Die heutige Doppellektion kommt von einer Korrespondentin und einem Korrespondenten von Laura Rozens blog War and Piece. Zuerst kommt Karen Mickleson zu Wort, die auf dem Feld der politische Psychologie arbeitet und uns erklärt, warum es wichtig ist, nicht nur den Inhalt, sondern auch die genaue Intention von Aussagen zu prüfen:

First, I quote a bit of painful truth from Bob Herbert from the NYT 9/24/04:

The president said he is personally optimistic and he delivered an upbeat assessment of conditions in Iraq..... If you spend more than a little time immersed in the world according to Karl Rove, you'll find that words lose even the remotest connection to reality. They become nothing more than tools designed to achieve political ends. So it's not easy to decipher what the president believes about Iraq....This is scary....the world needs more from the president of the United States than the fool's gold of his empty utterances.

When Bush lies, he is not . . . addressing people who read news or who think or who look for sense in the world. He is speaking to those who want relief from thinking, from hard decisions, from complex judgments; he's speaking to those who want a likable authority to take care of the hard stuff. He's speaking to the "my president, right or wrong" folks. He's speaking to those whose need for reassurance trumps the need for truth.

In fact, when Bush lies, he's not speaking at all. He's repeating the "empty utterances" of Rove's carefully crafted message.

I pray Kerry's handlers help him understand that the debate will have little to do with content, and everything to do with crafting the impression of an alternate "dad" whose aggression and firmness can fulfill fantasies of retaliation and imaginary protective safety.

Merke: Worte können informieren, agitieren, kalmieren. Jetzt kommt Chris Lovell zu Wort, ein Student der griechischen Literatur, der uns zeigt, dass Thucydides bereits alles gesagt hat, was es über Politik zu sagen gibt und dass man ihm mehrmals pro Jahr lesen und immer bei sich haben sollte. [Ich persönlich empfehle ihn allen Leuten, die ich treffe, habe ich ihn selber aber noch immer nicht gelesen, obwohl Thucydides es inzwischen sogar bis in die Präambel der EU-Verfassung geschafft hat.]:

This reminded me of a passage from the Greek historian Thucydides, describing what happens to language during wartime:

To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as thoughtless aggression was now considered the courage of a loyal ally; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one's unmanly character; the ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defense. Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect. To plot sucessfully was a sign of intelligence, but it was still cleverer to see that a plot was hatching. If one attempted to provide against having to do either, one was disrupting the unity of the party and acting out of fear of the opposition. In short, it was equally praiseworthy to get one's blow in first against someone who was going to do wrong, and to denounce someone who had no intention of doing any wrong at all. Family relations were a weaker tie than party membership...

--Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 382

Some of this seems quite Rovian. The idea that "the ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action" sounds a lot like the flip-flop accusation levelled against Kerry. What's chilling is that Thucydides was describing political behavior during a civil war . . .