article. If you have any questions about how to cite appropriately, or if you are nervous that you are plagiarizing, just write a note in the margin of your paper to that effect. Any handbook tells you how to cite sources, including webpages; papers without appropriate citation will be considered late.

I’ve grouped the assignments on the basis of course readings, but, if you discuss it with me at least one week before the paper is due, you can do an assignment from another part of the course. I just need to make sure that you write on a range of topics, and that your papers remain within an appropriate range of difficulty. If you simply turn a paper in from another part of the course, you can expect icky consequences.

The prompts ask that you apply a concept from rhetoric. You can use anything (other than ethos, pathos, or logos) from Jasinski, and here is a list that is likely to help:

    • any of Burke’s terms from “Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’”
    • art of masculine victimhood (Johnson)
    • the four terms described by O’Shaughnessy (pages 4-5)
    • condensation symbols (Jasinski)
    • dissociation (the rhetorical concept)/paired terms (it’s rare that you can do one without the other)
    • dog whistle politics
    • enthymematic reasoning (beginning from common ground)
    • identification through transcendence/common ground
    • inoculation
    • interpellation/constitutive rhetoric
    • jeremiad
    • prophetic ethos
    • rhetoric of survivance (Powell)
    • specific or universal topoi
    • stock topics (policy argumentation)
    • ultimate terms

Some good resources for the papers include:

    • The Domarus collection of Hitler’s speeches and proclamations. Available here.
    • This collection of Nazi propaganda
    • Here is a link to the official records of speeches in the Reichstag (in German). This is July 13, 1934—for other dates, just use the forward or backward arrows.

Paper One. Use a concept from rhetoric (from Jasinski or the list above—NOT ethos, pathos, or logos) to explain something puzzling about one of these speeches by Hitler:

    • April 12, 1922 speech in Munich
    • Something from The New Germany desires Work and Peace (not the March 23 speech)
    • “Sportspalast speech” (you can hear it here)
    • April 28 1939 speech (coursepack)
    • Deliberations with his generals (from Hitler and His Generals: Military Conferences 1942-1945; edited by Helmut Heiber, David M. Glantz) (some is in the coursepack, but a lot of it is really fascinating)
    • Invasion of Poland
    • February 20, 1933 “Speech to the Industrialists”
    • Announcement of the Soviet invasion June 22, 1941
    • November 8, 1942 (“Stalingrad speech”)
    • November 8, 1943 speech (a recording is here: )
    • His “last speech”

For these papers, your audience is other class members, and so the “puzzling” something should be something that you find interesting or weird about the text—that it doesn’t fit your image of Hitler, for instance, or that it seems completely different from other things we’ve read, or that you can’t imagine it being effective, or something along those lines. In class, we’ll go over thesis questions (that is, a statement of the puzzle you’re pursuing) so that we can make sure that you’ve got a manageable topic.

Paper Two
1) Trace out the development (or not) of a specific rhetorical strategy (use Jasinski or the list above—NOT ethos, pathos, or logos) from at least three speeches within a set such as these:

    • Hitler’s speeches about the Soviet Union
    • Goebbels’ birthday speeches for/about Hitler
    • Hitler’s declarations of war/speeches at the moment of invasion
    • Hitler’s speeches about (references to) the United States/FDR
    • If you didn’t do this for the first paper, you can write about Hitler’s deliberations with his generals (from Hitler and His Generals: Military Conferences 1942-1945; edited by Helmut Heiber, David M. Glantz)
    • If you’d like to do a different set, you need to get written approval from me by 2/27
    • Nazi theories of propaganda: in addition to what Hitler says in Mein Kampf, Goebbels’ Knowledge and Propaganda, and Our Battle Against Judah.

2) Or, write about the rhetorical strategy of one of these texts resisting/criticizing Hitler and/or Nazism. Use a concept from Jasinski or the list above (you can also use “rhetoric of survivance”—you can’t use ethos, pathos, or logos).

    • Otto Wels’ March 23, 1933 speech against “The Enabling Act.” This one is harder than it looks, since it’s short. You’ll need to talk a lot about it in the context of Hitler’s speech and the rhetorical situation.
    • Various responses to the “Aryan Paragraph” (you’ll need to talk about all of them probably, since they’re all pretty short—you can find them in M. Solberg’s A Church Undone)
    • von Papen’s “Marburg Speech” (You’ll find Evans’ discussion of that speech helpful [II; 27-41] and Ullrich
    • Clara Zetkin’s 1933 Reichstag speech (if you can find the full text in English, or can read German)
    • July 2017 speech by the President of France
    • Thomas Mann’s “This Man is My Brother” (coursepack)

Paper Three. For this paper, write about characteristics of Hitler’s rhetoric in other places. Use terminology from this class (that is, again, something from Jasinski or the above list, and not ethos, pathos, or logos). Thus, you won’t just be showing that they were praising Hitler or repeating what he said—you need to show that a concept from rhetoric helps us understand what is or is not the same about this rhetoric.

