Rhetorical Analysis Of Communism A History

Rhetorical Analysis of Communism: A History By Richard Pipes Communism was originally a social theory of a completely unified and harmonious society (3). Private property and class inequality was said to be the root of all evil, so by removing those from society, a government could encourage peace on a national, and later a global scale. Richard Pipes examines the roots of Communism in his book, Communism: A History, and then proceeds to methodically express the failure and decay that comes with it. Pipes argues that Communism is corrupt by appealing to his scholarly audience through a cause-and-effect logos appeal, an ethos appeal that plays on the audience’s appreciation of professionalism, and a pathos appeal built on a foundation of statistical deaths. In many cases, Richard Pipes can be found taking advantage of the Ethos appeal to convince his audience of his intellect and assure them that he has reliable information. Pipes is often found using large and

Here, he was trying to appeal to the emotions of the audience through empathy. The purposes of these statistics were both to inform the reader on a terrible aspect of Communism and further their agreement with Pipes, and to give objective facts that are dependable and preferred by the reader, but can also be used to show only one side of the argument. When Pipes says, “681,692 were shot- an average of 1,000 executions a day. The majority of the survivors [of the Great Terror] ended up in hard-labor camps,” he shows that while people survived, the main focus was on those who didn’t because the pathos appeal worked better there (67). However, he did not take into account that his audience consists of scholarly people, who should generally have an unbiased thought process. By utilizing the pathos appeal, Pipes was successful only in the way that he misled the attention of his audience when portraying