War is horrible, but...

So, perhaps just a little off the proffered topic of 9/11 rhetoric, but I came across this interesting essay, entitled "War Is Horrible, But..." Here's the first paragraph

Anyone who has done even a little reading about the theory and practice of war, whether in political theory, international relations, theology, history, or common journalistic commentary, has encountered a sentence of the form "war is horrible, but . . . ." In this construction, the phrase that follows the conjunction explains why a certain war was (or now is or someday will be) an action that ought to have been (or ought to be) undertaken notwithstanding its admitted horrors. The frequent, virtually formulaic use of this expression attests that nobody cares to argue, say, that war is a beautiful, humane, uplifting, or altogether splendid course of action and therefore the more often people fight, the better...

Click here to read the full article

Although I generally dislike the sort of insane "market anarchism" of the lewrockwell.com blog, every now and then something good pops up there like the above article. The author, Robert Higgs, is senior fellow in political economy at the Independent Institute. He does a great job analyzing the function of the conjunction "but" in this phrase, which is repeated so often in our poltical discourse that, very often, one does not even stop to analyze the rhetorical function of that small word.

And, well, maybe it's not so off topic. To explicate his thesis about the uses and abuses of this rhetorical strategy, Higgs did a Google search for this precise phrase on September 11th, 2006 and chose 14 of the 1,450 results to analyze. Well, yeah, that's all in the article. But this strikes me as an interesting methodology, if nothing else. Search technology has provided new tools for rhetorical analysis, making it possible to track down thousands of ocurrences of a specific meme and to analyze the different ways that meme functions in various contexts.

Speaking of technological advances and political rhetoric, I wanted to point out the resource that led me to the above essay. Lke I said, I hate lewrockwell.com, so it's not something I check that often. I came across the article through the "poltical opinion" section of the social content website digg.com.
Digg allows users to submit content, and then by "digging" or "burying" stories, decide what ends up on the main page, and what ends up at the bottom. Well... I guess the digg.com about page explains it better than I can here. So... yeah, chack it out.