{"id":284,"date":"2010-03-29T20:09:41","date_gmt":"2010-03-29T20:09:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mixermuse.com\/blog\/?p=284"},"modified":"2014-11-15T10:12:02","modified_gmt":"2014-11-15T17:12:02","slug":"the-absolute-necessity-of-rhetoric","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/myths-exposed\/the-absolute-necessity-of-rhetoric\/","title":{"rendered":"The Absolute Necessity of Rhetoric"},"content":{"rendered":"

In President Obama\u2019s recent trip to Afghanistan he told the troops that he would not send troops anywhere that was not \u201cabsolutely necessary\u201d (http:\/\/frontpagemag.com\/2009\/10\/27\/mission-abandoned-%e2%80%93-by-alan-w-dowd\/<\/a>).\u00a0 When President Bush started the war in Afghanistan he justified it as a crusade, vengeance for 911, a Texas style hanging for Al-Qaida and killing the ones responsible for 911.\u00a0 I never heard him state that he was going to bring the terrorists responsible for 911 to justice.\u00a0 He may have made that statement but most of the statements were along the line previously described.\u00a0 Using these rhetorical ploys Bush was able to get the support he needed to start the war in Afghanistan.\u00a0 Hatred is always a strong emotion while justice is emotionally a bit puny.\u00a0 Bush started the war against Afghanistan based on rhetoric about getting Al-Qaida.\u00a0 To date Al-Qaida is still around and our rhetoric about our enemy Al-Qaida is also used freely about the Taliban.\u00a0 While no one would suggest that the Taliban is a great group of guys, they were not the stated reason why we went to war in Afghanistan.\u00a0 Fanning the flames of 911, Bush was able to start a war.\u00a0 His rhetoric became President Obama\u2019s \u201cabsolute necessity\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I have previously stated that as leader of the United States, President Bush should have stated that we would bring Al-Qaida to justice.\u00a0 Preferably, this would be done through the United Nations, the World Court and pressure from the World Monetary Fund (in Afghanistan and Pakistan).\u00a0 President Bush\u2019s rhetoric should have made justice the guiding principle.\u00a0 We would have kept the sympathies of the world and made justice the value that everyone, no matter what their political persuasion, sympathetic to the universality of justice.\u00a0 Vengeance and hatred on the other hand are regionally specific.\u00a0 Those that hate and want vengeance are driven by their own internal necessity not by any universal appeal, by an ideal that everyone could think is worthwhile.\u00a0 As I have also mentioned in another paper, barring the earnest attempt to get justice in a region of the world where justice is highly lacking, the alternative would be US Special Forces, the CIA, mercenaries, and covert bribes and pressure.\u00a0 Don\u2019t think it can\u2019t be done; we had a whole cold war based in Afghanistan against the Russians using these techniques many years ago.\u00a0 However, the political rhetoric should always be concentrated on universal values not regional and circumstantial emotions.<\/p>\n

When our hatred drives our rhetoric the rhetoric can take on a life of its own in popular culture.\u00a0 The switch from admirable, universal ideals to self-aggrandizing, raw and base instincts that become yet another mindless iteration of the past; it becomes its own necessity.\u00a0 The necessity driven by hatred always ends badly.\u00a0 The necessity driven by high ideals, historically always ends well.\u00a0 Examples of the latter include the founding fathers, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Jesus, etc.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the earlier is typically the blunder of humankind.<\/p>\n

Since rhetoric based in base instinct got us into Afghanistan, I think President Obama had no other choice but to use rhetoric to get us out of Afghanistan.\u00a0 It has been done before (Vietnam comes to mind) \u2013 we declare victory for x, y, z reasons and get the hell out.\u00a0 We pursue the cause of bringing Al-Qaida to justice using the previously discussed strategies.\u00a0 As it is, now we are looking at an endless war that has the tendency to expand as these situations typically do.<\/p>\n

Another example of rhetoric gone badly is the recent militant rhetoric used by the Republican Party against the Democrats.\u00a0 The Republican leaders play on the strong emotions of hatred and violence with inflammatory rhetoric and \u201cwash their hands\u201d of it when their words start taking a life of its own in popular behavior.\u00a0 If you want to understand how Hitler was able to do what he did you can see the beginnings of it in these kinds of rhetorical ploys.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While personally, I have never opposed capital punishment in cases where there is \u201cno shadow of doubt\u201d about the defendant\u2019s guilt, I have opposed it based on the rhetorical dynamic described above.\u00a0 When the necessity of rhetoric is allowed to run rampant Texas style executions become more and more \u201cnormal\u201d and statistics about wrongful deaths and ethnic inequalities of the death penalty become more and more prevalent.<\/p>\n

President Obama should have held to his higher ideals and not adopted the rhetorical necessity handed to him by the Bush administration.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On a more philosophical level, the dynamic of rhetorical necessity tells us something about human\u2019s unique way of being-in-the-world.\u00a0 Our narratives of history become our cannon.\u00a0 The ill-conceived actions that typically follow continue to create generations of veterans and Republican voters that sanctify our motivations and our histories.\u00a0 The perceived alternative would be to exist in meaninglessness.\u00a0 God, the self-evident and the a priori surround us as witnesses to our ultimate worthiness and meaning.\u00a0 In the margins of our hubris plays the alter-ego, the lie of truth and the future seeds of our own undoing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In President Obama\u2019s recent trip to Afghanistan he told the troops that he would not send troops anywhere that was not \u201cabsolutely necessary\u201d (http:\/\/frontpagemag.com\/2009\/10\/27\/mission-abandoned-%e2%80%93-by-alan-w-dowd\/).\u00a0 When President Bush started the war in Afghanistan he justified it as a crusade, vengeance for 911, a Texas style hanging for Al-Qaida and killing the ones responsible for 911.\u00a0 I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,13,16,18,19],"tags":[24,44,159,240],"class_list":["post-284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-myths-exposed","category-western-philosophy","category-politics","category-republicans","category-war","tag-afghanistan","tag-bush","tag-obama","tag-republicans"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3928,"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284\/revisions\/3928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mixermuse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}