Description
This study is a record of my attempt to prove that rhetoric has a tangible, measurable and reviewable capacity to be directly influential of violence, including, and up to, the direct incitation of killing. For this study specifically, that rhetoric had to have been originally written and explicit in its attempt to incite violence. I drew on sources across history that had established and quantifiable outcomes. My sample, therefore, was a group of historical manifestos that exhorted violent acts. I examined their rhetorical content, data like year and author, and ultimate success in exhorting violent acts. My goal was to discover a method by which rules could be formed from rhetorical/casualty patterns shown and I hoped to formulate some of those rules in this study. My hope was that those rules would aid in highlighting threats to national security by examining other works of extremist written manifestos. I first created a system by which the documents could be assessed and classified according to their contents, through which a "Grade" was developed that could accurately denote their individual violent rhetorical elements and the sum of all those parts' effect on the entirety of the document's rhetorical character. Thus, the violence inherent rhetorically in each document was determined, which was then connected to actual violent events shown to have been influenced by them. These separate violent events I also compared and contrasted through the measure of the deaths they inflicted. Judging from that data, I attempted to specifically discern which levels of rhetoric produced more casualties, which types of rhetoric were the most successful in their expressed aims, but overall I hoped to locate and examine patterns between the elements of rhetoric and the elements of violence. My conclusions did reveal patterns that exist between rhetoric and violence, including: the inherent danger of standard, as compared to extreme, rhetoric, the influence of extreme rhetoric on increasingly more dangerous subsets of anti-social "Lone-Wolf" actors and extremists, and the danger posed by both ethnic and revolutionary violence in particular. Still, no patterns emerged that could highlight a complete and unchallengeable cause-and-effect relationship between, in this case, written manifestos and the violent actions they inspired. I concluded that a more robust method of assessing rhetoric that can account for more variables is necessary to accomplish my intended goal.
