Altering Perception Through Lingual Association

In his essay Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle, Kenneth Burke systematically breaks down, and at times commends, the strategic language used by Hitler in his verbal dissemination of Jewish people in his book Mein Kamph. Burke breaks down the dismissive notion that Hitler chose Jews as his scapegoat out of pure calculation, instead reasoning that his disdain for them came from a real place of displaced anger and frustration. Through out his book Hitler persistently criticized Jews as the inferior race and juxtaposed them with the inherently superior “Aryan” race; consequently manifesting an associative meaning between “Jew” and “devil”.

            Mikhail Bakhtin’s cryptic dissection of language destroys the classical notions that words have inherent meaning based on their seemingly arbitrary association with ideas and objects. Bakhtin instead offers a temporal interpretation of lingual meaning to replace notions of inherence. “In any given historical moment of verbal-ideological life, each generation at each social level has its own language…all this is brought about by socially typifying languages” (Bakhtin 290). Language is fleeting and more importantly it is timely and malleable. Because language has contextual meaning words can be manipulated to carry new situational meaning. Bakhtin goes on to say that communication is always a performance, giving it “the ability to infect with its own intention certain aspects of language that had been affected by its semantic and expressive impulse, imposing on them specific semantic nuances and specific axiological overtones” (Bakhtin 290).

            At the intersection of these two uniquely complex theories emerges a commonality, or rather a point of juncture. Adolf Hitler’s oratory skills need neither explanation nor further praise, however the key rhetorical device for his success was a mastery of associative language. By associative language I mean an innate ability to create correlation where none exits. Burke breaks down Hitler’s process of associating the word “Jew” with all that plagued the superior “Aryan” race. “If a movement must have its Rome, it must also have its devil” (Burke 195). In his book Hitler details the emotional process by which he came to fervent anti-Semitism, establishing an emotional base for his association of Jew with devil. This base became the foundation on which he built his case; he then goes through an arduous and repetitive process of correlative initialization.

            Burke argues that Hitler used Jews as a projection device to differ blame for societal and personal ills that were wide spread at the time. “The curative process that comes with the ability to hand over ones ills to a scapegoat, thereby getting purification by dissociation” (Burke 202). Hitler took the internal frustration of individuals and related it to his own frustration, which spontaneously manifests as anti-Semitism. Thus creating a correlation between Jews and personal hindrance. “If one can hand over his infirmities to a vessel, or cause outside the self, one can battle an external enemy instead of battling an enemy within” (Burke 202). By first displaying a negative emotional experience with Jews Hitler established a feeling on which to build on and exploit. Before he made the general correlation between Jews and societal ills he made a personal connection between his internal frustration and Jews.

            Words have no fixed meaning because language is inherently social and performative. Bahktin posits that this lingual performance is based largely one the expectations of the audience. Hitler was expressly aware of the frustrations of the masses at the time he was writing Mein Kamph, he knew that they desired a solution to their societal hardships and individual indignation.  This knowledge was instrumental in the construction of his association between Jews and the figurative devil. Bahktin says, “all words have the taste of a profession, a genre, a tendency…a day an hour” (Bahktin 293). Hitler gave the word “Jew” a malicious taste that lingered in the mouth of anyone who uttered it. Hitler did this systematically, following a formulaic pattern of association, “the Aryan is constructive; the Jew is destructive; and the Aryan to continue his construction must destroy Jewish destruction. The Aryan, as the vessel of love, must hate the Jewish hate” (Burke 204). With this concept firmly established Hitler was able to relate any matter that ensued to the malignant Jewish problem. Thus creating a faultless cycle of association that reinforced itself in the minds of his audience.

            Hitler’s unprecedented oratory success was due to his methodical ability to anticipate the needs of his audience and his construction of a mental pathway between the word Jew and the feeling of personal frustration. Because of the temporal “taste” of language Hitler was able to transform a word that once simply denoted race into an all-encompassing scapegoat. With the distorted meaning of one word he altered the opinions of an entire populace and reduced the humanity of another.  

~Mikaela McShane