    • Adolph Eichmann’s testimony and/or interrogation answers (pick one section from this). You can also watch Eichmann’s testimony here.
    • The Nazi Generals’ discussion of their situation (from Tapping Hitler’s Generals)
    • The Daily Stormer style guide
    • Hermann Goering, Reconstruction of a Nation (1934)
    • Aryanism.net or something from David Duke’s website
    • This site (essentially, a guide how to argue for white supremacy)
    • Gertrud Scholtz-Klink’s speeches about women and Nazism
    • A pamphlet released after things started going badly in Stalingrad: What Does Bolshevization Mean in Reality? Be forewarned, it’s really grim and deliberately horrifying—even I find it almost unreadable.
    • Theodore Bilbo’s Take Your Choice. Bilbo was a segregationist who cited the same authorities the Nazis cited. He was an Alabama governor and Senator, and his book is from 1948.
    • How Nuremburg defendants framed/explained their actions (see Interrogations), showing that a rhetorical concept explains their strategies (so you have to think rhetoric does).
    • F. von Bernhardi’s 1912 Germany and the Next War

==========
And here is the TOC for the coursepack

Rhetoric and Hitler Table of Contents

Syllabus
Rhetoric and Hitler: an introduction
Kenneth Buke, “Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’”
O’Shaughnessy, from Selling Hitler
McElligott, from Rethinking Weimar Germany
Hitler, March 23, 1933 speech
Sample papers
“Advice on Wrting”
Hitler, speech to the NSDAP 9/13, 1937
—. speech, 8/22/39
—. interview with Johst
—. speech, 1/27/32
Tourish and Vatcha, “Charismatic Leadership and Corporate Cultism at Enron: The Elimination of Dissent, the Promotion of Conformity and Organizational Collapse”
Entry on interpellation
Hitler, speech 4/28/39
Selection from Hitler’s Table Talk (480-83)
Kershaw, from The End (386-400)
Hitler, speech 7/13/34
Longerich, selection from Holocaust (Nazi evolution on genocide)
Selection from Hitler’s Table Talk 12-16, 422-426
Entry on inoculation
Selection from Tapping Hitler’s Generals (30-62)
Kershaw, from Hitler, The Germans, and the Final Solution (197-206)
Selection from Mayer, They Thought They Were Free (166-173)
“Dog whistle politics”
Selections from Shirer’s radio broadcasts
Selection from Snyder’s Black Earth
Selection from Hitler’s Table Talk (75-79)
Selection from Spicer’s Antisemitism, Christian Ambivalence, and the Holocaust
Hitler, speech 4/12/22
“Dissociation” from Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca’s The New Rhetoric
Selection from Encyclopedia of Rhetoric
Selection from Eichmann in Jerusalem
Selection from Eichmann Interrogated
Selection from Hitler and His Generals
Selection from Ordinary Men
Louis Goldblatt’s testimony before the Committee on National Defense Migration
Letter to Mr. Monk
Thomas Mann, “That Man is My Brother”
“Masculinity and Nationalism”
“Art of Masculine Victimhood”
Hitler, speech 6/22/41
selection from Longerich’s Hitler
selection from Maschmann’s Account Rendered

========

Here is the course calendar. It’s pretty messy, so, if you’d like a copy that’s a table, just email me:

