Praising the fallen heroes: Storytelling in US war presidential rhetoric, from Johnson to Obama

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 311-328
Author(s):  
Pere Franch
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
Presidential Rhetoric ◽  
Personal Stories ◽  
The People ◽  
Political Myth ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Political Differences

This paper analyses the use of storytelling by United States presidents in their war speeches, from the Vietnam War to the War on Terror. The study proposes a dual concept of storytelling in political communication: first, the global story that lies behind the presidential rhetoric aimed at justifying war; and second, the use of a specific technique consisting of inserting particular, personal stories into the speeches in order to communicate specific messages to the audience. The methodology used consists of an in-depth, interpretive, qualitative content analysis of a sample of presidential speeches. The findings confirm, firstly, that US presidents’ war storytelling aims to reinforce the political myth of America’s duty to preserve freedom, an argument that helps make the burden of the war understandable and bearable for the people, thereby reaffirming American collective identity. It is a reductionist narrative, as all wars are presented as having the same causes and goals. Secondly, the presidential use of personal stories is confirmed to have increased exponentially from the Vietnam War era. In most cases, these stories consist of a personification of some basic values attributed to the whole nation, by means of which these values are reinforced: heroism, patriotism, sense of duty, and, above all – again – the defence of freedom. The results also show that, in this aspect of their war rhetoric, the differences between George W. Bush and Barack Obama are at least blurred, despite their ideological and political differences.

About Ghost Stories: The Vietnam War and “Rememoration”

PMLA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (5) ◽  
pp. 1700-1702
Author(s):  
Yen Le Espiritu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sociological Imagination ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Ghost Stories ◽  
The People ◽  
The Vietnam War

In her book Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination, avery gordon writes that “to study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it”—the experiential realities of social and political life that have been systematically hidden or erased. To confront the ghostly aspects of social life is to tell ghost stories: to pay attention to what modern history has rendered ghostly and to write into being the seething presence of the things that appear to be not there (Gordon 7–8). By most accounts, Vietnam was the site of one of the most brutal and destructive of the wars between Western imperial powers and the people of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Yet public discussions and commemorations of the Vietnam War in the United States often skip over this devastating history, thereby ignoring the war's costs borne by the Vietnamese—the lifelong costs that turn the 1975 “fall of Saigon” and the exodus from Vietnam into “the endings that are not over” (Gordon 195). Without creating an opening for a Vietnamese perspective of the war, these public deliberations refuse to remember Vietnam as a historical site, Vietnamese people as genuine subjects, and the Vietnam War as having any kind of integrity of its own (Desser).

Making Sense of War: An Autobiographical Account of a Vietnam War Correspondent

1989 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 327-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bob M. Gassaway
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Organizational Factors ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The People ◽  
War Correspondents ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Retrospective Examination

This article presents and discusses the author's experiences as an Associated Press reporter covering the Vietnam War in the 1960s. The author presents vignettes of some of the people and events that made the greatest impressions on him, along with brief analyses of these stories. Following this he provides a retrospective examination of broader issues related to news coverage, including the emotional makeup of war correspondents, the role of journalists in creating news, and some organizational factors that influence the way news is reported.

Multinationals and Health: Reflections on the Seveso Catastrophe

1978 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 619-632 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan-Ramon Laporte
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Multinational Corporations ◽  
Industrial Process ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
The People ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Trichlorophenoxyacetic Acid

On July 10, 1976, a cloud of vaporized products containing dioxin escaped from a deposit of a plant of the Icmesa firm in the northern suburbs of Milan. The fallout was deposited on a vast zone in the municipalities of Desio, Seveso, Meda, and Cesano. Dioxin was not the desired product of the industrial process, but rather an impurity which generally accompanies trichlorophenol, and, to a smaller extent, the products synthesized from trichlorophenol. Among these there are hexachlorophene and the herbicide 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid, which was used as a defoliant in the Vietnam War. After describing toxicological properties of dioxin, this paper examines the role of multinational corporations and of capitalist governments in exploiting not only the people of underdeveloped lands, but also workers of developed countries, transforming into capital not only the increased value of man, but also the conditions, harmfulness, and risks of work.

scholarly journals The Flight

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikaela Colville
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Refugee Children ◽  
Western World ◽  
Documentary Films ◽  
Final Project ◽  
Relevant Today ◽  
The People ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Time Of Operation

