Rhetorical Analysis

Nicole Marsh          Marsh
Mr. Brown
English 1B
22 March 2013

Rhetorical Analysis for “Believe Me, It’s Torture”
In the article, “Believe Me, It’s Torture” by Christopher Hitchens, which was published in Vanity Fair in October 2011, he discusses his view of waterboarding and how it should be defined as torture. Hitchens states that “…if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.” Christopher Hitchens graduated from Oxford in 1970 and became a British-American author, literary critic, and journalist. He was known for his anti-theism and atheism and was a believer in the Enlightenment values of secularism, humanism, and reason. Throughout his article Hitchens effectively uses the strategies of ethos, pathos, and logos to help make his argument stronger and persuade his audience.
In this article, Hitchens argues whether or not waterboarding is a form of torture and gives many reasons as to why it should be considered as torture. His piece starts out by stating that people are being trained to resist but not to inflict torture. He goes on to illustrate his setting leading up to his “capture” and his experiment with waterboarding, describing the peacefulness of the sunny day before he begins his waterboarding journey. He then goes into great detail of what it feels like to be water boarded through his own personal experience. He states that it doesn’t stimulate drowning and that you are in fact drowning. Throughout his piece, he is implicitly stating that waterboarding is a form of
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torture and he is successful at doing so by vividly going into detail about his own experience with waterboarding.
In this piece, Hitchens uses the strategy of ethos. Ethos focuses attention on the writers’ character as it is projected in the message. With this strategy, the writer creates a trustworthy persona. Hitchens uses this approach by having a lot of knowledge on the background of his topic and by actually having a personal experience with waterboarding. By sharing his participation with waterboarding, he is able to get a good
look on what is actually feels like and is therefore better able to persuade his audience that it is, in fact, a form of torture. Hitchens is able to give us an inside look on what waterboarding feels like, which can be successful in persuading his audience even more than just giving examples from other people would. Having a lot of knowledge on the issue and having a firsthand experience with waterboarding, it allows his readers to trust him and believe him about the argument he is attempting to get across.
Another strategy portrayed in “Believe Me, It’s Torture,” is pathos. The write uses pathos to engage the reader on an emotional and or imaginative level. He effectively does this by using descriptive language to give his reader a vivid image of what waterboarding is like. “The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face,” is a perfect example of how Hitchens uses pathos in his writing. It gives the reader a more clear perspective on how it feels to be tortured in such a way. It also connects the reader with the speaker in a way that they feel as if they are the ones who are being water boarded. His audience can imagine how terrible a feeling it must be to have an object being
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clamped over your face, restricting your breathing to almost none. The use of pathos makes it seem more real and can be very useful in persuading an audience.
Hitchens also uses the strategy of logos to make his argument more clear. Logos uses reasons and evidence to support a claim. This strategy also includes unspoken assumptions. Although Christopher Hitchens does not directly say that waterboarding is torture, the reader can conclude that Hitchens truly does believe that waterboarding is a form of torture. He gives many reasons as to how waterboarding should be defined as a method of torture. For example, Hitchens says, “…it stimulates the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning- or rather being drowned…” and to most people, being drowned and not having the ability to breath properly would be considered torture.
The final strategy that is used in his piece is kairos, which is the appeal to timeliness or the appropriateness for the occasion. “Believe Me, It’s Torture” was published in October of 2011. This was a good time for this article to come out because in this century, many people may not be too aware that waterboarding is still taking place, especially at this time. Hitchens article helps to educate people about this form of torture and how it is still going on in this day and age.
In conclusion, Hitchens uses a variety of different strategies of ethos, pathos, logos, and even kairos to help get his argument across. There is no better way to try and persuade his audience that waterboarding is a form of torture than to have a firsthand experience with it. He was successful in persuading his readers to agree that it is torture. After reading his article it opened up my eyes on the subject and made me change my
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perspective on waterboarding and see that it really is a form of torture and not just a means to extract information, sometimes even junk information.