IB ENGLISH IO — INDIVIDUAL ORAL SCRIPT

Global Issue: Dehumanization of soldiers by state authority

Literary: Wilfred Owen | Non-Literary: Patrick Chappatte (Political Cartoons)

INTRODUCTION (Lines 1–5)

Line 1: War has always been sold as noble — a duty, an honour, a glorious sacrifice. Yet those who
are sent to fight tell a very different story.
Line 2: The global issue I will explore today is the dehumanization of soldiers by state authority — how
governments and power structures strip soldiers of their individuality, dignity, and humanity in the
service of political or military goals.
Line 3: This issue is urgent and enduring. From the trenches of World War One to contemporary
conflict zones, those in power have consistently used soldiers as instruments rather than as human
beings.
Line 4: I will examine how Wilfred Owen's war poetry — particularly 'Dulce et Decorum Est' — and
Patrick Chappatte's political cartoons illuminate this dehumanization from two very different but
complementary perspectives.
Line 5: Together, these works argue that state power does not merely send men to war — it erases
their humanity in the process.

PART 1 — MAIN LITERARY TEXT (Lines 6–18)

Wilfred Owen | 'Dulce et Decorum Est' (1917) | Technique: Sensory Imagery
Line 6: My main literary text is Wilfred Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum Est', written in 1917 while Owen was
recovering at Craiglockhart War Hospital — a poem that functions as both testimony and indictment.
Line 7: Owen structures the poem around a single, visceral gas attack, using it as a lens through which
to expose the lie embedded in the Latin phrase: 'it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country.'
Line 8: The poem's opening immediately dismantles any romantic image of the soldier. The men are
described as 'bent double, like old beggars under sacks' — a simile that strips them of any martial
dignity.
Line 9: The sensory imagery here is crucial: these are not proud warriors but broken, exhausted
bodies. Owen's use of visceral, physical detail is the poem's primary technique — it forces the reader to
inhabit the soldier's body rather than observe from a distance.
Line 10: The phrase 'knock-kneed, coughing like hags' compounds this — soldiers are compared not to
heroes but to sick, elderly women. The state's project of glory is directly contradicted by what Owen
shows us.
Line 11: Then the gas attack occurs. The shift to the present tense — 'Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!' — is
sudden and violent. The typographical urgency mirrors the sensory chaos of the moment.
Line 12: The extended simile that follows — watching a comrade die 'like a man in fire or lime' —
presents the soldier's death as grotesque spectacle. There is no dignity, no meaning, only suffering.
Line 13: Owen's acoustic imagery deepens this: 'guttering, choking, drowning' — three present
participles that suggest an ongoing, unending horror. These men are dying in ways that language can
barely contain.
Line 14: The third stanza shifts to nightmare — 'In all my dreams before my helpless sight / He plunges
at me.' The trauma is not merely physical but psychological. The state's war follows the soldier even
into sleep.
Line 15: Owen then addresses the reader directly: 'If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood / Come
gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs.' The conditional 'if' is an accusation — you have not heard this,
because those in power have hidden it.
Line 16: The poem's final turn is its most powerful. Owen names his target: 'the old Lie' — and
crucially, he capitalises it. This is not merely a mistake but a deliberate deception perpetrated by
authority.
Line 17: Through sensory imagery, Owen transforms abstract political violence into physical, embodied
suffering. The soldier is rendered fully human precisely at the moment the state has decided his
humanity is expendable.
Line 18: 'Dulce et Decorum Est' does not merely describe war — it functions as resistance against the
language of power that makes war possible.

PART 2 — LITERARY BODY OF WORKS (Lines 19–26)