8/29 First day of classes
8/31 Read “Rhetoric and Hitler: an introduction” and the course syllabus (especially the part on microthemes). Microtheme (due by 8:00 am [not as attachment—please never send microthemes as attachments]: what questions do you have about the class? What other rhetoric classes have you taken? What other courses about Hitler have you taken? What questions do you have about the material?
9/3 Labor Day
9/5 Read sample papers (coursepack) “Hitler’s speech to the NSDAP September 13, 1937” (coursepack) and “Advice on Writing” (coursepack and here https://www.patriciarobertsmiller.com//advice-on-writing/ ) Microtheme (due in email, by 8:00 a.m.): how is this advice like or unlike your writing processes on previous papers? What surprises you about the papers? What aspects of them do you especially like? What are some questions you have about the prompts? What prompt do you think you’ll answer? If you were going to write about this Hitler speech, what are some puzzles or odd things you might identify?
9/7 Read Evans, I: 1-76; Ullrich 92-109; Gregor 57-89. Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : What questions do you have about the reading? What sorts of topoi did the historical and cultural circumstances provide a racist and authoritarian rhetor like Hitler?
9/10 Read Ullrich 174-181, “Nation and Race” from Mein Kampf, and Burke’s “Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’” (coursepack). Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : what questions do you have about the reading? Which of Burke’s unification devices do you see in this chapter from Hitler? A lot of students find “Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’” a really useful basis of analysis—using it for their papers.
9/12 Read Ullrich 436-445; Evans I: 310-354. Read O’Shaughnessy (Selling Hitler cp) 4-5 and 170-181. Read McElligott (Rethinking cp) 181-207, and Hitler’s March 23, 1933 speech (cp) and Jasinski “Case Construction” and “Stock Issues,” (you can get that through the UT library—it’s an ebook). Microtheme (due in email, by 8:00 a.m.): apply the Jasinski to the Hitler speech. What kind of case does he make? Which stock issues does he use?
9/14 Microtheme (due by 8:00 am ): read the section in the syllabus on thesis questions, and submit at least one thesis question. You’re welcome to submit more than one. This is not your thesis statement.
9/17 1.1 due. If you’re the sort of person who prints up drafts, please include them. Microtheme (due by 8:00 am to patriciarobertsmiller@gmail.com): where is your thesis statement? Where is your thesis question? What is your primary text? How many quotes do you have from that text?
9/19 Read Longerich’s explanation of Nazi evolution on genocide (coursepack) and Evans III: 3-23 (in coursepack), Hitler’s August 22, 1939 speech (coursepack), and selections from his Table Talk (12-17; 422-26, coursepack), and article on inoculation. Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.): How does Hitler inoculate his audience in the speech?
9/21 Read Hitler’s interview with Johst (January 24, 1932, coursepack) and his (long and boring) speech before German industrialists (January 27, 1932, in the coursepack) and Ullrich 290-293. Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : German industrialists would later support Hitler wholeheartedly, but, as Ullrich says, this speech didn’t do the trick. Apply Burke, topoi, or one of the other concepts from the reading to discuss this speech.
9/24 Return 1.1. Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : 2 Read Jasinski on “prophetic speech/ethos,” article on charismatic leadership (coursepack) and “Our Hitler” (1935 birthday speech) http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/unser35.htm Microtheme (due in email, by 8:00 a.m.): apply either concept (prophetic speech or charismatic leadership) to the reading.
9/26 Otto Wels decided to respond to Hitler’s speech in favor of “The Enabling Act.” Before doing any of the reading, make some notes as to what you would do in that situation. Then, read the information on “interpellation” (coursepack) and Wels’ speech (coursepack) and Hitler’s response (coursepack). Also read McElligott 214-215 and Evans’ discussion of the Enabling Act. Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.): did Wels take the strategy you would have? How would you characterize Wels’ response? Are you surprised or puzzled by it? What rhetorical strategies does he use? How is Hitler’s rhetoric different in this speech from his speech earlier that evening? Why wasn’t that speech in the Nazi pamphlet? How does Hitler hail Germans such that they should support him?
9/28 Class cancelled because of individual conferences.
10/1 Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : revised introductions for your first paper. Make sure that your introductions sets up your thesis question, and that your thesis statement is delayed till the end of your paper.
10/3 1.2 due. Include all previous versions of every paper. If you’re the sort of person who prints up drafts, please include them. Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : what changes did you make to your paper? Where is your thesis statement? How much close analysis do you have in your paper?
10/5 Quiz.
10/8 In class: return 1.2 and go over sample student material.
10/10 Read William Shirer on Hitler’s April 28, 1939 speech 397-404, coursepack), and then that speech. Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.) what seems weird to you about Hitler’s speech? What rhetorical strategies does Hitler use?
10/12 Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : read the section in the syllabus on thesis questions, and submit at least one thesis question. You’re welcome to submit more than one. This is not your thesis statement.
10/15 2.1 due. Include all previous versions of every paper. If you’re the sort of person who prints up drafts, please include them.
10/17 Read Mein Kampf 176-186, 394-412, 579-589, selection from Table Talk (480-482) and this material on propaganda: “The Nature” http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/dietz.htm “First Course” http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/lehrgang.htm “Directive” http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/bolshevist.htm and Kershaw 386-400 (cp). Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.): As always, just feel free to react to the material, and don’t worry about reading the Mein Kampf carefully (the Kershaw will also have a lot of references you don’t get). What rhetorical strategies are constant in this material, and what changes?
10/19 Read background to the “Night of Long Knives” (Ullrich 458-473) and Hitler’s July 13, 1934 speech justifying the massacre (coursepack). Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.): As always, just feel free to react to the material. What rhetorical strategies does he use? This happens to be one speech where there is reasonably good evidence (which Ullrich mentions) that it was persuasive. Can you speculate as to why it worked?
10/22 [Return 2.1] Read these articles about American Nazis: https://the-avocado.org/2018/08/11/how-we-got-here-the-mad-legions-of-america/ and https://the-avocado.org/2018/08/11/how-we-got-here-the-mad-legions-of-america/ (you can see footage from the rally here https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/542499/marshall-curry-nazi-rally-madison-square-garden-1939/) and https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/8/15/16144070/psychology-alt-right-unite-the-right . Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.): how similar (or not) are the rhetorical strategies?
10/24 This reading is fairly disturbing: it’s about how various groups (such as“ordinary Germans” or military officers) rationalized supporting the regime. Selection from Tapping Hitler’s Generals (30-62, coursepack), Kershaw, “Popular Opinion” (197-209, coursepack), selection from They Thought They Were Free (166-173, coursepack). Microtheme (due by 8:00 am ): these readings all concern the complicated interactions of coercion, rhetoric, compliance, and belief. What role do you see rhetoric playing for these various kinds of Germans?
10/26 Read Hitler’s speech announcing the invasion of Poland (https://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/resource/document/HITLER1.htm), “dog whistle politics” (coursepack), and excerpts from Shirer’s radio broadcasts (coursepack and here https://www.patriciarobertsmiller.com//excerpts-william-shirers-berlin-1999/). Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.): As always, just feel free to react to the material. Also, how is Hitler framing the situation? Are there dog whistles and, if so, what are they and how do they function?
10/29 1.3 due. Include the marked copies of 1.1 and 1.2.
10/31 Read background to invasion of the USSR; (Snyder [Black Earth] in coursepack and this: https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005164) read Hitler’s speech on Stalingrad (http://comicism.tripod.com/421108.html) Microtheme (in email by 8:00 a.m.): what are Hitler’s main rhetorical problems and constraints with this speech?
11/2 Quiz.
11/5 2.2 due. Include all previous versions of every paper. If you’re the sort of person who prints up drafts, please include them.
11/7 Read Hitler selection from Table Talk 75-79, Spicer 105-120, Hitler’s April 12, 1922 speech and Perelman on dissociation (all in coursepack) and Jasinski on dissociation (ebook). Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : How does he use dissociation? Also, note his use of religious rhetoric. 11/9 Read “Duties of a Law-Abiding Citizen” (from Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem). Arendt is a tough read because she engages in a lot of indirect paraphrase (so she is often describing a point of view she does not have, such as that Eichmann was a victim) and the selection from Eichmann Interrogated (both in the coursepack). You might also find this background helpful: https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007412 Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.): do you see any of Hitler’s topoi in Eichmann’s rhetoric about himself or his situation? What is Eichmann’s argument, and how does he make it?
11/12 Return 2.2. Read Hitler’s September 30, 1942 speech and and background information from Kershaw 534-555 (both in coursepack) Microtheme (due by 8:00 am :
11/14 Read selection from Deliberations with His Generals (coursepack). Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : how is this private and deliberative rhetoric like or unlike his more public rhetoric?
11/16 Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : Introductions for 3.1.
11/19 Microtheme (due by 8:00 am necessary but not sufficient for getting an A on 3.1 or 3.2). Draft of 3.1. 11/21 Thanksgiving break
11/23 Thanksgiving break
11/26 Read the speeches by Speer and Goebbels trying to make the best of a bad situation: (Speer) http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/tatsachen.htm
and (Goebbels): http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb40.htm Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : what rhetorical strategies do they use? How is their rhetorical approach different (from each other, or from previous speeches of theirs) or alike?
11/28 3.1 due. Include all previous versions of every paper. If you’re the sort of person who prints up drafts, please include them. For class, read http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-stupid-ways-alt-right-destroying-itself-from-within/ Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.): What do you think about the strategy of humor in regard to Nazis?
11/30 Read selection from Ordinary Men (coursepack). Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.): this is a difficult reading, and it’s challenging for thinking about rhetoric—what difference did rhetoric make in the “persuasion” of these “ordinary men”?
12/3 Return 3.1 In class: quiz. Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.): what’s a concept from this course that you used outside of class? How did you use it? Or what’s a concept from this class you’ve found really useful outside of class?
12/5 Read this article about modern Nazis’ use of digital spaces: “Killing 8chan: The Heart of Modern Nazi Terrorism [CW]” https://c4ss.org/content/51110 Microtheme (due by 8:00 am : In what ways are these Nazis like the Nazis they admire? What rhetorical concepts help us understand these groups? What surprises you (or not) about them?
12/7 Read Goldblatt’s speech before the Congressional Committee on Japanese internment (which they called “evacuation” coursepack) Microtheme (in email, by 8:00 a.m.): what’s a concept from this course that you used outside of class? How did you use it? Or what’s a concept from this class you’ve found really useful outside of class?
12/10 Last day of classes
3.2 due. Include all previous versions of every paper, your filled-out gradesheet, and printed versions of any plus or check-plus microthemes. If you’re the sort of person who prints up drafts, please include them.

