{"id":15869,"date":"2025-10-22T15:23:02","date_gmt":"2025-10-22T04:23:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/?p=15869"},"modified":"2025-10-22T15:24:21","modified_gmt":"2025-10-22T04:24:21","slug":"how-authoritarians-twist-language-into-weapons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/2025\/10\/22\/how-authoritarians-twist-language-into-weapons\/","title":{"rendered":"How authoritarians twist language into weapons"},"content":{"rendered":"

The world finds itself in a cultural setting in which large swathes of democratic countries place their faith in <\/span>faux <\/span><\/i>salvific ‘strongmen’, part of whose ‘populist’ appeal is based on their ability to lie, exaggerate, and bully opponents with impunity.<\/span><\/p>\n

The philosopher, author, and French resistance member <\/span>Albert Camus wrote that<\/span><\/a> the struggle against totalitarianism was a struggle to preserve a <\/span>few vital distinctions<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It lies in the ability to think and speak clearly.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We cannot allow language to be distorted by those ambitious for power at all costs, to become a cultural weapon in their hands.<\/span><\/p>\n

The basic principle of those who favour authoritarian rule is that everything is political: from parliamentary debates down to <\/span>the lyrics and allures of Taylor Swift<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0 When culture is seen as war, the willingness <\/span>to use language to deceive, divide and demonise opponents<\/span><\/a> is projected as a virtue.<\/span><\/p>\n

For democracies, the principal means to overthrow liberal norms and institutions is to create a false equivalence with democracy\u2019s defenders.\u00a0 If achieving one\u2019s political goals requires lying and misrepresentation, then one must first accuse the people one wishes to deceive of being liars.\u00a0 If one wishes to betray cherished principles, one must accuse the other side of having already done this.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If one wishes to politicise the courts, make openly partisan appointments and threaten judges with whom one disagrees, then <\/span>accuse the liberals<\/span><\/a> of having created ‘lawfare’.\u00a0 If you find yourself supporting a convicted felon for high office, you ironically have to <\/span>echo the old Marxist Bertolt Brecht<\/span><\/a>, in his cynical jibe at banks, concerning the whole judiciary: \u201cWhat is robbing a bank compared to founding a bank?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

There are several advantages of this strategy. It is also known, notably, as ‘<\/span>whataboutism’<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This undermining process leads to many people raised in liberal democratic societies \u2013 who have an expectation that politics is and should be carried out with at least a pretence of honesty \u2013 being shocked and confused. The distortions and allegations sow confusion which can lead into self-doubt (\u201chave we\/the Liberals really done this?\u201d) or even a sense of guilt, which retards a concerted principled response.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Hannah Arendt <\/span>went too far, but with some truth<\/span><\/a>, when she claimed that totalitarian regimes require not a brainwashed population but one so confused that they have lost faith in their own ability to find out the truth.<\/span><\/p>\n

Second, by suggesting moral equivalence, the cynical \u201cthey started it\u201d strategy <\/span>levels the moral ground<\/span><\/a> for <\/span>direct moves<\/span><\/a> to actually politicise the jury, sponsor partisan and propagandist media sources.<\/span><\/p>\n

Albert Camus again writes of this with prescient discernment in <\/span>his 1952 book responding to Hitlerism and Stalinism, <\/span>The Rebel<\/span><\/i><\/a>.\u00a0 He is talking of the extreme, inevitable consequence of authoritarian takeovers, in the torture and murdering of outgroups:<\/span><\/p>\n

The triumph of the man who kills or tortures is marred by only one shadow: he is unable to feel that he is innocent. Thus, he must create guilt in his victim so that, in a world that has no direction, universal guilt will authorise no other course of action than the use of force and give its blessing to nothing but success. When the concept of innocence disappears from the mind of the innocent victim himself, the value of power establishes a definitive rule over a world of despair.<\/span><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

An offshoot of this master strategy of \u201cthey started it\u201d is that\u00a0 if one wishes to overthrow democratic, constitutional governance to insert an illiberal, authoritarian leader, one must present oneself as the real defender of ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’,\u00a0 and of opaque values like ‘Western civilisation’ or ‘greatness’.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This strategy became vital to the Far Right after 1945.\u00a0 After the monstrosities committed by Hitler and Mussolini became known to the outside world, no one who still wanted to defend ethnonationalist authoritarian rule <\/span>could actually <\/span>say <\/span><\/i>that this was what they supported<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For two generations at least, until the historical memory failed, <\/span>Far Right activists needed to proceed carefully<\/span><\/a> or <\/span>maintain a resentful silence<\/span><\/a>, waiting patiently.<\/span><\/p>\n

