My essay "All extremist political movements need a devil"
The red Chinese two minute advertisement for the film "My War", which is about the Korean War, reminded me of Kenneth Burke's analysis of the the projection device in political rhetoric: "If a movement must have its Rome, it must also have its devil. For as Russell pointed out years ago, an important ingredient of unity in the Middle Ages (....) was the symbol of a common enemy, the Prince of Evil himself... Hitler himself states the case very succinctly: As a whole, and at all times, 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. ... As everyone knows, this policy was exemplified in his selection of an "international" devil, the "international Jew" (the Prince was international, universal, "Catholic")" (Kenneth Burke: The Philosophy of Literary Form, The Rhetoric of Hitler's "Battle", P. 193-194).
The CCP has chosen nationalism as the central motive and "invaders and separatists" as its devils. The devil occurs in all current conflicts about
Diaoyu Island, the South China Sea, Hong Kong and Tibet. And the film " My War" presents the old and new devil, the USA. Here again Hitler as quoted by Kenneth Burke: "The more uniformly the fighting will of a people is put into action, the greater will be the magnetic force of the movement and the more powerful the impetus of the blow (Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, The Rhetoric of Hitler's "Battle", P. 193).
The church in the Middle Ages, the Nazis and the CCP, they all take advantage of projecting all evils into a scapegoat.
Xi Lan Zhang-Wilhelm
张威廉, 14.09.2016