We’ll be talking about Cabaret, so, if you have a chance, you should try to watch it.

Why y’all should read Lilliana Mason’s _Uncivil Agreements_

The book has a lot that is of interest only to scholars, and much that is of interest only to scholars in her field, but there is a lot that is useful to everyone. I think lefties can particularly benefit because she provides empirical research to show that a lot things we tend to do will not actually help (she isn’t alone in her claims about that–she pulls together a lot of research).

The empirical research, like hers, is clear that Americans agree on policy, especially policies that would imply higher taxes for the wealthy, reasonable gun control, government-funded healthcare, and various other progressive policies. But running candidates who advocate those policies won’t work because people (including a lot of lefties) vote on the basis of partisan identification.

They cheerfully (sometimes without knowing, sometimes completely aware) vote for political figures who will enact policies they don’t want, but they do it because their side winning is more important than any policy issue.

The more people identify with a political group–the more all their various group identifications align with a political party–the more they engage in motivated reasoning. People with cross-cutting identities are more likely to engage in empathy with other groups, advocate tolerance, and be willing to argue about policy.

This is a complicated point I won’t make here, but I think her book helped me understand the very specific ways that GOP trolls and clickbait fractured the left (and are already doing so today, especially in regard to AOC). Here are some of my favorite passages.

I read Goebbels’ 1945 diary entries so you don’t have to.

[Image from here]

The 1978 edition (ed. Hugh Trevor-Roper) of Goebbels’ Final Entries begins in late February 1945. By that time, the Battle of the Bulge was over, and it had failed. At this point, Germans have lost Budapest, Breslau is encircled, they’re calling up women, Dresden has been firebombed, bombings of major German cities are a nightly event, American troops have reached the Rhine. It goes downhill from there.

28 February. Goebbels’ reading of the situation is that Western countries are facing a “profound political crisis” with strikes “the order of the day”–so, any minute now, the Allies will collapse.[1] That same day he expresses outrage at “bolshevist atrocities” and, after a conversation with General Vlasov about the USSR in 1941, concludes, “The Soviet Union has had to weather precisely the same crises as we are now facing and that there is always a way out of these crises if one is determined not to knuckle under them.” [Thereby ignoring that USSR got through 1941 by having moved factories, still having access to resources, getting help from the US, and having a much larger potential military force. It was not just the will.]

2 March. “We can count on major operations in the east German area being possible by the end of March” and “if all goes well we can anticipate enormous success” [which is a nice example of a tautology, and summarizes Nazi strategic thinking at this point]. Also, the situation “is not reassuring” and “In the East too operations have not gone through as we expected.” But, meanwhile, he got a lot of letters telling him he made a great speech. Oh, and he condemns Roosevelt for megalomania.

3 March. Anglo-American troops are making progress. “We had never really visualized such a course of events.” [He did another speech that went over well, though.]

4 March. The population in the West is welcoming the Anglo-American troops. “This I had really not expected.” [Later he would—in many entries– blame this problem on the Nazi leadership rejecting his argument that they should openly abrogate the Geneva Convention.] He’s reading Carlyle on Frederick the Great, and that proves it will all be fine. Oh, and a lot of people thought “four weeks ago the situation was such that the majority of military experts had given us up for lost” but Hitler sure showed them! Hitler has a bullet-proof plan: “we must somehow succeed in holding firm in the West and the East.” Hitler also hopes to open talks with some one of the Allies, but, before they could start talks, “it is essential that we score some military success.” So, it’s a clear plan: hold the line everywhere, have some major military successes, and then open talks with one of the Allies. That’ll work.

