Winston Churchill: Hero and/or Colonist?

The discussion began with introductions of each speaker. Professor Paul Siewers shed light on the accomplishments of each speaker, establishing their credibility to speak on the subject and their background that supports their intelligence on the matter. This established an ethos for the speakers as it made them more trustworthy to the audience to give accurate information from professional, knowledgeable standpoints. The speech then carried on to speaker Dr. Larry P. Arnn who instantly laid the groundwork for the entire speech. Arnn posed a question, playing the role of the thesis of the speech, of whether Churchill was a hero and/or colonist. By doing so he immediately gave the audience a direction to follow throughout the speech and a centralized idea to relate back to as the speech progressed. Arnn then used the same tactic as Siewers prior when laying out Churchill’s accomplishments. Arnn explains that Churchill wrote over 45 books, wrote 8000 pages of speeches, had an unusually rich understanding of politics, was a liberal (somebody who thought people deserved to be free), was not racist in nature, thought that freedom was hard to get and maintain, by the 1900s he fought in four wars, had best selling books and about three of them then got elected into Parliament, and separation of powers were important to him and he worked to approve them in Britain. Throughout Arnn’s discussion of his opinion on the subject, he cited specific quotes from Churchill himself to back up the point he was making and established more credibility for himself. He used logos by using specific quotations and facts to provide evidence for his discussion on the central argument. We then saw speaker Professor Sean McMeekin use pathos within his speech tactics as he put on a show with his storytelling using clear passion on the subject and presenting his portion of the speech as a storyline for the audience to follow. It became less formal and stagnant, but rather engaging as he used physical movements and provided heavy emphasis on different portions of the speech with repetition to assert his viewpoints. McMeekin immediately gives truth to his credibility on the subject he confesses, “I should preface this by saying that unlike the other two speakers tonight I’m not really a Churchill scholar as such or a Churchill expert but I am someone who’s kind of written about Churchill.” He then goes on to explain that in all eight of his books Churchill had found a place within the text. One would suggest that making this confession takes away from his credibility but rather it made him a much more trustworthy speaker as we now know as the audience that the speaker is invested in providing us only the truth. He will not suggest or retell the truth of history that is not directly factual without at least prefacing first that it is opinion not fact. It also made McMeekin more relatable to the audience who seemingly were not all Churchill experts as well. Speaker Dr. Madhusree Mukerjee introduced her discussion by laying out the thesis when she stated, “It looks to me that my role is to describe Churchill’s imperialism.” Her speech then continued to centralize around this theme which made it easier for the audience to follow. She also strengthened her arguments by making use of logos. She did so by making use of visual aids within her powerpoint slides, producing figures that depicted her verbal discussions. She also balanced it as to not overwhelm the slides with everything she was discussing typed out on the slides but rather provided figures to support what she was saying or summaries of her discussion that went into further detail verbally. She used specific quotations by Churchill in the same way Arnn did to further her own discussion and provide background and support for her own arguments. Mukerjee argues that the United Kingdom extracted masses of resources and money from British India leaving them in famine and with huge quantities of death. She quoted Churchill’s input on the subject and exposed his call for giving limited resources to India but taking their rice resources during a time of mass famine in their empire. Mukerjee presents statistics of 25 million Indian people dying in the Victorian era alone to support her assertion. Each speaker spoke on the subject with various speech tactics, some being the same and others different, and yet all of which proved effective for the audience and for their own personalized arguments.