All That I Require Poem Analysis

In the song, “All That I Require” written by Radney Foster, the speaker conveys a theme of the political dangers of extremism and fascism. The line “I’ll make us strong again / you’ll sleep safely in your beds / I’ll reign down hell upon those dirty mongrels’ heads / And the blood of all your children is all that I require” directly correlates to pathos for the pity of the beliefs against previous fascists leaders like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini during WWII. Through this, he illustrates the errors on both sides of the arguments, making drama politically worse than it should be. One of the major literary devices used in the song is foreshadowing. He uses this to give suspense to his peers, displaying imagery to show that society tends to
fall by letting disasters happen. The line in the video from Winston Churchill, “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it” relates the irony of past history with many people facing increased partisanship in American society today.
This ties to the ideas in the American story, because extremism is a factor for understanding many of the extreme ideas that lead to obstruction of progression and separation of unification. Many irrational conversations lead to violence that put our society at risk and bend the idea of how lenient the freedom of speech should be with much of slander, libel, and hate speech. While not all forms of extremism are necessarily violent, it would be more sensible at times to find a middle ground between two sides of the argument. Conversing with other people through ethical arguments with help us compromise and unify us as a nation once again. While it does seem that being extreme eliminates some unfair aspects of being moderate in conversations, it will help simplify the complexity of some tasks assigned to us for the leader of America and we the people. We have to understand too that prosperity comes from expressing our ideals for our country, but sometimes extremism at times will block other aspects of the freedom of speech from taking place.