Bad Language.

There are probably thousands of books that have been written about Germany's descent into the embrace of Nazism from just as many different angles. I've probably read at least one-hundred of them.

These various volumes look at:
The failures of the Weimar.
The fear of communism.
Germany's millennia-long history of anti-semitism.
The psychic evisceration and humiliation of Versailles.
The eugenic belief in Aryan superiority.

Viktor in 1961.

The best book I've read about the descent into Nazism was written by Viktor Klemperer. Klemperer was a university philologist. He studied language itself, the use of language to sway people. And, of course, the manipulation of language for political ends.

His book "LTI--Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen," "The Language of the Third Reich: A Philologists Notebook," is as dense as a soufflé made by a masochist. Each page is work. This ain't no beach read.

But what Klemperer does in these pages is what we today in amerrykaka should be doing. He examines, closely, semantics to see how power was being imposed upon people. How hitler's will was triumphing.

As you can see from the Wikipedia examples I posted here, such language was everywhere in Germany during the thousand-years of Hitler, which lasted just twelve.

All social organizations, your family, your business, your clients, your department, and yes, the tump misministration use language both semantically and semiotically. There's dictionary meaning and there is usually deeper symbolic meaning. 

Here's an example of what I mean: For five years I worked for a big bank in New York. I saw the client pretty much twice a week for five years. The marketing department was on the 18th Floor. The executives (who had to approve TV spots) were on the 3rd Floor. Even so, my client always said, "We have to go up to see the executives." I'd say, "You mean down. They're on 3, we're on 18. They're below us." My line of thinking was dismissed quickly.

Our job now as amerrycants is to notice and call out LARF (the Language of Amerikan Racist Fascism.) 

The superlatives--greatest economy.
The accusations--a domestic terrorist.
The calumnies--reaching for his gun.
The interjections--'real' (as in not a real american.)
The diction and word choice--homeland (most tautologically can't fit in. This isn't their home.)

Here's one annotation I made of an article in Wednesday's Times. 

We need to learn how to do this for ourselves. Every day.
To understand what's happening.
And how we're being manipulated by LARF into nazis.
You and me: werewolfed into nazi 2.0.

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By the way, if you can no longer read, Stan Neumann's one-hour and 42 minute documentary on Klemperer is linked here.