Tucídides, la sofística, George W. Bush i la retòrica

Abstract

Plato maintains that the sophist practices the art of persuasion,an art which attempts, by use of rhetoric, only to convince the listener, without seeking either justice or virtue in the process. Nietzsche, on the other hand, says that the sophists are realists and blames Plato for shunning reality and taking refuge in morality and the ideal. Can we consider, then, Thucydides to be a paradigm of the sophist? No, quite the contrary, in that rather than convincing his readers, what he attempts to do is to tell, in a descriptive way, the concrete facts of the history of classical Greece: Thucydides, with his knowledge of rhetorical resources, does not use them to obtain the approval of the public, but rather to transmit a reality. And is Bush a sophist? Yes, in fact he is because he uses rhetoric only to justify the occupation of Iraq to world public opinion, independently of whether the existence of weapons of mass destruction there is true or false. These arguments, those of Bush in 2003, had already been used 2500 years ago by the Athenians and Spartans when confronting the Peloponnesian War.