Wilfred Owen | Supporting Poems
BODY OF WORK 1: 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' — Technique: Irony
Line 19: Owen's sonnet 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' approaches the same global issue through irony,
contrasting the rituals of mourning with the realities of mass death.
Line 20: The opening question — 'What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?' — is profoundly
ironic. Soldiers are compared to livestock slaughtered without ceremony, inverting the state's narrative
of honourable sacrifice.
Line 21: Owen replaces the sounds of religious mourning — bells, prayers, choirs — with the sounds of
war: 'the monstrous anger of the guns,' 'the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle.' The irony is structural: war
itself becomes their only 'anthem'.
Line 22: Where 'Dulce' uses sensory imagery to make suffering vivid, 'Anthem' uses irony to expose
the hollow consolations offered by state and church — both complicit in the dehumanization of soldiers.
BODY OF WORK 2: 'Disabled' — Technique: Juxtaposition
Line 23: 'Disabled' extends Owen's project through juxtaposition — placing the soldier's pre-war vitality
against his post-war abandonment.
Line 24: The poem opens with a young man sitting 'in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark' — immediately
evoking passivity and waste. The juxtaposition with his former self — celebrated footballer, young lover
— is devastating.
Line 25: Crucially, the state that recruited him has discarded him: 'some cheered him home, but not as
crowds cheer Goal.' He is returned like a broken tool, no longer useful to the machinery of war.
Line 26: Where 'Dulce' resists through testimony and 'Anthem' through irony, 'Disabled' resists through
juxtaposition — showing us the before and after of a man the state made and then abandoned.

PART 3 — MAIN NON-LITERARY TEXT (Lines 27–35)

Patrick Chappatte | War Cartoons | Technique: Visual Symbolism
Line 27: My non-literary text is the political cartooning of Patrick Chappatte — a Swiss-American
cartoonist whose work appears in publications including the International New York Times and Le
Temps.
Line 28: Chappatte's cartoons address contemporary conflict — Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria — and
consistently expose the gap between how power represents war and what war actually does to human
beings.
Line 29: His primary technique is visual symbolism: soldiers are often rendered as small, isolated
figures dwarfed by flags, machinery, or political rhetoric — their humanity diminished by the scale of the
state's apparatus.
Line 30: In cartoons depicting soldiers returning from war, Chappatte frequently uses the contrast
between triumphant political rhetoric — represented through banners, speeches, headlines — and the
broken, silent figures of veterans.
Line 31: The visual language echoes Owen: where Owen uses words to render bodies, Chappatte
uses line and composition to expose the same gap between official narrative and human reality.
Line 32: In one recurring visual motif, soldiers are depicted as chess pieces — literal objects to be
moved by an unseen hand. This symbolism makes explicit what Owen implies: that soldiers are
instruments of power, not human subjects.
Line 33: Chappatte's caricature of political leaders — drawn large, comfortable, distant from violence
— creates a visual hierarchy that mirrors the power structures Owen critiques. The powerful are safe;
the soldiers are not.
Line 34: The cartoon form itself is significant. Political cartoons operate in the public sphere — they
appear in newspapers, are shared widely, and are designed for immediate impact. Chappatte uses this
accessibility as a tool of resistance.
Line 35: Like Owen, Chappatte does not merely observe — he accuses. His visual symbolism
translates the dehumanization of soldiers into an image that cannot be ignored.

PART 4 — NON-LITERARY BODY OF WORKS (Lines 36–38)

BODY OF WORK 1: Chappatte — Veterans / PTSD Cartoons — Technique: Contrast
Line 36: In his cartoons addressing veterans and PTSD, Chappatte deploys visual contrast between
the public face of military service — medals, parades, honour — and the private reality of psychological
destruction. The state celebrates soldiers publicly and abandons them privately; Chappatte makes this
contradiction visible on a single page.
BODY OF WORK 2: Chappatte — Drone Warfare Cartoons — Technique: Irony through Scale
Line 37: His drone warfare cartoons use irony through scale: a politician operates a drone from a
comfortable office while the human consequences are rendered as tiny, distant figures. The irony is
spatial — the further from power, the more expendable the human life. This mirrors Owen's 'old Lie': the
comfortable distance of authority from the violence it authorizes.

CONCLUSION (Lines 38–40)

Line 38: Across these four works — spanning a century and two very different forms — the same truth
emerges: that state power, in order to wage war, must first make soldiers less than human.
Line 39: Owen achieves this through language — sensory imagery, irony, juxtaposition. Chappatte
achieves it through image — symbolism, contrast, scale. Both are acts of resistance against the
machinery of dehumanization.
Line 40: The global issue of dehumanization is not historical. As long as states send human beings to
fight wars they did not choose, the work of Owen and Chappatte remains not only relevant — but
necessary.