Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2015

After 1945 and the end of WWII, denying the Holocaust became an explicit taboo in most European countries. More specifically, in Austria, denying the Holocaust in public implies legal consequences: the so-called Verbotsgesetz persecutes any public utterances which even insinuate National Socialist ideology (utterances, symbols, songs, images) and the Holocaust denial. Naturally, it remains difficult for the courts to substantiate any accusations and to prove that somebody has actually uttered Holocaust denial if the meanings are only implied, inferred, or alluded to. Thus, in spite of such explicit sanctions, politicians of the far-right have found many coded and implicit discursive-pragmatic practices and devices of denying the Holocaust, even during parliamentary debates and official speeches. In my paper, I compare the “discourses about Holocaust denial” in Austria and the UK, in two case studies: the first one relates to the controversy about some utterances of Barbara Rosenkranz who stood as candidate of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) for election to Austrian Presidency in April 2010. Secondly, I focus on the debates triggered by Nick Griffin from the British extreme right party BNP, in and after his appearance in the prominent BBC 1 weekly show Question Time, in 2009. I apply the Discourse-Historical Approach in CDA for the detailed analysis of such recurring debates and foreground the patterns of a globalised politics of denial.

Some Internet genres, in particular Weblogs and discussion fora, have a dubious reputation for giving voice to strongly polemical discourses or hate-speech. This paper investigates the use of dehumanizing metaphors, specifically parasite metaphors, in British debates about immigration. It compares the range of metaphors used in Blogs with that used in online fora and in mainstream newspaper coverage and concludes that despite substantial variation, they can be categorised into four main scenarios, of which one includes dehumanizing metaphors such as depictions of immigrants as parasites, leeches, or bloodsuckers. Whilst this kind of stigmatizing imagery occurs across the three different media genres, the samples also show significant quantitative and qualitative differences: dehumanizing metaphors occur most often and their potential for aggressive argumentation and polemics is exploited in more detail in Blogs than in the fora, and least in the mainstream press. It is then asked what cognitive import this differential usage has in view of a) the discourse histories of such metaphors and b) their most likely present-day semantic motivation. The paper concludes that while it is unlikely that present-day users have detailed knowledge of the etymological and conceptual histories of such metaphors, it is also improbable to assume a wholly “unconscious” or “automatic” use or reception in the respective community of practice, and that instead it is more likely that they are used with a high degree of “deliberateness” and a modicum of discourse-historical awareness.

This paper uses corpus-based methods to explore how British Parliamentary arguments against LGBT equality have changed in response to decreasing social acceptability of discriminatory language against minority groups. A comparison of the language of opposition to the equalisation of the age of consent for anal sex (1998–2000) is made to the oppositional language in debates to allow same-sex marriage (2013). Keyword, collocation and concordance analyses were used to identify differences in overall argumentation strategies, assessing the extent to which previously explicit homophobic speech (e.g. homosexuality as unnatural) has been replaced by more indirect strategies (e.g. less use of personalised argumentation via the pronoun I). We argue that while homophobic language appears to be on the decrease in such contexts, there is a mismatch between words and acts, requiring analysts to acknowledge the presence of more subtle indications of homophobic discourse in the future.

In American politics, the National Rifle Association (NRA) has asserted itself as a leading voice in the gun rights movement. The strident rhetoric emanating from the NRA leadership impacts the development of a broader discourse in American public life over gun rights — a discourse of Second Amendment absolutism — that articulates a set of assumptions and explanations in defense of an absolutist stance against gun regulation in any form. This paper examines the ideologies that underlie this absolutist discourse and the identities those ideologies help to construct. In particular, the absolutist discourse is analyzed through the lens of what historian Richard Hofstadter termed “the paranoid style in American politics.” The aim is to isolate and expose the extremist elements of this discourse, which polarize political debate and hinder the democratic process.

Scholars of politeness admit that being insulted may be the result of the hearer’s assumptions about the other’s behavior and may not necessarily relate to the actual words or intentions of the speaker. Thus, it is surprising to find only a few accounts of how people are doing “being insulted” or of how, in public discourse, responses to insults are strategically employed for various ends. In this paper, I analyze the meta-pragmatics of “hurt feelings” in order to understand how speakers do things with emotions and the role of hurt feelings in political democratic discourse. By examining instances in which public figures have stated their feelings of insult in Israeli public discourse (1997–2012), I show both how hurt feelings are strategically employed to protest against politically unacceptable acts, and how public actors sometimes explicitly refuse to be insulted, shifting the meaning of what is perceived as an insult by side-participants into a compliment. I conclude by discussing the consequences of manifesting hurt feelings in political discourse.

