NewSpeak

I had a troubling thought today. We are walking down the road to NewSpeak. We have seen this for some time, but have probably not realized it for what it is. We call them Bushisms. We look at how he speaks and wonder how a man so ignorant could ever have risen to power. We miss the subtlety. His language is closely based on english, but has a greatly reduced and simplified vocabulary and grammar. It makes heavy use of tired metaphors, pretentious rhetoric, and meaningless words and phrases. It is a language of black and white, removing all shades of gray. You are with us, or you are against us. These are the characteristics of NewSpeak. It exists, and it is in use, and there is a significant subset of the population it appeals to.

Invasion is Liberation.
Dissent is UnAmerican.
Ignorance is Strength.

Welcome to Oceania.

Echoes of the Past...

I just found a fairly direct link between a portion of modern neoconservative ideology and Nazi Germany. This link ties in through McCarthyism.

Modern Neoconservatism has strong ties to McCarthyism, in many senses it is a revival of McCarthyism. It values accusations over proof, demands names and confessions from the accused, and practices guilt by association. This is evident in its foreign policy, where it literally bought supposed arab terrorists from foreign warlords on no more evidence than their accusations and condemned them to imprisonment without trial. It is also evident in its domestic rhetoric, where once again liberals are being attacked as "pinko commies", "traitors", and "enemy sympathizers". Not to mention being blamed for loosing Vietnam, rather than credited with extracting us from that quagmire.

McCarthyism is also the source of a slogan that neoconservatives would very much agree with, judging by their rhetoric: "Better Dead than Red". It is this phrase which provides a direct link to Nazi Germany. This slogan was first heard in its original german form, "Lieber tot als rot". It was a slogan created by Josef Goebbels, Nazi Germany's Propaganda Minister, at the end of World War II. It was a slogan created by our enemies to use against one of our allies.

A point of interest

A very good catch here about one of the GOP's latest framing moves, expanding on earlier framing relating to people of faith, and the democratic party as being against people of faith:

http://www.gwaihir.org/archives/2005/05/too_stupid_to_r.html

Demagogy

Can anyone recommend a good extended text on demagogy and its methods? Preferably outside of the fictional context, I've already downloaded a pdf of 1984 and several other dystopian novels, so I think I'm set on that front... I'd like more of a scholarly analysis, even possibly something along the lines of a how-to. (How-to's also make very good how-to-recognize and how-to-counters.) I *think* possibly I remember sections of Hitler's "Mein Kampf" dealing with his own approaches to demagogy, and he was undeniably an expert on the subject, so I might have to look for an english translation of that... any others?

Oh, there's that new one too... "Don't think of an elephant", or something like that... that sort of deals with some of what I'm looking for. But for some reason I have a feeling I would be better off looking into older sources, I think this phenomenon was better understood in the past, much like the art of rhetoric itself.