7 March. [And a lot of other entries.] Goebbels is puzzled that publicizing Soviet atrocities isn’t turning world opinion in favor of the Nazis. [This is a common plaint: why can’t people see that Nazis are the real victims here?] He’s also grumpy that a lot of the “Germans” coming in from the East don’t really look German to him. At this point, he begins to blame Goering for all of the Nazis’ problems [a nice instance of projection—yes, it’s true that Goering screwed up, but Goebbels has screwed up just as much if not more].

8 March. Goebbels makes fun of Churchill for saying the war would end in two months. [VE-Day was 8 May.] “Our sole great hope at present lies in the U-boat war.” And “Rendulic has now put things in order in East Prussia.” So, really, everything is fine.

13 March. Hitler says there are new airplanes, so it’s all good (and, besides, Hitler had been right all along about what kind of aircraft Germany should have been producing) [This topos–what really matters here is who was right–runs throughout Hitler’s deliberations with his generals, and, less so, through Goebbels’ diaries. That’s interesting.][2]

14 March. “I refuse to be deterred by reports of so-called eyewitnesses.” [Germans in the west are cheerfully welcoming Anglo-American troops.]

21 March. He and Hitler have a long talk and agree “that we must hold firm at the front and if possible score a victory in order to start talking to the enemy.” Well, as long as he and Hitler have decided that the people at the front should hold firm, it’s all good. [It’s fascinating how often Goebbels and Hitler decide that the problem can be solved by telling people to be more steadfast. Sometimes they take a lot of time to yell at people to be more steadfast. ]

22 March. “The military situation both in East and West has become extraordinarily critical; during the course of the 24 hours it has changed noticeably to our disadvantage.” [Because up to that point it was pretty good?]

23 March. “I think that my work too is no longer being totally effective today.” He was getting a lot of reports of people surrendering instead of fighting to the death for Hitler. This might cause some people to think that perhaps things were getting a little bleak for Germany. But, no, his reading of Carlyle’s biography of Frederick the Great shows that, although Frederick “too [who else is feeling this? Goebbels or Hitler?] sometimes felt that he must doubt his lucky star, but, as generally happens in history, at the darkest hour a bright star arose and Prussia was saved when he had almost given up all hope. Why should not we also hope for a similar wonderful turn of fortune!” So, the fact that things were going badly was proof that things would be fine! As long as you continue to beleeeeeve.

30 March. “This is the beginning of the catastrophe in the West.” He and Hitler agree on the military strategy: “we must now make every effort to re-establish a fresh front.”

31 March. He’s getting letters that are a little “despairing.” Some of them even suggest Hitler might be at fault. He blames it on Goering.

1 April. People in France, he says, must really be regretting the Allies’ success because they are facing a serious food shortage. [Did he really not know that Nazis had always been starving occupied countries? He mentions, approvingly, Hitler’s decision not to try to feed POW. He has several entries where he says that the liberated peoples must be miserable now, so maybe he really didn’t? On the other hand, he knew about Nazi extermination policies, and the extraordinary atrocities, and yet he expresses outrage at Soviet atrocities, so is all just in- v out-group?]

4 April. “We must act at once if it is not to be too late.”

It was too late in November 1941.

In other words, this is how an administration steeped in charismatic leadership and blind loyalty who believes it’s all about marketing responds to failure. They never learn. They never start behaving rationally.

Never. They will take everyone down with them.

[1] Editors of Goebbels’ diaries always have to decide what to do about the fact that he is writing the next day about what happened the previous. So, on February 28, he wrote about what happened on the 27th (“yesterday” in Goebbels’ words). Some editors (e.g., Fred Taylor, who edited Goebbels’ 1939-41 entries) keep Goebbels’ dates, but Trevor-Roper doesn’t. I’ve used Trevor-Roper’s dates.

[2] This is also the entry where Goebbels makes clear that it was genocide, and he knew it, and he was happy about it: “Anyone in a position to do so should kill the Jews off like rats. In Germany, thank God, we have already done a fairly complete job. I trust that the world will take its cue from this.”

What’s wrong with the “women should be afraid that their sons will be accused of rape” meme

[Edited to include the meme I’d seen elsewhere that I couldn’t find at the time I wrote this.]

The meme circulating is almost everything wrong with current GOP rhetoric (GOP rhetoric wasn’t always this bad, and being conservative does not mean you have to be stupid). It’s engaging in a false binary, shifting the stasis, asserting empirically indefensible claims, reducing  women to mothers (and, in some versions, wives), and fear-mongering. It’s also weirdly entangled in racist experiences of the justice system. And there is the really bizarre argument that Ford’s accusations can be dismissed because they’re politically motivated, which is a subset of the rape culture topos that rape accusers have bad motives.

Sometimes this meme is explicitly connected to Kavanaugh, and the accusation against him. And it’s sometimes asserted that a male can be convicted on the basis of a single woman’s word. While there are people arguing that Kavanaugh shouldn’t be confirmed because of this accusation, far more are arguing that his confirmation shouldn’t be, as the GOP is doing, rushed. They are calling for an investigation, perhaps by the FBI. Some are simply asking that Kavanaugh testify under oath about this incident. Some are saying that, in addition to his stance on Roe v Wade, he shouldn’t be confirmed. The reactions to the accusations about Kavanaugh don’t neatly split into two.