This dissertation examines the Canadian operated flight that evacuated a group of Vietnamese children from Saigon during the final days of the Vietnam War (April, 1975) in what became known as “Operation Babylift”. These children were flown from Saigon to Hong Kong, and then eventually to Toronto, Canada. Adopted by local families many of these children came with no records. These children eventually reconnected and had a reunion 30 years later. Operation Babylift and the people who were affected are the main focus of my final Masters Research Project (MRP) which was formulated into a 20-minute documentary film. The focus for the film was to explore the lives of three of the orphans, shed some light on the significance of the flights, and also discus the lack of proper documentation practices at the time. Controversy surrounded Operation Babylift and its motivations and continues to this day. I first began to explore and study this subject in September of 2015 after meeting with one of the orphans who was flown to Canada as part of the Canadian efforts in the Operation Babylift project. Trent Kilner and his story fascinated me. The Vietnam war was never a topic of study in school nor was I aware how orphans were flown to Canada out of Vietnam in the last days of the war. It was Trent’s story that stimulated the concept to create a documentary to share and educate others on this subject. The exploration of how our society and culture address foreign refugees and the process of adopting refugee children is something that is still a topic of conversation and relevant today. During the time of Operation Babylift there was much controversy about how the Western world was handling these children. Some people saw Operation Babylift as child-napping, while others saw it as a rescue mission. The purpose of this research paper is to explore the historical, political, social and controversial events that surrounded the orphan flights, drawing on scholarly literature, newspaper/media articles, archival footage, as well as other documentary films. I will show how this research impacted the production of the documentary and offer an analysis of the final project situating it within the wider realm of contemporary documentary film.

scholarly journals “Kung Flu”—The Dynamics of Fear, Popular Culture, and Authenticity in the Anatomy of Populist Communication

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Kurilla
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
News Media ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
The People ◽  
Time Period ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Empirical Material

The article presents results of a study on the dynamics between Donald Trump’s use of terms that relate COVID-19 to China and news media publications concerning this use. Qualitative content analysis with elements of discourse analysis was conducted to 1) describe the case as a type of populist discourse on COVID-19, and 2) illustrate the following hypotheses with the help of empirical material: 1) News media and the dynamics of political communication based on the difference of friend and enemy help legitimizing populist claims and directing public attention toward them while feeding into a narrative of a diffuse category of threats that creates objects of angst and thereby enhances social cohesion. 2) With resources derived from popular culture, populists exploit the culture of political correctness, which is facilitated through the ascription of authenticity. The hypotheses emerged in the course of organizing and preliminarily examining the data collected for an ongoing broader study on populist communication and its repercussions in different public spheres in view of the following assumptions: 1) Political communication is guided by the distinction of friend and enemy. 2) In populist communication, this distinction appears as the difference of ‘the people’ and allegedly corrupt elites, including news media. 3) Angst enhances social cohesion among the audiences of populist speakers directly or mediated by fear. 4) Populist communication is more likely to produce a type of fear that populists benefit from when it depicts the elite as a diffuse category composed of various interlinked enemies. Trump’s contextualized use of the following terms in the time period between March 13 and September 15, 2020, was examined: China flu, China plague, China virus, Chinese plague, Chinese flu, Chinese virus, Wuhan virus, and Kung flu. 38 speeches from Trump’s election campaign or rallies, 28 talks at presidential events or meetings, 47 interviews, 37 press conferences, 35 tweets and seven re-tweets as well as selected news media responses were subjected to analysis. The case has been successfully described as a type of populist discourse on COVID-19 and both hypotheses have been illustrated with empirical material.

scholarly journals The Flight

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikaela Colville
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Refugee Children ◽  
Western World ◽  
Documentary Films ◽  
Final Project ◽  
Relevant Today ◽  
The People ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
Time Of Operation

This dissertation examines the Canadian operated flight that evacuated a group of Vietnamese children from Saigon during the final days of the Vietnam War (April, 1975) in what became known as “Operation Babylift”. These children were flown from Saigon to Hong Kong, and then eventually to Toronto, Canada. Adopted by local families many of these children came with no records. These children eventually reconnected and had a reunion 30 years later. Operation Babylift and the people who were affected are the main focus of my final Masters Research Project (MRP) which was formulated into a 20-minute documentary film. The focus for the film was to explore the lives of three of the orphans, shed some light on the significance of the flights, and also discus the lack of proper documentation practices at the time. Controversy surrounded Operation Babylift and its motivations and continues to this day. I first began to explore and study this subject in September of 2015 after meeting with one of the orphans who was flown to Canada as part of the Canadian efforts in the Operation Babylift project. Trent Kilner and his story fascinated me. The Vietnam war was never a topic of study in school nor was I aware how orphans were flown to Canada out of Vietnam in the last days of the war. It was Trent’s story that stimulated the concept to create a documentary to share and educate others on this subject. The exploration of how our society and culture address foreign refugees and the process of adopting refugee children is something that is still a topic of conversation and relevant today. During the time of Operation Babylift there was much controversy about how the Western world was handling these children. Some people saw Operation Babylift as child-napping, while others saw it as a rescue mission. The purpose of this research paper is to explore the historical, political, social and controversial events that surrounded the orphan flights, drawing on scholarly literature, newspaper/media articles, archival footage, as well as other documentary films. I will show how this research impacted the production of the documentary and offer an analysis of the final project situating it within the wider realm of contemporary documentary film.

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