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Rhetorical Analysis Of Sebastian Junger's ' The Cold Enemy '

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The ultimate purpose in creating an opinionated article is to assert one’s idea as incontrovertibly true. In the case of one Washington Post article focused on a video that emerged appearing to show four U.S. Marines urinating on several dead Taliban fighters. Author, Sebastian Junger makes an effort to present the faults in the public’s reaction to the video. He composed such article dubbed “We’re all guilty of dehumanizing the enemy” on January 13th, 2012, in which he employs strategic rhetoric to emphasize the effectiveness of his argument. Junger questions the ironic nature of the public’s outrage; the American viewers prosecute troops for desecrating the enemy while maintaining that it is okay to torture the living. This notion is so wrong, yet the American public can’t seem to realize it. Through his use of rhetorical appeals, being ethos, logos, and pathos, Sebastian Junger energetically analyzes the controversy in the topic of dehumanizing the enemy. Sebastian Junger directs his argument at the readers of The Washington Post, being mainly liberals, the general American public, and specifically those offended by the video. Additionally, Junger asserts his credibility through first-hand accounts. He writes that he had spent a year on and off with a platoon of U.S. soldiers in the Korengal Valley of eastern Afghanistan. This translates into personal experience from which he can state his observations. He’s been in their shoes, therefore, experiencing the fighting,

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