The result today, after due time has elapsed and liberal democracies have failed to keep the memory of Nazism and fascism alive, is what historian <\/span>Timothy Snyder calls ‘schizofascism’<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Vladimir Putin of Russia has effectively<\/span><\/a> destroyed the free press, shut down all real opposition, and ended free and open democratic elections in his country.\u00a0 He has courted support from <\/span>Far Right extremists<\/span><\/a> like <\/span>Aleksandr Dugin<\/span><\/a> and <\/span>ruthlessly eliminated critics<\/span><\/a>, inside and outside of ‘the Motherland’.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet, when Putin\u2019s tanks rolled into the sovereign territory of Ukraine, <\/span>many bore ‘anti-Nazi’ slogans on their flanks<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Intellectuals like Martin Heidegger, <\/span>who had been Nazi Party members<\/span><\/a> and legitimised Hitler and his minions to wider society, deftly presented themselves after 1945 as persecuted opponents or even critics of the regime.<\/span><\/p>\n

All the while, they maintained that the fascist destruction of liberal democratic societies had an \u201cinner truth and greatness\u201d which should, given time, return\u2014as well as holding to the regime\u2019s virulent antisemitism.<\/span><\/p>\n

Once again, the effect of confusion caused by such deceitful uses of language is politically invaluable for the Far Right.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

An opposition which can be made to doubt whether the Far Right takeover of a democratic nation is actually a benign exercise, in line with its core values, is an opposition which is completely disoriented and disabled.<\/span><\/p>\n

A further strategy which is vital to legitimising Far Right takeovers of democracies \u2013 for long enough to conquer the \u201ccommanding heights\u201d of executive, judiciary, legislative, military and police powers \u2013 is implicit in what we\u2019ve now already laid out. <\/span>Authoritarian activists must work over time to ‘deconstruct’ or dismantle the distinctions between peace and war, and to present peacetime life as a form of ‘battle’ in which their own increasingly extreme measures are necessary.<\/span><\/p>\n

We see this in President Trump\u2019s latest attempts to present Democratic cities in the US as ‘<\/span>war-ravaged’ or ‘battlegrounds’<\/span><\/a>\u00a0requiring the urgent need to <\/span>send the military<\/span><\/a> into these alleged war zones \u2013 a move which may of course provoke the kind of violence he claims to be seeking to prevent and legitimise or license the invocation of emergency powers.<\/span><\/p>\n

This distortion of basic language also plays out in attempts to demonise <\/span>all peaceful protestors<\/span><\/a> against the new regime as ‘violent’ and ‘crazed’ or ‘extremist’ \u2013 if not members or stooges of the ultimate spectre and illegitimate enemy, ‘<\/span>Antifa’<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Trump himself has echoed Far Right content online, dehumanising his opponents as ‘<\/span>vermin’<\/span><\/a>, as well as decrying immigrants for \u201c<\/span>poisoning the blood<\/span><\/a>\u201d of Americans.\u00a0 These were both <\/span>tropes at the heart of Goebbels\u2019 and Hitler\u2019s propagandistic arsenal<\/span><\/a>. This arsenal (metaphor intended) presented the <\/span>Jews as ‘parasites’<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and <\/span>biological threats<\/span><\/a>, in ways which in due course enabled their extermination as an act of ‘<\/span>racial hygiene’<\/span><\/a> protecting the German ‘people’ (vo<\/em><\/span>lk<\/span><\/i>).<\/span><\/p>\n

Such language, <\/span>and the shocking reality today of boots on the ground in blue states<\/span><\/a>, has been long prepared by the acceptance as normal of ‘culture wars’ in Western democracies. \u00a0 The road to authoritarian takeover has a thousand small cultural as well as political steps.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was <\/span>the 19th century Jewish poet Heinrich Heine<\/span><\/a>\u00a0who said, prophetically, that when they start by burning books, they will end by burning people.\u00a0 Today, what we are seeing unfold in real time is that when convinced political partisans in democracies start by distorting language to normalise warlike hostility and false equivalence, they seem set to end democracy itself.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This article was\u00a0originally published by\u00a0<\/em>360info<\/a>. It is republished under\u00a0Creative Commons<\/a>. Minor changes have been made for style, punctuation and capitalisation.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Photo: ‘No Kings! Covid 45’ by Seth Anderson<\/a> (Flickr, CC<\/a>)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The world finds itself in a cultural setting in which large swathes of democratic countries place their faith in faux<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":775,"featured_media":15872,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[755,386,776,72],"coauthors":[727],"class_list":["post-15869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-law-politics","tag-authoritarianism","tag-extremism","tag-far-right","tag-language"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/775"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15869"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15869\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15874,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15869\/revisions\/15874"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15869"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=15869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}