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This is a paper about the process of creating meaning in speeches held by president Bush after the terrorist attacks on September 11th 2001. People need tools to orient and understand the surrounding world. They need to create a meaningful orientation in a chaotic world. Some meaning is favoured due to the prevailing social structures. Thru language discourses are produced that helps us understand how the world is constructed. The national state is a discourse that make the world understandable. The discourse create a natural perception of the world as divided into nations. A grand narrative is a story that explain incomprehensive occurrences in society. In times of war these stories become crucial. It is necessary to demonise the enemy to legitimise ones actions. In the US a myth of origin is built around the concept of Manifest Destiny. The myth constitutes that the nation has a unique mission from God to save the rest of the world. In the story retelling the events of September 11th president Bush presents a solution to the problem of terrorists threatening to divide the nation. The nation is constantly on the brink of falling apart. The solution is unity. President Bush recreate the story of USA and the terrorist attacks in a meaningful way, and portrays the nation as a natural entity. The enemy is the evil force that unites the nation.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-07-29T16:17:39Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertacao Maurineide Alves da Silva.pdf: 991986 bytes, checksum: 111fb6a28f609b9364d02765fa3f1a9a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-09-27 / The United States is a country of tradition belligerent. It is common to find in their public squares and monuments statues of military figures, in addition to reserve specific days to honor them, military parades and ceremonies are displayed in various regions of the country and numerous film productions are performed representing the U.S. involvement in world conflicts. It is felt that the war is part of its fundamental characteristics. Seeking to understand the aspects that have built this tradition and thus marked the history of the United States military interventions around the world, without limiting ourselves to explanations that emphasize only the imperialist interests, but taking into account ideological and dogmatic aspects, we reach a ideology formulated in the nineteenth century, in order to justify the U.S. right to intervene in another nation: the ideology of Manifest Destiny. The three ideas that form the three show Manifest Destiny of American beliefs that are part of their national identity and profoundly marked its history: Puritanism, democracy and capitalism. To peer into the permanence of these three beliefs motivating the U.S. military interventions in the XXI century and still seek mainly new elements that enrich our historical understanding of the American society in his belligerent relations with other regions of the world, analyze imagery of a document period, the film Black Hawk Down (Black Hawk Down, Hidley Scott, 2001), which refers to U.S. military intervention in Somalia in 1993 and eventually present the vision of its directors on the subject. As one of the forms of cultural expression more representative of the United States, the film ends up a material extremely rich set of information about the beliefs and customs United States. / Os Estados Unidos são um país de tradição beligerante. É comum encontrar em suas praças públicas estátuas e monumentos de figuras militares, além de reservarem dias específicos para homenageá-los; desfiles e cerimônias militares são exibidos em diversas regiões do país e inúmeras produções cinematográficas são realizadas representando a participação norte-americana em conflitos mundiais. Percebe-se que a guerra faz parte de suas características fundamentais. Buscando entender os aspectos que construíram tal tradição e, consequentemente, marcaram a história dos Estados Unidos com intervenções militares por todo o mundo, sem nos limitarmos a explicações que ressaltam apenas os interesses imperialistas, mas levando em consideração aspectos dogmáticos e ideológicos, chegamos a uma ideologia formulada no século XIX, com o objetivo de justificar o direito norte-americano de intervir em outra nação: a ideologia do Destino Manifesto. As três idéias que formam o Destino Manifesto mostram três crenças do norte-americano que fazem parte de sua identidade nacional e que marcaram profundamente sua história: o puritanismo, a democracia e o capitalismo. Para perscrutar a permanência dessas três crenças motivando as intervenções militares norte-americanas ainda no século XXI e principalmente buscar elementos novos que enriqueçam a nossa compreensão histórica sobre a sociedade norte-americana em sua relação beligerante com outras regiões do mundo, analiso um documento imagético desse período, a produção cinematográfica Falcão Negro em Perigo (Black Hawk Down, Hidley Scott, 2001), que se reporta à intervenção militar norte-americana na Somália em 1993 e acaba por apresentar a visão de seus realizadores sobre o tema. Sendo uma das formas de manifestação cultural mais representativa dos Estados Unidos, o cinema acaba por configurar um material extremamente rico de informações a respeito das crenças e costumes norte-americanos.

