Rhetorical Tricks: It's Always About America

Recent events have prompted me to go back and republish some pieces I wrote several years ago that relate to our current crisis.  This is from five years ago when I noticed President Obama using a rhetorical trick that, until then, I'd only seen employed in the academic world and which turns out to be a precursor to today's Woke speech.  It's no accident - at Harvard Law School Obama was friends with Professor Derrick Bell, one of the founders of Critical Race Theory, the plague now spreading hate and divisiveness in today's America.

The trick is designed to disable the reasoning ability of those not familiar with history or the world outside of the United States.  It is designed to make the listener dumber.  It's simple really - when speaking of America’s ills, ignore the broader global context, so the audience remains focused on America’s sins. but when confronted with the ills of another country, always be sure to refer to what you characterize as similar ills in America. That way, no matter what, the focus remains America’s ills.

Here are the two examples that caught my eye back in 2015 (with some slight edits).

Earlier this week the New York Times reported that President Obama made the following remarks during what it refers to as comedian Mark Maron’s “WTF” podcast:

The legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives, you know, that casts a long shadow, and that’s still part of our DNA that’s passed on.

Reading the remainder of the Times article reveals no reference by the President to the rest of the world. Since my purpose is not to debate the accuracy of the President’s assertion (I agree the U.S. has a continuing legacy from slavery, but disagree with much of his analysis) but to discuss context, it would seem that in fairness, as well as enhancing our understanding, he should be mentioning the legacy of slavery that all of us carry around the world - it is distinctly not unique to America.

President Obama's purposeful distortion is just another form of American Exceptionalism - America as uniquely evil.

What is unique to American and England was that the impetus for ending racial slavery came from Anglo-Saxon Christians beginning in the late 18th century, not from anywhere else in the world.

Every country in the Western Hemisphere imported African slaves (imports into the colonies that became the U.S. and into the U.S. until Congress banned the import of slaves in 1808 are less than 4% of the total), Spain, Portugal, France and Britain prospered from the slave trade, the Arab world imported millions of African slaves, African rulers sold fellow Africans for that purpose, and slavery outside of the African context existed in most societies for thousands of years.  For a more nuanced and sophisticated view we recommend reading The Long, Lingering Shadow: Slavery, Race, and Law In The American Hemisphere by Robert J Cottrol (2013), a fascinating comparative study and here's a recent speech by someone else who's spoken more thoughtfully about the subject.  In other words, America does have problems in this area, but they are problems we share with much of the global community.  As Cottrol points out, in some instances we've dealt with them more successfully than others, in some respects not, but it would seem that, in the President's phrase it's "still part of" much of the world's DNA.

Moreover the reference to DNA constitutes a modern day version of a blood libel by the President (no surprise, since Critical Race Theory is based on a blood libel), marking those who have played no role in slavery or its legacy but remain tainted because of their birth.

Now, let’s look at the flip side; the interview the President gave last month to Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic on the nuclear deal with Iran. Goldberg, who is very sympathetic to the President, presses him on the Iranian regime’s anti-semitism because to Goldberg it indicates they are irrational in their decision making. To expand on Goldberg's point - he is saying that when a regime's leaders are fixated not just on the destruction of the State of Israel, but go around leading chants of "Death to the Jews!"; alternatively deny the Holocaust, then turn around and say Hitler gave the Jews what they deserved; and seriously believe in a global Jewish conspiracy to rule the world, they tend not to confine their irrational thought processes to that one issue; more importantly it may mean they just don't think using the same calculus about risk that we do.

The President airily rejects this, saying “Well the fact that you are anti-Semitic, or racist, doesn’t preclude you from being interested in survival” and then goes on to point out that, after all:

"there were deep strains of anti-Semitism in this country"

In that remark the President equates the Iranian regime, with its bizarre core beliefs about Jews, with his own country which provided a refuge for more than 2 million Russian Jews fleeing Czarist oppression, including  my paternal grandparents and maternal great-grandparents (my grandfather immediately after arriving enlisting in the U.S. Army and serving in the Philippines), and whose first President wrote the magnificent letter to the Jewish congregation of Newport, Rhode Island. 
A moment's thought reveals the inane nature of the President's remark.

It is very cleverly done. As with all these types of statements there is an element of truth. There was, and still is, some anti-semitism in America but to equate it with Iran you have to be incapable of making the type of distinctions that thoughtful individuals who know history and are capable of self-reflection do all the time, or at least used to be able to make.  It appears that the purpose of the 21st century educational system is to leave students incapable of making the distinctions that were once the mark of an educated person.  Unfortunately, it seems to be a successful strategy.

What the technique does is turn the argument inward, always forcing examination of America and, for those who object, bogging them down in time-consuming arguments about why those employing the trick are wrong and diverting them from discussing the core proposition.

When you see this rhetorical trick deployed by the Woke, don't fall for it.