An Investigation Into the Way in Which Sir Winston Churchill Used Rhetoric During the Second World War to Inspire His Audience

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An Investigation Into the Way in Which Sir Winston Churchill Used Rhetoric During the Second World War to Inspire His Audience

Introduction

Language is the lifeblood of politics. Political power struggles, and the legitimisation of political policies and authorities occurs primarily through discourse and verbal representations. Winston Churchill is hailed as one of the greatest public speakers of the last century. I intend to look at a variety of his speeches and investigate what it is that made his speeches so notable.

On May 10th, 1940, Sir Winston Churchill took over the helm of the British ship of state. He acquired a nation that stood in peril after nine months of watching the Nazi war machine consume the countries of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark and Norway. On that very day, the Germans attacked Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Churchill needed to inspire his people to reverse the tide of German victories. Although he claimed, "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat," these qualities do not quite fully explain how Sir Winston Churchill helped lead the Allied Powers to victory in World War II. To this list, the word speech should be added, for it was through Churchill's speeches that much of the war was won. President Kennedy once said that Churchill "mobilized the English language and sent it into battle" . Although context is important and is noted in this paper, the primary interest of this paper is to explore the words and phrases, and the sources of these words and phrases, that Churchill uses in his speeches. Specifically, the question here is: how did the speech structure, phrases and language that Churchill used serve to inspire his audience?

In order to view Churchill's use of rhetoric during the course of the war, this paper examines three speeches, one from the beginning, the middle and the end of World War II. In addition to following the overall trends of Churchill's writing style in these three speeches, I have also considered how each speech targets the particular audience who herd it.

The first speech, "The War Situation: House of Many Mansions," is a look at one of Churchill's earliest assessments of the war as Lord Admiral of the Navy. The second speech, "The Price of Greatness is Responsibility," is an address delivered to an American audience at a university. The last speech is an informal victory speech he made to the British people on V-E Day.

The thesis of this paper is that Churchill's use of language, rhetoric and speech structure allowed him to form a bond with the listener that made the listener more receptive to Churchill's message.

In order to analyse Churchill's use of rhetoric, we must first find out what it is.

Rhetoric is defined by Crockcroft and Crockcroft in their book Persuading People (1992) as 'the art of persuasive discourse', her to refer to both spoken and written communication. The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322BC) wrote extensively on the 'art' of rhetoric, seeing it as an important part of human activity, and so worth categorising and defining in great detail. Plato, on the other hand, believed rhetoric to be about the manipulation of an audience be people who were essentially insincere in their motives. Neither saw rhetoric concerned only with government, but as far as a factor in all human communication; the skills of rhetoric were thought in early school systems long before subjects like English Language and Literature were invented.

Although rhetoric, in the sense the Cockcrofts use the word, relates to all forms of human communication, the word has tended to be used much more frequently to refer to speech and even more specifically to a certain type of public speaking. Rhetorical skills, in the sense of persuasive public speaking, have always been an important part of our national curriculum. Formal debating is an important part of education as it is the skills of speaking persuasively that are far more important than a personally held belief in the topic under debate. In competitions for instance, for instance, debating teams are given a proposition and are told which side they must argue. They aren't judged on the honestly of their views. Students when debating formally are encouraged to see insincerity as perfectly acceptable, provided that the rhetorical skills are good enough. The adversarial legal systems of many countries could also be said to reward rhetorical skill rather that honesty and truth; good lawyers are often seen as those who can persuade a jury to agree with their case, rather that adjudicate on what really happened.

So in some circumstances we place the skills of rhetoric above the value of honesty (as Plato indicated); in others we hope that the skills of rhetoric will reinforce our good intentions (as Aristotle claimed). When we come to political speeches, though, the position is less clear. No doubt the politicians themselves would argue that they wish to put forward policies that the genuinely believe in. More cynical listeners, though, might argue that the real purpose, at least those politicians whom they see as untrustworthy, is to manipulate the audience into agreeing with policies which really serve only the desires of the politician to gain or keep power. There is no simple answer to this dilemma, because concepts like honesty and sincerity cannot be measured against and absolute standard.
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Analysis

Metaphor

Recent work on semantics in English has investigated the place of metaphor in everyday speech. Metaphor is deeply embedded in the way we construct the world around us and the way the world is constructed by others. An example of this process involves the metaphorical idea that a lesson is a journey; we take a difficult topic 'step by step'; if we cannot conclude an idea we 'go round in circles'; if we loose relevance we 'arrive at a conclusion'; if we are unsuccessful we are 'lost' or 'stuck'.

There are lots of ...

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