Sex Sells - Even Hitler Knew That

In class on Tuesday, we grappled with the idea of “what can language do? (other than signify)”. After analyzing Mikhail Bakhtin’s “Discourse in the Novel”, I know many things that language can do. It can “define a time period” (Bakhtin 291), “provide diversity in the novel” (Bakhtin 315), and “permit authorial intention” (Bakhtin 314). While what language can do is extremely important – and I will unpack what it can do for the purpose of understanding my central idea – after I read Kenneth Burke’s “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle”, I am more interested not in what language can do, but through what means or how language pulls those feats off.

Burke’s “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle” is a great exemplification of how literary criticism can be used in a political context, in this case, Hitler’s persuasion to the Aryan race that the Jews were the scum of the earth. Hitler was more than just a terrifying great leader, but he was a rhetorician of sorts, because he mastered so many rhetorical skills. He understood that it was not just content, but also style that was crucial when persuading and attempting to connect with an audience. 

Hitler had that in common with Mikhail Bakhtin. According to Charles Schuster, Bakhtin thought that a “more enlightened conception of style” that is “more sensitive to tone” is the way to go. This offers “a compelling argument for the return of aesthetics as a central concern in rhetoric and composition” (595). Bakhtin, aside from the rhetorical triangle, was concerned with the aesthetics in writing: tone, style, and verbal phrasing. However, words themselves had to be tampered with. “The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes ‘one’s own’ only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting to it his own semantic and expressive intention” (Schuster 596). This is Bakhtin’s central idea of “dialogic” in play, which is the interactive nature of language itself. Thus, individuals have to add their own expressive intentions towards the words and language to being to develop their own stylistic profiles. Hitler and Bakhtin were also on the same page when it came to style. “Style has generally been represented as a quality separable from language itself (Schuster 597), but style is language, so to create a style is to create a language for oneself (according to Bakhtin). And so that’s exactly what Hitler did.

I located two instances, or ways how Hitler chooses to connect and persuade with his audience: sexuality and the common enemy.

While we may all have different personality traits – some kinder and others sassier – if you want a way to unite people together, find a common enemy between them. If you are trying to start a movement, like Hitler was, “an important ingredient of unity…was the symbol of a common enemy…” (Burke 193). Burke continued on to say, “Men who can unite on nothing else can unite on the basis of a foe shared by all” (193). He could not be more correct. I can think of so many instances that relate to my generation where this rings true. Girls in college, for example: She may be the nicest person in the world and has never done anything personally wrong to you, but if your best friends don’t like her, there’s a good chance you’ll be rallying against her as well (sadly). Or, like this speech given by Jimbo Fisher as a pregame speech before the game against Georgia Tech in the ACC Championship game this past season. The players might have a love for football, they might have similar skill levels, etc., but instead of aiming for a common goal, there is nothing that unites the players more than a common enemy, in this case, Georgia Tech (see the pregame speech below).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TmiMiCUbzI

Another way how Hitler utilizes language is through sexuality. What does our world love more than money and power? Sex. He incorporates sexuality into his arguments because, well, sex sells, and we all know that. He portrays the Jewish men as dirty old men, waiting to defile a good and pure, Aryan/German girl (which is entirely untrue, obviously). Burke notes, “the rival male, the villainous Jew, would on the contrary ‘seduce’ them. If he succeeds, he poisons their blood by intermingling with them” (195). Sexuality is the most emotive and persuasional agent for so many things – marketing/advertising, politics, journalism, you name it. Even when you don’t notice it, it’s there subliminally. Don’t believe me? Check out this Huffington Post article that shows numerous examples of how and why sex sells (in the link below).

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/madeline-wahl/why-its-unfortunate-that-sex-sells_b_5433251.html

The strength of Hitler’s rhetoric lies in his “unification devices” – inborn dignity, projection device, symbolic rebirth, and commercial use (202) – and I see sexuality and the common enemy as just subcategories of those listed. Hitler posed the idea that “The Aryan is ‘constructive’; the Jew is ‘destructive’; and the Aryan, to continue his construction, must destroy the Jewish destruction” (Burke 204). He understood the power behind rhetoric that contained not only great content, but great stylistic accompaniment as well. I guess we haven’t grown that much as a people, because even in the 1920s, Hitler knew that sex sells.