Language, Memory, & Soft Totalitarianism

The riots give us an excellent opportunity to see how the soft totalitarianism of the progressive left works.

Check out this tweet from an Associated Press reporter. The AP Stylebook is the standard reference book in most US newsrooms.

Feels like a good time to post AP’s guidance on the word looting: pic.twitter.com/hjxQWbSYAx

— Kimberlee Kruesi (@kkruesi) May 31, 2020

In other words, obscrue These Riot Days are accelerating the trends toward soft totalitarianism. The manipulation of language is a standard strategy for controlling the way people think. From my forthcoming book Live Not By Lies, here’s a passage taken from my interview with a Polish historian in Warsaw, Pawel Skibinski:

Skibiński focuses on language as a preserver of cultural memory. We know that communists forbade people to talk about history in unapproved ways. This is a tactic today’s progressives use as well, especially within universities.

What is harder for contemporary people to appreciate is how we are repeating the Marxist habit of falsifying language, hollowing out familiar words and replacing them with a new, highly ideological meaning. Propaganda not only changes the way we think about politics and contemporary life but it also conditions what a culture judges worth remembering.

I mention the way liberals today deploy neutral-sounding, or even positive, words like dialogue and tolerance to disarm and ultimately defeat unaware conservatives. And they imbue other words and phrases—hierarchy, for example, or traditional family—with negative connotations.

Recalling life under communism, the professor continues, “The people who lived only within such a linguistic sphere, who didn’t know any other way to speak, they could really start believing in this way of using of words. If a word carries with it negative baggage, it becomes impossible to have a discussion about the phenomenon.”

Teaching current generations of college students who grew up in the postcommunist era is challenging because they do not have a natural immunity to the ideological abuse of language. “For me, it’s obvious. I remember this false use of language. But for our students, it’s impossible to understand.”

Watch and listen for how the media — TV, radio, print — describe the rioters, and the riots. They’re going to start calling it an “uprising” — the New Yorker already has done so, and so has NBC News.

Watch also for how the rioting will be downplayed in favor of the real message, which is that America is a racist country.

The peaceful protest is entirely seperate from the rioting, you see. Though rioting seems to always happen at these protests. For years now. And there was that one where 5 cops were killed. And now cities are on fire. But it’s really peaceful, you understand, for the most part.

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) June 2, 2020

The New Yorker is on the social media scene puffing an SJW grifter who explains why white people getting upset over riots and looting, if they are carried out by black people, is a racist act:

You can spend many years reading many books to try to understand liberal modernity, or you can just watch this 24-second video. pic.twitter.com/KyJLKAuzKM

— Michael Knowles (@michaeljknowles) June 2, 2020

The (white, Democratic) attorney general of Massachusetts said today that the riots are an opportunity for moral growth:

“We have a once in a lifetime opportunity,” Healey said in a speech to the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce. “The challenge I pose to all of us this morning is: Will we seize it?

She referenced the protest and riots of the past few days over the death of George Floyd, a black man who died on May 25 after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for several minutes. “Yes, America is burning, but that’s how forests grow.”

Watch closely how elites manage the public discourse to gaslight us all into believing that we are not seeing what we’re seeing. Matt Walsh had an amazing series of tweets — gathered in one place here — about how the media covered anti-lockdown protests as selfish, reckless, even racist — but completely flipped the narrative when mass gatherings were in service of a cause the media endorse.

So what we’ve learned is that if you want to protest during a pandemic, do it safely by burning down buildings and beating the hell out of random bystanders. That way you’ll escape criticism from the media.

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) June 1, 2020

Get this: public health experts are now coming out in favor of mass protests, for political reasons. It’s insane! Here I have been pulling my hair out in my red state over conservatives who refused to wear masks, and who treated Covid-19 like it was a political thing, not a public health matter … and now here are left-wing public health experts treating Covid-19 like it’s a political thing!

Dozens of public health and disease experts have signed an open letter in support of the nationwide anti-racism protests.

“White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19,” they wrote.https://t.co/EewPNgDSu3

— NPR (@NPR) June 2, 2020

I was already suspicious of authority, but after this, I am even more radically skeptical.

(Note well: I acknowledge, and I deplore, that there have been multiple instances of police brutality against media covering protesters — see, for example, this shocking instance from Australian TV. The point of this post is to talk about how the narrative is being constructed, and how the culture’s memory of events of this week will be shaped.)

Here, Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has allowed looters to run rampant in Manhattan, answers a Jewish reporter’s very good question:

Hamodia reporter asks why protest is allowed when prayer services aren’t.@NYCMayor @BilldeBlasio: “400 years of American racism, I’m sorry, that is not the same question as the understandably aggrieved store owner or the devout religious person who wants to go back to services”

— Matthew Chayes (@chayesmatthew) June 2, 2020

And:

Bill de Blasio on Jewish funeral mourners: The time for warnings has passed, you will be arrested.

de Blasio on Jewish schools: Don’t even think about it.

de Blasio on churches, synagogues, etc.: Sorry, no.

de Blasio on Floyd protesters: All good