Burke's "The Rhetoric of Hitler's Battle", demonstrates a lot of different analyzations of Hitler as well as examples of Hitlers actions through symbolism. Reading this essay, truly shows how well Hitler managed to get away with what he believed for a very long time. He was creative and persuasive and also demonstrated a sense of agency through his speech and language. His audience was gaining by the second and he did enough research in order to figure out how to draw them in and obtain what he wanted.
Burke managers to analyze Hitler pretty well in my opinion. On pages 193 and 194 Burke provides us with an excerpt from Hitlers book about concentrating on a single enemy. Burke realized that the common enemy is a symbol that unites two sides. As I was reading this, I couldn't agree more with what was being said. I would have never thought of this being a small symbolic action but it is a small step in the direction of which Hitler was trying to go. I think that symbolic actions can be small and large. What I mean by this is that I think what Burke meant by "Symbolic Action" was that humans ambition, is what drives the symbolic actions, which later lead up to a much larger symbolic action as a whole. The actions being taken by Hitler, are desired by him which makes him determined to create an even larger action, thus, making him a symbol of the Holocaust as well as a symbol for many other things in this era. Hitler connected with people and made them trust him so that all could be possible of him being a symbol later on in his time of being a leader. Burke also discusses how he thinks Hitler was not all there in his mind which I thought was interesting as well. Hitler showed areas of being "crazy" but he was also very very smart in order to gain what he wanted. I thought this was an interesting topic that Burke brought up but I also agreed with it after reading Burkes thoughts on this.
I like your definition of common enemy being a symbol that unites two sides. This seems like such a simple definition, but it is extremely accurate. Enemies are inherently symbolic of what is hated by a person or a group of people and a common enemy unites two or more people/groups of people based on their mutual hatred of what that enemy represents. This reminds me of when Burke discussed the disjointedness of the parliament. The parliament consisted of too many different people with too many different opinions and viewpoints. Hitler sought to reduce disjointedness in his followers by unifying them all based on one common enemy: the Jews. The Jews grew to symbolize everything Hitler and his followers disliked. I'm fascinated by your idea of Hitler as a symbol himself. I don't think it was ever his intention to actually become a symbol, but it's ironic considering how heavily he relied on symbols and symbolic action to create his following. ow Hitler serves as a symbol for fascism worldwide. I would be interested to see your definition of symbolic action unpacked further. Are you stating that symbolic action is the action caused by symbols or am I misinterpreting your words?
ReplyDelete-Kayla Goldstein