The dominant argument is that the charges should be investigated, exactly the opposite claim of the meme. So, this meme shifts the stasis from “we should slow down in this confirmation process” to “women are slutty mcslutfaces who love accusing men of rape because men go to jail over one slutty mcslutface’s word.”

[Edited to add: just to be clear, the argument that most critics of the process are making is that we should slow down this process, and investigate the claims. So, it isn’t critics of Kavanaugh who are cutting short an investigation–it’s his defenders.]

Obviously, women who make accusations of rape are more likely to have their lives destroyed than the men, but there are cases of men being charged who have been falsely accused of rape. And it’s true that major figures will weigh in and insist on punishment even before the trial, such as Trump’s false accusation against the Central Park rapists (which he’s never retracted). So, if you want to worry about someone in power who will make and refuse to retract irresponsible accusations of rape, you might look at Trump. It’s interesting that the cases that get so much media attention tend to be white men (Rolling Stone grovelled, but Trump never has, for instance). The media is very worried about the lives of white males whose lives might be ruined by rape accusations, less worried about how the lives of accusers are always in ruins, and meanwhile almost entirely ignoring that the real crime is convictions on the basis of false accusations. And, to be blunt, suburban GOP white women don’t need to worry that their sons will be convicted of rape on the grounds of the word of a single woman who has no supporting evidence.

There are mothers who need to worry about that, though–the mothers of the Scottsboro Boys, of course, the Central Park Five (whom Trump wanted executed). There are false accusations of rape, and, yes, men have spent a lot of time in prison over those false accusations. Men have been indisputably exonerated.

But the Kavanaugh confirmation has nothing to do with whether white men are falsely accused of rape. That’s the most cunning and wicked stasis-shift of all. Hearings are supposed to be about getting to the truth. As I crawl around the internet, I’m finding that one of the most common defenses of Kavanaugh is that Ford and her supporters have bad motives for their claims. For instance, they claim it’s suspicious that Feinstein delayed releasing the letter, although that’s clearly explained in the initial letter–she requested confidentiality until they could speak. (They don’t know that–they’re drinking the flavor-aid, and dutifully repeating the talking points they’ve been given, not realizing they’re uncritically repeating stupid arguments.)

But, here’s what matters: people who care about the truth don’t care about the motives of people. It doesn’t matter whether Ford has good or bad motives; what matters is whether what she says is true. (Or not, what matters is that the GOP and Kavanaugh’s response is they’re deep in rape culture.) When someone argues that Ford doesn’t get her claims to be investigated, they are openly saying that they favor rabid political factionalism over the truth.

And that’s where the GOP is these days. And it’s tragic. A healthy democracy has people of good will and intelligence reasonably arguing for various policies from various perspectives. The GOP is openly opposed to democratic deliberation.

Rough draft of the intro for the Hitler and Rhetoric book

[Much of this is elsewhere on this blog. I’m curious if I’m still having the problem of being too heady and academic.]

Martin Niemoller was a Lutheran pastor who spent 1938-1945 in concentration camps as the personal prisoner of Adolf Hitler. Yet, Neimoller had once been a vocal supporter of Hitler, who believed that Hitler would best enact the conservative nationalist politics that he and Niemoller shared. Niemoller was a little worried about whether Hitler would support the churches as much as Niemoller wanted (under the Democratic Socialists, the power of the Lutheran and Catholic churches had been weakened, as the SD believed in a separation of church and state), but Neimoller thought he could outwit Hitler, get the conservative social agenda he wanted, disempower the socialists, and all without harm coming to the church. He was wrong.

After the war, Niemoller famously said about his experience:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.[1]

Niemoller was persuaded that Hitler would be a good leader, or, at least, better than the Socialists. After the war, Niemoller was persuaded that his support for Hitler had been a mistake. What persuaded him either time?

Christopher Browning studied the Reserve Police Battalion 101 and its role in Nazi genocide, narrating how a group of ordinary men could move from being appalled at the killing of unarmed noncombatants to doing so effectively, calculatedly, and enthusiastically. German generals held captive by the British were wiretapped, and often talked about how and why they supported Hitler, many of whom had been opposed to him. In 1950, Milton Mayer went to visit the small German town from which his family had emigrated and talked to the people living there, writing a book about his conversations with ten of them, all of whom to some degree justified not only their actions during the Nazi regime, but the regime itself—even those who had at points or in ways resisted it. Melita Maschmann’s autobiographical Account Rendered, published in 1963, describes how she reconciled her Hitler Youth activities, which included confiscating property and helping to send people to camps, with her sense that National Socialism was idealistic and good. Robert Citino’s The Wehrmacht Retreats, David Stone’s Shattered Genius, and Ian Kershaw’s The End all describe how so many members of the German military elite not only reconciled themselves to working for Hitler, but to following orders that they believed (often correctly) meant disaster and defeat. Benny Morris’ Roots of Appeasement gives a depressing number of examples of major figures and media outlets that persuaded others and were persuaded themselves that Hitler was a rational, reasonable, peace-loving political figure whose intermittent eliminationist and expansionist rhetoric could be dismissed. Andrew Nagorski’s Hitlerland similarly describes American figures who were persuaded that Hitler wouldn’t start another war; accounts of the 1936 Olymplic Games, hosted by the Nazis, emphasize that Nazi efforts were successful, and most visitors went away believing that accounts of anti-Jewish violence and discrimination were overstated. Biographers of Hitler all have discussions of his great rhetorical successes at various moments, enthusiastic crowds, listeners converted to followers, and individuals who walked out of meetings with him completely won over. Soldiers freezing to death in a Russian winter wrote home about how they still had faith in Hitler’s ability to save them; pastors and priests who believed that they were fighting to prevent the extermination of Christianity from Germany still preached faith in Hitler, blaming his bad advisors; ordinary Germans facing the corruption and sadism of the Nazi government and the life-threatening consequences of Hitler’s policies similarly protection their commitment to Hitler and bemoaned the “little Hitlers” below him who were, they said, the source of the problems. The atrocities of Nazism required active participation, support, and at least acquiescence on the part of the majority of Germans—the people shooting, arresting, boycotting, humiliating, and betraying victims of Nazism were not some tiny portion of the population, and those actions required that large numbers walk by. Some people were persuaded to do those things, and some people were persuaded to walk past.

