Demagoguery in English
...Is (British) English capable of sustaining demagoguery?
I mean highly-charged oratory, persuasive whipping up rhetoric. If Hitler had been English would we, under similar circumstances have been moved, charged up, fired by his inflammatory speeches, or should we have laughed? Is English too ironic a language to support Hitlerian styles, would his language simply have, have rung false in our ears? Is our language a function of our British cynicism, tolerance, resistance to false emotion, humour and so on, or do those qualities come extrinsically - extrinsically, from the language itself?
Stephen Fry
see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFD01r6ersw
I mean highly-charged oratory, persuasive whipping up rhetoric. If Hitler had been English would we, under similar circumstances have been moved, charged up, fired by his inflammatory speeches, or should we have laughed? Is English too ironic a language to support Hitlerian styles, would his language simply have, have rung false in our ears? Is our language a function of our British cynicism, tolerance, resistance to false emotion, humour and so on, or do those qualities come extrinsically - extrinsically, from the language itself?
Stephen Fry
see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFD01r6ersw