Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2008

Dehumanisation is a central tool of propaganda, war and oppression, but could it also be an everyday phenomenon? This paper attempts to demonstrate that dehumanisation is not invariably deviant behaviour, but often grounded in normal cognition. Dehumanisation is often defined as to make less human (Encarta) or to deprive of human character (Oxford English Dictionary). Are these adequate definitions? Is there evidence of polysemy, and a more salient sense? How can we explain the meaning and enactment of this process? This paper investigates the linguistic and behavioural representation of dehumanisation, with reference to modern and historical events. This semantic analysis considers aspects of pragmatics, semiotics, cognition and metaphor. The framework used in this examination is the Natural Semantic Metalanguage method of Reductive Paraphrase (Wierzbicka & Goddard 2002; Wierzbicka 1972).

Social realities are often negotiated and determined by elite groups of society, including political and religious leaders, the mass media, and even professional experts, who give meaning to complex, multifaceted constructs such as terrorism consistent with their individual socio-political agendas. The Bush Administrations National Strategy for Combating Terrorism (NSCT) (2003) defines what we the public and media understand by the term terrorism; who are terrorists; what constitutes terrorism; how we can fight terrorism, etc. In order to convince audiences that the version of reality that the NSCT is representing is the objective truth, particular themes such as the construction of religion, Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs), orientalism, and attack vs. self-defence, typically realised through the use of rhetorical resources such as category work, appeals to historicity, negative other-presentation, and the use of metaphor, are utilised. Metaphors are used to construct new and alternate realities. They allow a subjective conceptualisation of reality to appear more convincing through the invocation of emotions and ideologies. Drawing on a detailed analysis of NSCT, the paper investigates how metaphors are combined with other features of language and rhetoric to achieve the themes mentioned above enabling the discourse of illusion to take effect.

This article is based on the view that in the post-Cold War period, a US-defined New World Order discourse has been in formation. Adopting a critical discourse analytical perspective, the paper examines the deployment of American liberal democratic political ideology, which forms the basis of the New World Order discourse. American liberal democracy is construed vis--vis the articulation of illiberal global threats (namely, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein); through international consensus-building based on universalized American principles of freedom and democracy; and through Americas self-election to global leadership. While the primary focus of the study is on the speeches of President George W. Bush since the 11 September 2001 attacks, the analysis also includes speeches by the former post-Cold War presidents, Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, in the context of earlier historic events. An intertextual analysis of the speeches shows the hegemonic form(ul)ation of American liberal democratic internationalism in the post-Cold War environment.

This article investigates the rhetorical strategies deployed by President Clinton and Senator Dole during the 1996 presidential debates. Clinton resorted to implicit persuasion and audience-oriented rhetorical strategies, while Doles persuasion was more explicit, and he did not avoid the use of dispreferred strategies such as opening his answers with the discourse particle well. There were differences in the candidates use of personal pronouns: Dole used I, you, and they more, whereas Clinton employed the audience-inclusive we heavily. Clintons syntax and the content of his turns were coherently organized; Doles syntax showed occasional incoherence. The article does not claim that the use of successful rhetorical strategies is a necessary requirement for electoral success; it does, however, claim that a good orator is more likely to succeed.

In the discourse of political interviews, references to participants can be expressed explicitly by proper nouns and forms of address, and they can be expressed implicitly by personal pronouns and other indexical expressions. The meaning of personal pronouns is context-dependent and retrievable only by inference, and therefore is less determinate. Furthermore, it can shift according to the status of the participants in interaction. This may occur both in terms of social roles and in terms of roles in talk and footing. In this context, an analysis was conducted of televised political interviews broadcast during the 1997 and 2001 British general elections and just before the war with Iraq in 2003. Question-response sequences were identified in which politicians made use of pronominal shifts as a form of equivocation. These sequences were analyzed in the context of Bavelas et al.s (1990) theory of equivocation and Goffmans (1981) concept of footing. The polyvalent function of pronominal shifts, their potential perlocutionary effects and strategic advantages are discussed.

The violent acts of post-modern war are sometimes represented as long-distance communication. This paper examines the phrase send a message and others like it when used to refer to bombings, firing missiles, shooting civilians, etc. The metonymic reduction of killing and destroying to communication promotes message-sending as the single goal of a military enterprise. We provide relevant historical, cultural and political contexts that account for this increasingly prevalent framing: the imperatives of justifying aggressive war in a Post-Nuremburg international legal order; the emergence and intensification of message culture; and the increased strategic importance of perception management and information warfare. The paper includes a richly illustrated analysis of the metonymic structure of send a message and its relationship to the common, well-studied metaphor for communication, the conduit. We argue that the use of send a message to describe acts of violence does more than simply euphemize: it positions the message-senders as rational agents engaged in communicative action; and it displaces responsibility for suffering onto those who fail to get the message.

This article argues that Russias various neo-fascist and ultra-nationalist groups are articulating a populism-in-formation around the signifiers order and people, and through the narrative of mischief. The process of signification and context are added to Ernesto Laclaus understanding of the process and politics of the articulation of hegemony. Texts, modes, symbols and narratives of various neo-fascist and ultra-nationalist groups are employed and analyzed to suggest the populism-in-formation that Russian neo-fascism represents. In concluding, the paper suggests that Russias National Bolshevik Party, insofar as they articulate a discourse that mobilizes resonant versions of order and people, and as their narrative mode highlights the mischievous version of masculinity which is dominant in Russian culture and politics, represents the potentiality of Russian neo-fascism to articulate a hegemonic populism.