In this post I'll be analyzing the rhetorical situation of the American Journal of International Law, but to keep things specific I've selected a single article from the Journal- "Genocide as a Crime Under International Law".
1. The author of this article is Raphael Lemkin, frequent contributor to the scholarly journal. The author stays objective, giving a detailed summary of Germany's historic genocide, and why the governments at that time had issues establishing genocide as done to a people by it's government as a criminal act.
2. It can be argued that the intended audience is really anyone who is interested. This could be an excellent source for a paper, as it is largely summation of facts depicting a legal case. The audience is really anyone who is interested in the making of this law and the rights of minorities in any country.
3. The context surrounding this particular issue of lawmaking was obviously Hitler's holocaust, and how lawmakers could prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again. It shows that people were frantic as to be sure that this never would be a problem in any other country, but keeps the writing objective as this was a very long time in the past and not necessarily a sore spot for anyone recently.
4. The message here is mainly to put government initiated genocide in a negative light (obviously, because it is a negative thing) and to depict the facts of what happened in Germany and how, after the fact, this type of crime initiated by the very people who makes law for any given country, could become illegal. I decided this because it's very easy to tell, because as I said earlier, the article is very objective.
5. I think the purpose of this article in particular is to be a good source for anyone who may need it (students, teachers, etc) seeing as this is not really a trigger event any longer. It happened so long ago but is still a very famous event in history that everyone should learn or otherwise be doomed to repeat it.
No comments:
Post a Comment