Burke quotes Hitler as saying "...the efficiency of the truly national leader consists primarily in preventing the division of the attention of a people, and always in concentrating it on a single enemy(Burke, 193)". This quote is eerily accurate in his manipulation of rhetoric toward the German people against the Jews. It is difficult after reading this to dispute that Hitler's main goal in persecuting Jews was to unite the German people through a hatred of another people.
Burke discusses throughout this text Hitler's "medicinal" appeal to rhetoric as he calls it. The use of the word medicine is interesting to me because when I hear it I think of a cure for an ailment, and I suppose in that regard it can be related to Hitler's goal of uniting an economically failed people, the Germans as a whole. Perhaps Hitler's persecution and use of a scapegoat is a way of achieving this as he states above, discounting the divided attention of a people. Burke says, regarding this "medicinal approach, "...there is 'medicine' for the 'Aryan' members of the middle class in the projective device of the scapegoat, whereby the 'bad' features can be allocated to the 'devil,' and one can 'respect himself' by a distinction between 'good' capitalism and 'bad' capitalism, with those of a different lodge being the vessels of 'bad' capitalism(Burke, 196)". For Hitler, the Jewish people represent this 'bad' capitalism of the middle class, and the 'Aryan' part of this class can be cured 'medicinally'.
Toward the end of this text, Burke says: "...the Germans had the resentment of a lost war to increase their susceptibility to Hitler's rhetoric. But in a wider sense, it has repeatedly been observed, the whole world lost the War-- and the accumulating ills of the capitalist order were but accelerated in their movements towards confusion(Burke, 219)". Hitler attempts to remedy the short fallings of capitalistic society in Germany and obviously does not succeed, but this use of 'medicinal' rhetoric, to me, can make the attitudes of the German people at the time more relatable; the whole world was struggling financially and searching for hope, and Hitler finds a way to manipulate a desperate nation with unity, a promise for work and food for everyone, and 'medicinal' rhetoric is extremely reassuring to the Germans at this time.
This makes me wonder, what other instances has medicinal rhetoric been used? Obviously this exact strategy has not been performed since Hitler, in regards to the amount of tragedy the 'medicine' resulted in. I was intrigued as well when Burke discusses Hitler's knowledge of the 'medicine' the middle class needed due to 'bad' capitalism practices, (Burke 196). This desire for a scapegoat should not be singled to the Germans during World War II. It is in human nature to want, as you said, a cure for an ailment, in times of sickness and depression; in this case, economic depression. I am trying to get to the event of 9/11 and terrorist attacks since that day through my rambling. Who were the American civilians boarded on those planes to the Taliban and to radical Muslims? Who are the murdered French journalists to ISIS? They were not civilians, they are not journalists. It is the 'international devil' that Burke talks about in regard to the rhetoric of Hitler. As with the time for Germany during Hitler, the Middle-East is in total chaos; it is in need of some ailment. My point, to reiterate what I finished with in my blog post, is what Burke said, "...let us try also to discover what kind of 'medicine' this medicine-man has concocted, that we may know, with greater accuracy, exactly what to guard against, if we are to forestall the concocting of similar medicine in America," (Burke 191). It is said that history repeats itself more often than not.
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