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David Chidester, Atlantic Community, Atlantic World: Anti-Americanism between Europe and Africa, Journal of American History, Volume 93, Issue 2, September 2006, Pages 432–436, https://doi.org/10.2307/4486240
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A recent editorial in a South African newspaper made the surprising proposal that U.S. President George W. Bush should receive the Nobel Peace Prize, but only on the ironic basis that his administration's military adventures had given war a bad name all over the world. “Not since Adolf Hitler,” the editor Ferial Haffajee observed, “has a world leader done so much to tarnish the reputation of war and warmongering.”1 So, there is one international vote of support for President Bush, which he might welcome, if he does not mind being compared to Hitler.
One of the casualties of September 11, 2001, I feared, would be the death of irony. As a rhetorical strategy, irony dwells in the play of incongruity, in strange mixtures and unexpected juxtapositions, which evoke surprise. Irony undermines the stability of polarizing dualisms—good and evil, us and them—that have been central to recent U.S. foreign policy. As Rob Kroes observed, “on both sides of the Atlantic,” such dualisms have only “sharpened differences and divisions” between Europe and America. Irony gives rise to thought, but dualisms are deadly for thinking and for international relations.2