While I don't generally consider myself someone who appreciates the mathematical arts to the same degree I appreciate the linguistic ones, I nevertheless tend to take a significant amount of comfort in quantifying progress on nebulous and/or extended projects. This is a quick quantification of some of the progress I've made on the book I'm … Continue reading Hitler’s Rhetoric, A Progress Report (Dec. 2022)
Tag: Adolf Hitler
Are You Really Going to Make Me Defend Hitler? Style, Grammar, and Usage Edition
By equating good language with good people and bad language with bad people, we trick ourselves into believing that we (that is, people who use language well) could never fall for someone like Hitler.
No, You’re Hitler!: A History and a Proposal
In 1953, famed political philosopher and Jewish-German exile, Leo Strauss, coined a term to describe a trope that he increasingly saw circulating in public discourse: reductio ad Hilterum. Reductio ad Hitlerum is a fallacy used in arguments to discredit anything that can be associated with or compared to Hitler. Hitler liked dogs? Then liking dogs … Continue reading No, You’re Hitler!: A History and a Proposal
Nazi Science: Coronavirus Edition
I decided to try posting this one on Medium. I posted the first few paragraphs below, and the full post can be accessed here: https://medium.com/@ryan.skinnell/nazi-science-coronavirus-edition-bac4c2a0ed15?sk=eb9579d771e4125548f77d2a84f7ddab Noted flim-flam artists and doctors of low repute—including Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil—have recently been trotted out by right-wing media outlets to bemoan Coronavirus social distancing directives as “worse than … Continue reading Nazi Science: Coronavirus Edition
Reflections on Super Tuesday: Yearning for Unity
In 1939, just months before WWII broke out with Germany’s invasion of Poland, rhetorician Kenneth Burke wrote a very detailed book review of Mein Kampf. It was Burke’s attempt to understand how Hitler had “swung a great people into his wake.” At the time, Germany was one of the most literate, highly-educated countries in Europe, … Continue reading Reflections on Super Tuesday: Yearning for Unity
Nazi “Science” and Jewish “Genius”
In March 1966, rhetoric and communication scholar Haig A. Bosmajian published an article in ETC.: A Review of General Semantics called, “The Magic Word in Nazi Persuasion.” In the article, Bosmajian wrote about how Adolf Hitler and other prominent Nazis realized very early on that, while they needed terror, violence, and intimidation to gain and … Continue reading Nazi “Science” and Jewish “Genius”
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