This is an illegal war

This study guide will help you analyze Arnold Schwarzenegger’s speech “This is an illegal war”. In addition to help for your analysis, you can find a summary of the text and ideas for putting it into perspective.

Presentation of the text

Title: This is an illegal war (2022)

Sender: Arnold Schwarzenegger

Genre: Speech

Arnold Schwarzenegger (b. 1947) is an Austrian and American actor, former professional bodybuilder, and politician. He served as the Republican governor of California between 2003 and 2011. In his bodybuilding career, he won the Mr. Universe title when he was twenty, and he is generally considered one of the best bodybuilders of all time. As an actor, he is best known for the science-fiction films The Terminator (1984) and its sequels.

The speech “This is an illegal war” was published on Schwarzenegger’s Twitter account in March 2022, as an address to the Russian people in an attempt to raise their awareness about the nature of the Russian war against Ukraine.

Excerpt

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Repetition and antithesis

Schwarzenegger also relies on repetition when he gives examples of the lies Russian soldiers were told by their government:

Some were told that the Ukrainian people would greet them like heroes. Some were told that they were simply going on exercises – they didn’t even know that they were going into war. And some were told that they were there to protect ethnic Russians in Ukraine.

In this case, the repetition of the phrase “some were told” points to the extent of the misinformation given to the Russian soldiers and hints that many of them would not have been in Ukraine ...