After the war, what stunned the world was that Germans had been persuaded to acts of irrationality and cruelty previously unimaginable. Understanding what happened in Germany requires understanding persuasion. And understanding persuasion means not thinking of it as a speaker who casts a spell over an audience and immediately persuades them to be entirely different. Rhetoric, which Aristotle defined as the art of finding the available means of persuasion, isn’t just about what a rhetor (a speaker or author) consciously decides to do to manipulate a passive audience. What the case of Hitler shows very clearly is that we are persuaded by many things, not all of them words spoken by a person consciously trying to change our beliefs. Rhetoric helps us understand our own experience, and the most powerful kind of persuasion is self-persuasion. What a rhetor like Hitler does is give us what scholars of rhetoric call “topoi” (essentially talking points) and strategies such that we feel comfortable and perhaps deeply convinced that a course of action is or was the right one. Rhetoric is about justification as much as motivation. That isn’t how people normally think about persuasion and rhetoric, and, paradoxically, that’s why we don’t see when we’ve been persuaded of a bad argument—because we’re wrong about how persuasion works.

This book is about Hitler, and yet not about Hitler. It’s really about persuasion, and why we shouldn’t imagine persuasion as a magically-gifted speaker who seduces people into new beliefs and actions they will regret in the morning. It’s never just one speaker, it’s never just speech, it’s never even just discourse, the beliefs and actions aren’t necessarily very new, and people don’t always really regret them in the morning.

[1] There are various versions. This one is from here: https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007392

Arguing against injustice: Louis Goldblatt before the Tolan Committee

In 1942, after years of fear-mongering about “the Japanese,” the US was seriously considering race-based mass imprisonment of legal aliens and citizens of Japanese ethnicity. The Tolan Committee was formed by a progressive Congressman to have hearings on the West Coast about whether such imprisonment (euphemistically called “evacuation”) should happen. Louis Goldblatt, representing the California State Industrial Union Council, was one of few people to do a fiery anti-imprisonment speech. This is the record of the speech.

       

How trolls get played

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-8-prototypes-for-trumps-border-wall-photos

There are many ways in which working class people have the same political “interests” (the term used for goals, needs, policies). Concerns like good public schools, good roads, good police protection, affordable housing, affordable access to good healthcare, and so on aren’t limited to one kind of working class group. But they are necessarily class issues in two ways: first, rich people aren’t as dependent on the government to provide various services and so, if they only think in their short-term narrow self-interest, they can think that a strong social safety net isn’t a high priority. Rich people don’t need to care whether public schools are good, since they can send their kids to private schools. They can set up gated communities with good roads and private security forces. They don’t have to care whether there is low-income housing or affordable health insurance since they can pay for the expensive versions of both. Second, if all the working class got together—regardless of their membership in various sub-groups (religion, race, region)—it’s likely that they would advocate for stronger social safety nets, and it might end up with rich people and corporations having to pay higher taxes than either do now.

So, if rich people didn’t want to have to pay money to help working class people, what they would need to do would be to persuade working class people not to band together, not to think about their issues in policy terms. They would try to persuade some large part of the working class that their interests are the same as the rich.[1]

And the easiest way to do that (and the way it’s always been done) is to create an “out-group” (Those People) and persuade some large number of the working class that, as long as they’re doing something that harms Those People, they are winning. You can also tell them that their superiority over That Group would be threatened by [a policy that would actually benefit them]. It’s awful how well that works.

What a lot of people don’t realize about how slavery worked was that it enabled rich planters to exploit poorer whites. Proslavery rhetoric identified slaveholding with “being white,” as a wonderful life possibly available to every white man. Proslavery rhetoric also told poor whites that, no matter how poor they were, they were better than the richest or most successful non-white. Proslavery rhetoric guaranteed honor to every white man.[2] Conditions were pretty bad for poor whites in the South, with less access to public education, less industry, and various other issues, than people like them in some other areas, but proslavery rhetoric thwarted poor white political action by very rich people claiming solidarity with the poor whites they were underpaying, overworking, and often screwing over.

The same thing happened in prosegregation rhetoric (as the very Southern WB Cash pointed out in the 40s): rich whites could prevent any kind of labor action by pointing out that unions allowed non-whites to join. They created a kind of “herrenvolk democracy“–a race-based democracy that, instead of material gain, gave poor whites whiteness as a prize (a prize only meaningful if denied to others).  A lot of poor (and screwed-over) whites would rather get screwed over by rich whites than admit they had common cause with African Americans (a point Cash made). Segregation (white supremacist) rhetoric said that, no matter how poor you are, you are better than the richest or most successful non-white. In other words, pro-segregation rhetoric didn’t argue the really complicated policy issues about segregation (especially the significant harms for all working class people of the rejection of unions, hostility to support for public schools, aversion to good science education, and shoddy labor laws). It got assent by redirecting policy issues to simple zero-sum Us v. Them arguments.

