Harper's Newspeak
He loves naming laws with false slogans. (So do fascists).
In 1995 the Italian writer Umberto Eco, who grew up in Mussolini's Italy, wrote an essay on the eternal threat of fascism for the New York Review of Books.
Eco explained that fascism, like any totalitarian system, depended on certain features to poison the political landscape.
It could sprout, warned Eco, like an invasive weed in any place where careless citizens let liberty erode.
To Eco the central ingredients of eternal fascism included a cult of heroism; an irrational worship of technology; a faith in action and action plans (politics as permanent warfare); a fear of difference (all fascist governments are racist); leadership that bullies the masses; an obsession over some kind of international plot (such as ISIS taking over the world) and a belief that parliamentary government is rotten to the core.
A fascist government also bent plain language intoNewspeak to converse with the people. Whether engineered by socialists, capitalists or dictators, all Newspeak, noted Eco, must make "use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning." In essence, fascism suspends thinking with lies and false language.
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