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Greece in Crisis: Combining critical discourse and corpus linguistics perspectives
Edited by Ourania Hatzidaki and Dionysis Goutsos
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 70] 2017
► pp. 151–190

Chapter 5
The “theory of the two extremes”

A rhetorical topography for self- and other-identification across the Greek political spectrum

This chapter reports on a large-scale quantitative and qualitative investigation of the use of the notion of “extremism” in the public discourse of significant political actors during the Greek crisis. It focuses on its employment as a rhetorical tool for the stigmatization of political opponents, specifically for the delegitimation, by the government representatives at the time (New Democracy and PASOK), of potentially threatening political/electoral rivals (principally SYRIZA and the Left, and secondarily Golden Dawn). We also examine the reaction of the stigmatized, by analysing the discourse of the parliamentary opposition, extra-parliamentary web fora and social-revolutionary terrorists, where several strategies of response are identified. We observe that respondents universally prefer lower-key rhetorical techniques, probably in an effort to disconfirm the politically costly extremism reproach.

Keywords: extremism, lexicophraseology, organizational identity, political identity, political polarization, recontextualization, social actors
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework and methodology
    • 2.1The notion of extreme/extremism as a political stigma
    • 2.2Collective political identity as organizational identity
  • 3.The data
  • 4.Publicly debating the notion of extremism: A critical discourse analysis
    • 4.1Initial observations
    • 4.2The stigmatizers
      • 4.2.1New Democracy as a militant force of prudence against the extremist agents of instability and social upheaval
      • 4.2.2PASOK as anti-violence agent and critic of reluctant denouncers of violence
    • 4.3The stigmatized
      • 4.3.1Six strategies of response to the stigma of extremism
      • 4.3.2SYRIZA as agent of democracy and critic of calumniating and extreme Right-leaning rulers
      • 4.3.3The Communist Party (KKE) as anti-fascist vanguard and critic of the systemically-driven “left-right extremism” equation
      • 4.3.4The Athens Indymedia collectivity as people’s advocate and as justified “extreme” in opposition to the genuinely extremist establishment
      • 4.3.5Golden Dawn as virtuous, non-partisan nationalist opposite the anti-Greek rulers and leftist para-states
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 26 July 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.70.05our
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