In other words, white supremacist rhetoric (proslavery or prosegregation) meant that people voted on issues entirely on the basis of whether they were voting for something that would preserve their racial status. And, if the policy harmed the “other” race, that was good enough. Thus, they could often get tricked into voting for something that preserved their racial status, and harmed them in every other way—poor whites supported employment laws, laws about schools, restrictive laws about literacy that hurt them because they were happy that those laws hurt non-whites more. That’s the next step in this process of getting citizens in a democracy not to argue politics—reframe all policy issues into the question of whether the policy hurts (yay!) or helps (boo!) the out-group, regardless of what it does for the in-group.

It’s a really Machiavellian way to go about getting support for a policy, and it works far too often. If you persuade your base that every political issue is us v. them, and that the world is a zero-sum of us v. them, then you can persuade your base to support policies that hurt them as long as they believe it hurts “the other group” more.

The term for this is a “wedge” issue. You get a wedge into a group that really should be allied (such as the Irish and the freed African Americans in the early 19th century), and you separate them, and race is a great way to do that (so is religion). Poor people (regardless of race or religion) generally have the same policy goals; working class people have the same political needs regardless of race. It wasn’t just the South that did this. In the nineteenth century, Jacksonian Democrats gained the support of the poor Irish for policies that didn’t help them purely on the grounds that those policies hurt African Americans more.

Putting politics in terms of us v. them enables the screwing-over of people rests on first creating a lot of resentment of the out-group, and often scapegoating, including scapegoating the out-group for the consequences the in-group policy will have. Sources on every side of the American political spectrum agree that the American skilled working class has been hurt, and sensible sources agree that the causes are complicated. Mechanization, globalization, and union-busting have significantly hurt the skilled working class, and yet immigrants are scapegoated for unemployment (immigrants didn’t cause jobs to leave the US, and immigrants didn’t take union jobs). But, once that resentment against immigrants (or any other group) is created, and a base is persuaded to think that it’s a zero-sum between Us and Them, then all a party has to do is get its base to vote and behave in ways that hurt Them.

Under those conditions, it seems unnecessary to argue policies, and that may even be the intent. Slaveholders didn’t want slavery debated—at all. They wanted it to appear that you either fully supported slavery in every possible way or you were actively advocating race war against whites. Any restriction of slavery would hurt them after all, and any reasonable and thorough debate of the institution of slavery would lead to restriction. And so, slaveholders were so committed to prohibiting deliberation of slavery that they talked themselves into unnecessarily aggressive policies that alienated people who didn’t really care about slavery (through things like the Gag Rule, Bleeding Kansas, assaulting a Senator in the Senate, the Fugitive Slave Law, the war with Mexico, the Dred Scott decision, pushing “black codes” on “free” states, the open advocacy of forcing “free” states to allow slavery). The South would have done better to have allowed open debate about slavery. But even people who didn’t own slaves were persuaded that it was either “us” (advocating unrestricted slavery) or “them” (rabid abolitionists who wanted race war). So, any violence against “them,” any policy they hated—that was good enough.

There are lots of examples in history when communities were dominated by this kind of “as long as it makes Them unhappy, I’m good with this policy” thinking. That’s worth considering—if this is a good way for people to make decisions, we should be able to point to times it worked out well. And I yet to find an example of a time it did work well for any length of time as a way of a large group making policy decisions. I can think of lots of examples of times it was disastrous—it’s what motivated Athenians to send troops on campaigns that were guaranteed failures, or support campaigns that were failing (as in the Sicilian Expedition). The whole philosophy is captured in the saying, “cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

But, in the short run, it can seem like a good idea. It’s a great way for a TV channel, organization, radio show, politician, or political party to build a base (after all, you probably said to yourself, “THEY DO IT TOO!”), and it’s more fun to engage in the two-minute hate about the other group than get into the weeds of the various political options available. In the long run, though, if you make decisions purely on the basis of whether it pisses someone you hate off, you’re making bad decisions, often ones that hurt you.

And, if all you try to do in social media is piss off the other side, you were persuaded to do that by someone who knows how useful it is for them. Trolls think they’re just doing it for the lulz. They aren’t. They think they aren’t earnest. Their refusal to think very clearly about their actions is carefully and earnestly encouraged by media, political parties, and interests that find their mindless resentment of Them very profitable. Trolls might think they’re in it for the lulz, but someone is into their activity for the bucks. Bucks the trolls aren’t getting.

Trolls think they’re playing earnest people earnestly involved in political deliberation; on the contrary, they’re getting earnestly played.

 

 

[1] What’s interesting about the current attempt to keep working class people from seeing their concerns as shared with others in their economic system is that it’s only in the short-term narrow self-interest of corporations and rich people to thwart discussion about what would help the working class. After all, it benefits everyone in a nation if the populace is well-educated, scientifically literate, if they have access to good healthcare, a strong infrastructure, low crime, and public servants (teachers, fire fighters, police, public defenders, social workers) who are well-paid, well-trained, selectively hired, and enjoy helping the public regardless of class, race, religion, and so on. That’s a good world for everyone.

[2] Another thing a lot of people who admire the institution of slavery and the CSA don’t realize is that whiteness was actually not what we now imagine it to be—for instance, neither eastern Europeans nor Italians were considered white, and Catholics also had a shaky claim on the term.