Rhetoric and Political Intervention — Churchill’s World War II Speeches in Context

Abstract

Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, the foundation-point of the historical discipline, placed speech-making at the heart of the narrative. This was in part a literary device, whereby the author made speakers ‘say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the occasion’, but the centrality of rhetoric to his vision of war is indisputable (Thucydides, 1972, p. 47). Following Plato, however, the Western tradition has often viewed rhetoric as a delusive art, inimical to reason and modern military history has little to say about the ways in which leaders have used oratory as a strategic tool. This neglects the critical part that leaders’ public pronouncements play in modern warfare, as a tool of global diplomacy, as a form of open-source intelligence, and as a means of mobilising ideology in the battle for moral and psychological advantage.