Man of War: RAHHHHH!

My initial thought after I read this speech by Mussolini was, "Wow... that was a whole lot of nothing." I think this was my reaction very specifically because I read the speech, rather than heard it spoken. Like we mentioned in class, after watching the piece from the office, the point of this speech was to inspire emotion, not necessarily to have any actual depth. Now that is not implying that every speech that is intended to pull an emotional response is empty, but this one and actually many speeches by dictator like figures during this time period, tend to only prey on the emotional response which makes them lacking.
Martin Luther King Juniors speech I Have a Dream is an example of a very moving and emotion provoking speech and it also has a lot of depth and the intended purpose to inspire and provoke thought as well. It has depth and it is multifaceted.
This concept sort of ties in with another reading we had, Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?. In that piece the author talks about how writing tends to go wrong when it has a missing piece from her basic recipe for a good piece of writing. Mussolini's speech I think represents one of the failures but only in the context of "multifaceted writing." However, I think this speech's intended purpose, which is to get people riled up, it is incredibly efficient and well done.
Another thought I had was the way the meaning of words change so completely with time. What made me think of this was in the speech when he uses the word Fascist. While the word itself hasn't changed very much it made me think this because the moment I read the word Fascist I thought instantly of a line from The Big Lebowski. Someone hits the dude and he says, "you f***ing fascist!". I thought that was kind of funny considering in his speech Mussolini obviously meant this as a good thing.
But back on track, even though this speech lacked depth and actual meaning, in the context of that time which was war and a lot of other not so fun stuff, it was geared to do exactly what was needed: to bring people together. World War II involved a lot of Hitler killing people of his own country which he claimed to be so proud of. One could see how this would make people feel a little disconnected from their fellow countrymen. In Germany a neighbor who was Jewish was not an enemy to be destroyed leaving one feeling isolated and without a feeling of unity among their nation. So of course leaders would be driven to try and bring their nations together. So even though Mussolini's speech Man of War does exactly what is intended to do (when spoken, not read) when it is taken out of it's location it is rendered almost moronic sounding.