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Bush, Blair and Hitler? A review of comparative self‐presentation
Author(s) -
O'Shaughnessy Nicholas Jackson
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
journal of public affairs
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.221
H-Index - 20
eISSN - 1479-1854
pISSN - 1472-3891
DOI - 10.1002/pa.302
Subject(s) - rebuttal , politics , nazism , sociology , law , parallel universe , rhetorical question , construct (python library) , ethos , media studies , aesthetics , philosophy , political science , literature , art , artificial intelligence , computer science , programming language
This article (while emphatic in stressing the absence of any political or ethical connection between two recent governments, those of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, and one historic one, the genocidal empire of Adolf Hitler), argues that the Nazi regime did in fact anticipate many communications methods pursued subsequently. The Nazis sponsored a communications revolution. The conscious production of political imagery and tableaux, government via symbolic strategies, the rhetoricizing of civic culture and the centrality of the rhetorical vision, all these have become part of our political truth as well as the Nazis'. Such a reality, then as now, is underpinned by spin, rapid rebuttal, duplicity and the construction of a nirvana of statistics and benevolent data. The ultimate fate of all these regimes was bound up with an ethos of government that placed symbolism centre‐ stage; a parallel universe of imagery and symbolism is no basis on which to construct an edifice of permanence. The methodologies of these regimes do sustain comparison, the ends, of course, do not. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.