This paper uses critical stylistics to analyse the British press’s use of the term “terrorism” in their reporting of the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby outside the military barracks in Woolwich, London on 22nd May 2013. It considers academic definitions of “terrorism” and compares these to the use of the term in newspaper reports on the attack. The authors seek to understand how the Woolwich attack is fit into a complex and contested concept such as terrorism. A close reading of a small corpus of national newspaper articles was used to identify common themes in the way the incident is portrayed, with critical stylistic analysis being applied to investigate how the term “terrorism” is used in context. The study highlights how the application of the “terrorism” label is justified within the articles despite the scarcity of information regarding the attack and persons involved at the time of their publication.

In the late 2000s far-right parties made significant gains in numerous countries of the European Union. Sharing the same agenda and discourse of discrimination, many of these parties collaborate today at the European level as well. Yet, it is unclear whether the contemporary European far-right is indeed homogenous in terms of ideology. This project in critical discourse analysis shows that the far-right in the EU is actually characterized by ideological diversity. The paper compares and contrasts how China, an emerging great power with a booming economy, has been portrayed in the early 2010s by far-right parties in the UK and Hungary. By identifying major references, metaphors, frames and argumentation schemes, the article concludes that despite belonging to the same party family, and being actual political allies, the British National Party (BNP) and the Jobbik party in Hungary construct fundamentally different images of the “Chinese Other”. The far-right in the UK, a major Western power, presents China clearly in hostile terms, mainly as a “dangerous, threatening intruder” into the British market. Additionally, in the discourse of the British far-right China is primarily identified as a communist dictatorship and used as a metaphor of oppression in the domestic UK context. Meanwhile, in Hungary, a post-communist country in Eastern Europe and a relatively recent member of the European Union, an opposite picture of China is constructed by the far-right. Here, China serves as a tool to distance Hungary from the West. China is positioned by the Hungarian far-right as a state where communism has lost its significance. By stressing the Asian origin of Hungarians, brotherhood is claimed among Hungarians and Chinese and China is presented as a “role model country” which successfully resisted “Western dominance”.

The electoral rise of Golden Dawn from obscurity to parliamentary representation has drawn attention to its particular neo-fascist discourse. In sharp contrast to the tendency of most far-right movements in Europe to present themselves as being part of the political mainstream, Golden Dawn has never disavowed its openly neo-Nazi references. Its political and ideological discourse combines extreme racism, nationalism and authoritarianism along with traditional conservative positions in favour of traditional family roles and values and the Greek Orthodox Church. The aim of this paper is twofold: on the one hand to situate the ideology and discourse of Golden Dawn in a conjuncture of economic and social crisis, a crisis of the project of European Integration, and examine it as part of a broader authoritarian post-democratic and post-hegemonic transformation of the State in contemporary capitalism; on the other hand to criticize the position suggested recently that Golden Dawn was also the result of the supposedly “national-populist” discourse of the anti-austerity movement. On the contrary, we will insist on the opposition between the discourses and practices of Golden Dawn and the anti-austerity movement in Greece.

This article discusses the discursive strategies of the Freedom Party (PVV), a contemporary Dutch populist and Islamophobic party. After tracing its ideological roots to mainstream liberalism rather than earlier forms of extreme right political movements, I will discuss its discourse about Muslims. It will appear that this discourse goes far beyond the legitimate expression of opinion. Using some of Judith Butler’s ideas about the performativity of hate speech, I will attempt to describe how PVV leader Geert Wilders’s language is not only a discourse about violence, but is also itself a discourse of violence. Simultaneously, however, Wilders systematically denied responsibility for any violence his words might contain, imply, or provoke; instead, he and his sympathizers blamed both Muslims and his political opponents for whatever violence might occur in the wake of his utterances. This appears most clearly in the discussion following Norwegian Anders Breivik’s murderous 2011 assault on the Utøya island, an act which he himself claimed was in part inspired by Wilders’s political rhetoric.