Posts Tagged ‘political discourse’

“The Rhetoric of Threat”

December 1, 2025

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Ricardo Morín
Triangulación 9: The Rhetoric of Threat
56 x 76 cm
Watercolor and wax crayon on paper
2007

Ricardo Morín

November 2025

Oakland Park, Florida

Authoritarian language does not arise as excess or accident; it emerges as a deliberate strategy designed to reorganize public perception until difference appears suspect and complexity becomes intolerable.   Within this framework, the phrase attributed to the Argentine president Javier Milei—“if an immigrant does not adapt to your culture, then it is not immigration but an invasion” (or https://youtube.com/shorts/EJ9RRC3pyTQ?si=xehJCUD8fIIpaqsw )—functions as a mechanism of extreme reduction.   It replaces the historical reality of migration with a binary schema meant to provoke alarm.  The leader is not describing a fact; he is manufacturing an enemy.

This formulation shifts the migratory experience into a warlike imaginary in which any form of difference is construed as aggression.   Culture—treated as a static and homogeneous block—is framed as a besieged territory requiring defense, and plurality as a threat that can only be resolved through submission.   Under this logic, the migrant ceases to be a person and becomes an abstraction crafted to justify coercive impulse.

The paradox is unmistakable:   what is proclaimed as the defense of identity is, in truth, an effort to standardize it; what is presented as caution operates as an instrument of fear.  Rather than analyze, the language disciplines.   And in doing so, it exposes its deeper function:     it shapes an emotional climate ready to accept measures that, under any other light, would be incompatible with democratic life.

This is the dimension that most clearly reveals the nature of the statement:   it is not a commentary on immigration but a mechanism of affective control.   By turning coexistence into compulsory assimilation, it introduces a dehumanized conception of the social world, one in which diversity ceases to be constitutive and becomes an obstacle to be neutralized.   Ultimately, this discourse seeks not to understand reality but to govern it.