How the Republicans Use Language to Undermine Democracy

[Galraedia]

"The Republican Party is pursuing tactics which are heavily similar to those used by the Nazis as they sought to destabilize and overthrow the Weimar government. The party is deliberately warping language, denuding the words they use of their meaning, so they are converted into mere labels denoting horror or disapproval. These labels are then used to marginalize and weaken adversaries. If the people making the accusations were held to the original definitions of the words they use, they would clearly be uttering libelous falsehoods, but in today's atmosphere of degraded language, we are witnessing a remarkable phenomenon, where empty words without meaning fly like stones and have a tremendously destructive impact. The whole arc is something like this:


‪1.‬Take a word, and scoop out its meaning.
‪2.‬Convert the word into a mere contentless label now denoting “a bad, horrible person to be excluded from our community”.
‪3.‬Teach or compel others to believe these labels unquestioningly without realizing or caring about their lack of content.
‪4.‬Apply this word to an individual with the goal of marginalizing or weakening him, and with a radical disregard for the falsity the allegation would have if the word still had meaning.
‪5.‬Weaken the individual or drive him from power by causing enough people to believe the applicability of the empty label."

.....Continue: http://www.spectacle.org/1009/language.html

[ixion]

1. then on to the next chapter: Using re-defined words to frame the debate

And the only reason this one-two sucker punch works is because "journalists" don't point out the fact that they're re-defining words in the first place, nor do they bother to call them on the wild logical fallacies in the premise of that frame.

[msongs]

2. and too many of the redefined people (Democratic Party USA Inc for example) don't fight back nt

[ixion]

3. yep, exactly

which makes them accessories by proxy.

[applegrove]

4. They did that to the word "liberal". Because Liberal democracies won the cold war.

[libinnyandia]

5. liberty

When I hear the word "liberal" I think of liberty. We can't have liberty, can we?