Publications

Publication details [#57273]

Forchtner, Bernhard. 2013. Legitimizing the Iraq War through the genre of political speeches. Rhetorics of judge-penitence in the narrative reconstruction of Denmark’s cooperation with Nazism. In Cap, Piotr and Urszula Okulska, eds. Analyzing Genres in Political Communication. Theory and practice. (Discourse approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 50). John Benjamins. pp. 239–265.
Publication type
Article in book
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins

Annotation

In Albert Camus’ novel The Fall, the main character Jean-Baptiste Clamance introduces himself as a judge-penitent, following the motto “[t]he more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you”. This chapter operationalizes such behavior in order to understand the strategy of persuasion used by Denmark’s then Prime-Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen when he legitimized the Iraq-invasion in 2003. In contrast to self-righteous myths, Rasmussen did so by self-critically addressing the policy of Danish collaboration with Nazi-Germany during World War Two. He thereby became able to claim, like Clamance, to have learnt the lessons from history, thus occupying the moral high ground from which he discursively constructed the opponents of the invasion as being morally inferior.