Saturday, March 11, 2017

Mussolini's Method Of Oratory

Does this sound familiar?

"He [Mussolini] paid little attention to the logic and truth of what he said as long as it was energetic and stirring. His gestures had rhythm and vigour.  He used short, staccato sentences, with no clear connection between them, often with long and dramatic pauses, sometimes changing voice and expression in a crescendo of violence and ending in a tornado of vituperations.  When his audience was carried away by his oratory he would sometimes stop and put to them a rhetorical question. They roared their answer.  This established a sort of heated dialogue, through which the spectators became involved in decisions they had no time to meditate on. Through incendiary eloquence, he rose..."

Luigi Barzini, The Italians, 1964, pp.135-136

Barkley Rosser

1 comment:

John Mason said...

Sounds like someone we know?