The Image of the Enemy as a Stereotype of Thinking

In this article we analyze the process of stereotype thinking and its verbal expression. We focus our attention on the symbolic vision of our society in the mind of Europeans: Russia is evil, a country where law and democracy have deteriorated. Our aim is to examine the process of mind manipulation and imprinting of the enemy image on the mind of the society by means of communication and show the difficulty of destruction of stereotypes which prevents people of the 21st century from the objective perception of reality. We conducted our study on dictionary entries, articles, B.Obama’s speech in particular, and the extract from David Mitchell’s book “Black Swan Green”. The research is based on the data worked out by a number of sciences: Cultural Linguistics, Psychology, Psycholinguistics, Cross-Cultural Communication. We used the methods of functional and pragmatic analysis of the text. A stereotype is defined as an element of the cultural code which can be decoded by means of language; itt affects the way of thinking, behavior and lexis. Thus, the proposed thesis of a stereotype is supposed to be changing but too slowly. It is concluded that the sterotype “Russia is the enemy” possesses its formal linguistic, mental, and behavioural parametres.

stereotypes, image of the enemy, language behavior, verbal expression, thought control, mass media