My Speeches – #1: How Much Abuse of Persuasion Becomes a Crime?

February 12th, 2023

This is the first of the two speeches I have written as an assignment while attending the Art of Persuasive Writing and Speech at HarvardX. 

I ask with grave worry: how much abuse of persuasion becomes a crime?

With a bitter experience, sadly shared among many others, I have to speak aloud, for our virtues have gotten tainted by corruption.

With our hands tied behind our backs, we must acknowledge that we have fallen under schemes and frauds yet unrecognized by law. The lies have plotted our bold flights from the realms of heavens to the dire trails of unavoidable demise.

Our passion, our love, and our self-evident devotion had gotten compromised with undeserved failure, because the unconvicted orchestrators of these agendas have been holding a key, for far too long, to the room of our most precious treasure: our homeland. Our blood-forged country. The country of vast natural riches. Of the golden fields with the potential to feed millions. Of the snow-capped mountains that spear into the blue sky. Of the seas of dreamlike sceneries, beaches that bring an envious amount of tourists every year, islands that are jewels in the glittering surface of the warm Adriatic. The country of history, so important that it has shaped the fate of Europe. The country that was only recently liberated from the sinister and dark era of dictatorship and communism, now becoming a victim of political and very organized crime.

The party has ruled the parliament for years now, thanks to its enormous voting machinery; a monstrous Kraken spreading tentacles all across the region and the world. From the day our country had been founded, injured badly from the wounds of the Homeland War, they had been doing the worst to their people so they could do the best for themselves. They had sold our companies to earn a percentage in their private pockets. They had sold our forests to foreign sawmills whose owners we shall never truly know. They had sold our precious water sources to their hand-picked bottlers from abroad. Worst of all, they had sold our future, so the youth had gone out into the world to seek a better tomorrow.

The numbers tell everything.

Before they stagger you, bear in mind our country counts almost four million men, women, children, and elders altogether. This is only a little more than the residents of Berlin, or half of London’s population. There are not many of us here … and the demographic trend shows there will be even fewer. Only during the last year, forty thousand people–mainly young people and educated people–have moved to other countries to look for jobs that would pay them the salary they deserve. If not the salary, then, the respect that they deserve. It is a rising trend we all should be afraid of.

And why have they gone abroad, leaving their friends and families behind unless they could take them along? 

The answer is simple: corruption.

Last year, we held a poll. 10,7% of the people we asked have given bribes to the workers of the public sector. If you would bring that percentage to the overall population, it would say that 417300 persons felt forced to pay money out of their pocket so they could live a comfortable life! What kind of a tragedy is that? Now imagine if we were a country like Germany, with 88 million residents. Or, even worse, India or China. Then we’d have over 120 000 000–I repeat: one hundred and twenty MILLION–people who would bribe their government’s officials, only so they could peacefully hold their jobs, earn their working positions, attain their school, and gain proper medical treatment. 17% percent of those questions said they haven’t reported the corruption because they didn’t believe anyone would care about it. How sad is that?

Especially because every day, the press reveals a new corruption case among the top-ranged politicians. And not for the monies imaginable to the common folks. When that happens, the sums revolve in hundreds of thousands, if not millions. 

Is this the world we want to live in? How is that different from communism, socialism, or any other dictatures?    

These criminal schemes, perpetrated through acts of persuasion, carved the destinies of poverty and extremely dangerous equanimity. The trust, betrayed and broken beyond repair. The hopes, misgiven too many times. The dreams, lost before attained. The blood, spilled in wars, but all in vain.

I ask thee now, in the name of those battered people who feel as if they have to live without their futures, how many consequences make the abuse of persuasion become a heinous crime?

Drive. Passion. Ambition. Persistence. Those four together shape either the most beautiful angel or the worst kind of monster. Is the art of persuasion a weapon that can far too easily make it into the wrong hands?

Does the failure of moral principles induce the failure of rhetoric?

Does society today approve of this or if not, why can’t it fight it?

To what extent can this cancer grow?

And if it outgrows the critical mass, can it be ever cured?

With the words of Isaiah, I bring this heartfelt message to its closing: “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.”