Non-Fiction Analysis of 'England, Silent and Determined'

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England, Silent and Determined by The analysed text is an article by the name of ‘England, Silent and Determined’ by Sidney Brooks, London Representative of The Independent. The article was published in The Independent on September 7, 1914. The primary theme of the text is Great Britain under the stress of World War I – it explains the reasoning of going to war at first, but also how the country is coping with the war. Moving on to the characteristics of the text, the argumentation of the author of the article is somewhat closed – it tries to enlighten the English people on the reasoning behind the decision of going to war, however the answers provided are not ones that provide a foundation for discussion. Everything is very conclusive – just have a look at this quote from the very first sentence: ‘We in England have entered upon this war with the greatest of all military assets on our side—a cause we believe to be just and a conscience we know to be clear. We did not provoke it; we did not want it; there is the unanswerable evidence of the White Paper to show how far Sir Edward Grey went to avert it’. This closed type of argumentation continues throughout; the Germans are at fault for the war, Britain had no choice but to go to war, the spirit of the English lion cannot be shaken etc. To a modern non-British reader, this very conclusive and patriotic style of writing might seem strange – would any freethinking individual not question all this? Would conspiracies towards the real motive of the government not arise? What you have to keep in mind, however, is that this was written at a time, where the British empire was at the peak of its reign, and Britons had the utmost confidence in their country – the targeted audience was not, say an average farmer in Europe, but a British citizen. This is sometimes forgotten today, where we live in an internet-age and
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