Pathos

We're watching a movie, and the main character is going through a seriously difficult life event of some kind. The background music is slow and sad, the main character and all of his or her friends are crying, and then it happens: we feel our own chin begin to wobble.

What the what? We don't know these people, and it's just a movie. We can't be crying about it, right? Is someone cutting onions in here?

Nope, no onions. We've just been had by the producers of this fantabulous rom-com. They played to our emotions and it worked: they wanted us sad and now we're hunting down the tissues.

We've been pathosed.

In wartime political speeches, the pathos approach is pretty typical. Maybe the phrase "winning hearts and minds" rings a bell? That's what we're talking about here. This speech was designed to persuade the hearts and minds of its audience that the West is the best and freedom is the answer to all of the problems facing the East.

How do we know this? Well, we just have to take a look at the words Reagan uses to describe the West and contrast them with the words he uses to describe the East. He uses a three-pronged strategy: he talks about how awesome the West is, he expresses solidarity with West Berlin and West Germany, and he talks about how awful the Eastern world is. All of these are accomplished with emotional appeals, and we can see them throughout the speech.

Let's take a gander at a few examples.

The West is Where it's at

Reagan tells us that "in the West today, we see a free world that has achieved a level of prosperity and well-being unprecedented in all human history" (46). What does this tell us? According to the Gipper, it tells us that:

[…] there stands before the entire world one great and inescapable truth: Freedom leads to prosperity. Freedom replaces the ancient hatreds among the nations with comity and peace. Freedom is the victor. (49-51)

So Reagan's words of the West are things like prosperity, well-being, freedom, comity, peace, and victory. Those all sound like a pretty good deal, right?

Now let's contrast this with how he talks about the Soviet Union and the rest of the Eastern world.

Look to the East? No, Don't.

We can get a really good sense of Reagan's feelings about the East with this sentence:

In the Communist world, we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards of health, even want of the most basic kind—too little food. (47)

Whoa, that sounds way less awesome than prosperity, well-being, freedom, and all that other stuff.

And not only that, the Eastern totalitarian regimes do "such violence to the spirit, thwarting the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship" (119).

Hmm, "violence to the spirit" doesn't sound good.

See what he's done here? He's created a vision of two societies in stark contrast to one another. In the West: freedom, riches, health, and peace. In the East: sickness, starvation, poverty, and violence to the spirit.

Well, when he puts it that way, it's a no-brainer which one people would want to live in, right?

Westies Besties

So now that he's given us this picture of two opposing worlds, he makes no bones about the fact that West Germany and West Berlin are, as their names indicate, part of the West.

He says several things that symbolize the West's support of and unity with West Berlin. West German leaders understand the importance of liberty, Reagan tells us, and this is apparent in the economic policies of Wirtschaftswunder. He talks about the Marshall Plan and specifically mentions how it's helping rebuild the Reichstag, a Berlin landmark.

And, maybe most importantly, he says "we" when he talks about West Germany and West Berlin, and "you" or "they" when he's directing comments toward the East.

Just like certain songs evoke certain emotions, certain words can do the same. President Reagan and his speechwriters capitalized on this throughout his administration, advancing a philosophy and ideology that really did change the world.