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There are surprisingly detailed similarities between Germany and the USA on their way towards the Second World War. In this paper, I have compared the nations' expansionist philosophies, their encounter with racism, and the internal conflicts between authoritarian leadership and democracy. I began with an overview of Manifest Destiny and the German myth of the East. Next, I summed up the deep changes that the First World War caused for both societies and how they went into the Great Depression. I examined the rise of scientific racism as part of the international eugenics movement and the emergence of populist leaders during the economic crisis. It became clear that neither expansionism nor racism were genuine German ideologies. In fact, the American Manifest Destiny served as a role-model for German plans in the East. Even the racist concepts of the Third Reich were strongly influenced by American scientists. The main difference seems to be the experience with the First World War and the diversity of American protest during the crisis.

At the close of the American Civil War some southerners unwilling to remain in a reconstructed South, elected to immigrate to areas of Central and South America to reestablish a Southern antebellum lifestyle. The influences of Manifest Destiny, expansionism, filibustering, and southern nationalism in the antebellum era directly influenced post-bellum expatriates to attempt colonization in Mexico, Venezuela, Chile, Peru, and Brazil. A comparison between the antebellum language of expansionists, southern nationalists, and the language of the expatriates will elucidate the connection to the pre-Civil War expansionist mindset that southern émigrés drew upon when attempting colonization in foreign lands.

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THESIS ABSTRACT This thesis deals with the problematics and the role of American frontier and American West in Cormac McCarthy's border trilogy consisting of All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1999). The reading proper focuses mainly on the second novel of the trilogy, making frequent references to both the other two volumes of the trilogy and to Blood Meridian (1985), a novel directly preceding the trilogy itself. The main goal of the thesis is to demonstrate that the trilogy not only critically engages with the American nationalist ideology represented by a nostalgically conceptualized myths of the American frontier, but that it also offers its own alternative vision of the concept of the frontier and of American national identity. The thesis further claims that McCarthy's critical approach to the mythical representations of the American history bears strong resemblance to the philosophy of American pragmatism as defined by a French philosopher Giles Deleuze in his works dedicated to American thinking and culture. In his pragmatic view of American identity the frontier ceases to function in its traditional, nationalistic sense as a line of separation that divides the social and political space into binary categories, and instead it is understood as an open and...

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While few would deny America is the most powerful nation on earth, there is considerable debate, and controversy, over how America uses its foreign policy power. This is even truer since the “unipolar moment,” when America gained sole superpower status with the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War. In the Cold War Reinhold Niebuhr was the main theological voice speaking to American power. In the Unipolar world, the Religious right emerged as the main theological voice, but instead of seeking to curb American power the Religious right embraced Neoconservatism in what I will call “Totemic Conservatism” to support use of America's power in the world and to triumph Manifest destiny in American foreign policy, which is the notion that America is a chosen nation, and this legitimizes its use of power and underpins its moral claims. I critique the Niebuhrian and Religious right legacies, and offer a classical realist strategy for theology to speak to America power and foreign policy, which avoids the neoconservative and religious conservative error of totemism, while avoiding the jettisoning of Niebuhr's theology by political liberals, and, the political ghettoizing of theology by his chief critics. This strategy is based on embracing the understanding of classical realism, but not taking the next step, which both Niebuhr and neoconservativism ultimately do, of moving from a prescriptive to a predictive strategy for American foreign policy. In this thesis, I argue that in the wake of the unipolar moment the embrace of the Religious right of Neoconservatism to triumph Manifest destiny in American foreign policy is a problematic commingling of faith and politics, and what is needed instead is a strategy of speaking to power rooted in classical realism but one which refines Niebuhrian realism to avoid the risk of progressing a Constantinian theology.