Ethos in The Pro War Propaganda
In "After Total War can come Total Living", there is a lack of ethos in the propaganda because there was a serious distrust in the government during the time that this piece was released and used. This piece of propaganda was released in the 1950's as an attempt to justify and rationalize the second world war, and then similar posters were used again to rationalize the Vietnam war. Along with the war, the levels of distrust also followed the economic prosperity and stagnation of the economy. There were spikes of distrust in the mid 1960's and 1970's, both in times of recession in the economy (http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/04/80-percent-of-americans-dont-trust-the-government-heres-whm y/39148/). There is also a lack of ethos in this propaganda poster because it is exactly that, propaganda. As a characteristic of ethos, the author is supposed to understand the issue/the topic from all angles. Since this is a propaganda piece in favor of pro war, there is no appeal or understanding of the anti-war protests or side to the argument. This detracts from full aspect of ethos, and detracts from the argument validity because of that.
I'm not sure I understand why distrust of the government would equate to a lack of ethos. I suppose that if the audience doesn't trust the government, that the government couldn't use their own image to sell the idea of war. Government sponsored ads are fairly impersonal anyway; I'd say government has little to no intrinsic ethos regardless of whether or not people trust them.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure I understand why distrust of the government would equate to a lack of ethos. I suppose that if the audience doesn't trust the government, that the government couldn't use their own image to sell the idea of war. Government sponsored ads are fairly impersonal anyway; I'd say government has little to no intrinsic ethos regardless of whether or not people trust them.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the poster "After total war can come total living" does not have ethos. The statement is just an opinion of the artist which did not do any amount of research on its audience. If the audience are nonbelievers in the war then how does "total war" convince them that every thing will be okay at the end.
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