What Are We Fighting For? Introducing a Political Genre of ‘Battle Exhortations’

Exhorting soldiers for battle is a long known tradition in the history of nations. From Pericles’s speeches in the Peloponnesians wars to General Eisenhower’s D-Day command in WWII, military leaders call upon their soldiers to possibly sacrifice their lives in war. Despite the widespread use of such exhortations throughout history as well as in modern times, this tradition has attracted surprisingly little scholarly attention as a distinct political genre and has often been relegated solely to the analysis of military history. Addressing this gap, this paper presents a theoretical introduction and provides a conceptualization and characterization of battle exhortations, arguing that this rhetorical genre can be used to explore fundamental social and political values of a society – the ones worth risking life for. As the dynamic relationship between civil society and military takes shape in the modern 21st century, this paper addresses the following questions: What are the functions of battle exhortations in modern nation-states? What are the common denominators for fighting, if any? These questions are explored using political discourse’s “genre analysis,” analyzing a pioneering database of 290 battle missives written in the Israeli Defense Force, along with missives written in the British and US armies in the 20th and 21st Century. The paper is built in two parts: First, a conceptualization of battle exhortations as a unique prism through which to explore the essence of the ‘contract’ between the state and its citizens, revealed specifically in times of emergency, is developed. Demanding a possible sacrifice from a citizen (whether conscripted or volunteered to the military) is the most radical form of civil action, binding an individual to a particular political community, exalting and defining the values worth risking life for. Exhorting for battle possibly differentiate between “us” (the soldiers) and “them” (the enemy) while offering compelling arguments for the Jus ad Bellum and the Jus in Bello. Second, characterization of this genre based on the Israeli case and international illustrations is developed. This characterization involves differentiating between oral and written exhortation (‘battle missive’) sent or read to the soldier; explaining the difference from other military texts such as operation commands or routine orders of the day; and tracking repeated forms and structures (opening and closing words, length of the text, and so forth) in the Israeli and other missives. These characteristics are used in order to understand the possible functions of this genre, highlighting the potential of what may be learnt from such explorations. This paper thus takes the first steps in exploring the tradition of battle exhortations, substantiating the importance of analyzing the fundamental values deemed worth calling upon citizens to risk their lives for, and laying the groundwork for future comparative research of this genre by placing the building blocks of its characteristics and objectives.