Dictatorial Discourse

Luncaşu Diana
“Dictatorial”
“Words can create an attitude. If a person says something loud enough and often
enough, he creates a climate. And under that climate all sorts of things can happen”
Rabbi Eliahu Ellis, Rabbi Shmuel Slinsky,
The War against Jews

 Tending to dictate; domineering; expecting

unquestioning obedience

 Of, relating to, or characteristic of a dictator or

dictatorship; autocratic.

 Synonyms: authoritarian, dogmatic, doctrinaire

Where does Dictatorial Discourse
stand ?
What does it imply?
 Dahl: Obligation (in behavioral terms)
 A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do
something that B wouldn’t otherwise do – as in George
Orwell’s novel 1984

 Bachrach and Baratz: Manipulation of the mind

 Hitler’s Ideology in his war against the Jews

 Lukes: Controlling, Shapping and Influencing

 What Himler succeded to do with the SS troupes in WWII
 Der Stürmer – a well-known prapagandistic newspaper in
which caricatures and short stories and all kinds of
information were exclusively published to keep alive the
hatred against Jewish people
Key Word - Manipulation
 Implies social power abuse, cognitive mind
control, discursive interaction

 The manipulator exercises control over people

against their will or against their best interests
but without them knowing

 Abuse of power – domination

 Is being exercised through text, talk and visual

messsages.
Structure
 Overall interaction strategies
 Positive self-presentation
 Negative other-presentation

 Macro speech act

 Our “good” acts
 Their “bad” acts (accusation, defense)

 Semantic macrostructures
 Topic selection: (de)emphasize negative/positive topics about
US/THEM

 Local speech acts implementing and sustaining the

global ones (statements that prove accusations)

 Lexicon
 Positive words for US
 Negative words for THEM
Examples:

 Julius Streiche: The Toadstool – the Poisonous

Mushroom

 George Orwell – Nineteen eighty-four

 Heinrich Himmler’s Speech to the SS troupes

 Adolf Hitler’s Speeches to the German Volk

The Poisonous Mushroom
The mother praises her boy for his intelligence,
and goes on to explain the different kinds of
"poisonous" Jews: the Jewish pedlar, the
Jewish cattle-dealer, the Kosher butcher, the
Jewish doctor, the baptised Jew, and so on.

"However they disguise themselves, or however

friendly they try to be, affirming a thousand
times their good intentions to us, one must
not believe them. Jews they are and Jews
they remain. For our Volk they are poison."

"Like the poisonous mushroom!" says Franz.

"Yes, my child! Just as a single poisonous

mushroom can kill a whole family, so a
solitary Jew can destroy a whole
village, a whole city, even an entire
Volk."
 Joseph Goebbels’s speech (Chancellor of
Germany) in The Nurenberg Trials
 “The Nazi Ideology
perverted Darwin’s theory
of natural selection, to
claim that Northern-
European Arian Man was
superior, but locked in a  “Our German peasant is
biological struggle for the last pure survival
survival against lesser before the industrial
races (the Asiatic, the revolution; before the
blacks, the gypsies and Jews have eaten us.”
the Jews). These anti-
races are the bacteria
decomposing the bodies
of the host nations in
which they lived.”
Nineteen eighty-four George
Orwell

 “Big Brother is watching you!”

 Headlines and titles also function as the conventional
text category for the expression of semantic
macrostructures or topics, which organize local
semantic structures.
 Beyond manipulation it leads to domination, to
restriction and abuse of power

 “War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery;

Ignorance is Strength”
 Another important characteristic of the dictatorial
discourse is the mentioning of some slogans.
 Propaganda Papers - mind
manipulation
Title: The Economy and Jewry
This issue accuses Jews of every manner of
economic misdeed. The cartoon is titled "Demon
Money." A Jewish monster, engraved with the
Star of David and the symbols for the American
dollar and British pound has its claws on the
planet.

Illustration from an antisemitic

children's book,in which a Jewish
man is depicted as a child molester
attempting to lure German children
with candy
This is the cover to the most
infamous issue of Der Stürmer,
the 1934 issue accusing Jews of
practicing ritual murder to secure
the blood of Christians to use in
Jewish religious rituals. The
headline reads: Jewish Murder
Plan against Gentile Humanity
Revealed. The issue actually got
banned by the Nazis after it had
been out for a while, not because
of anti-Semitic content, but
because it compared alleged
Jewish ritual murder with the
Christian sacrament of
communion.
"The worm"

 Caption: "Where
something is rotten, the
Jew is the cause."

 Explanation: The names

in the background are
those of Jews involved in
major financial scandals.
The apple is named "the
German economy." The
worm is named "Jewish
scandals." (November
1931)