From the Daily Signal, a new website, comes an article called 25 Years After Fall of Berlin Wall, a pretty self explanatory title. What interested me in this article was twofold. First was the title itself. The Berlin Wall is something I have very, very little background knowledge of and I had been seeing it in pictures all of today, and I was curious. Also, it surprised me that only 25 years had passed since the fall of the wall, meaning that it fell in 1989, a pretty progressive time, but only a couple years before I was born. The second thing that interested me was that the article was written by Ted Cruz, a politician. I was curious to see if there was any political bias on the article, or if Cruz was genuinely writing a non-biased article.
Cruz uses many literary devices, at the forefront, pathos. This pathos is very potent, because not only does it target people who were alive and probably saw this stuff in the newspapers in the morning, but also because it uses pictures to do so. And then the political bias starts to kick in, a bias that most American politicans and people hold today, the bias against communism. Cruz uses strong vocabulary to emphasize how horrible communism is, saying, "Untold numbers slaved away in work camps under horrific conditions." He then also uses very credible sources, citing a survivor of the Soviet gulag. All this culminates to the point where he is reveling in the American inherent goodness, citing America the beautiful. It was interesting to see how Cruz used rhetoric to shape the thoughts of readers, so hey, maybe he went through APELC too.
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