Secured totalitarianism
In his “Critical Dictionary,” Rudolph Bauer deciphers the language of a new fascism.
Language and writing express thoughts and feelings. Sentences formed from words can flatter or hurt. When it comes to the use and meaning of terms, communication becomes a sharp blade. This applies to the private sphere as well as to the political stage, where the end has long since justified the means. People rant, insult, exaggerate, and often lie so much that the beams bend. It is bad when statements no longer have anything to do with concrete actions. When totalitarian intentions hide in and behind the terms used, it becomes extremely dangerous for society. In June of this year, Bremen artist Rudolph Bauer published his “Critical Dictionary of Colorful Totalitarianism, Volume 1: A to H” with pad-Verlag. In it, he deciphers the language of a new fascism that has attached labels such as justice and freedom to its democratic camouflage. Volume 2 has now been published.
[This book review posted on 10/29/2024 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.manova.news/artikel/gesichert-totalitar.]
The arsenal of linguistic and contextual distortions, whose use in public and political discourse has long been tried and tested, holds surprises that Bauer meticulously deciphers in his reference work. One example should suffice as an illustration.
Individualization
In 100 pages, Bauer analyzes terms and PR formulas from I to N that have been spewed out by the ranks of the political establishment and are not only received by urban, woke, and bourgeois subcultures, but are also used to glorify war as a path to peace or the deaths of thousands in bombings and shootings as a means of saving lives from death by terrorist attacks.
An apparently harmless term such as individualization or individualism, to which Rudolph Bauer devotes eight lines in his dictionary and cross-references to loneliness, lifestyle, and identity politics, contains socially and politically explosive potential:
“Antonym of collectivization/collectivism. Of comparable relevance to biologization; while the latter term reduces humans to their biological nature in a one-dimensional way, the emphasis on individualism reinforces alienation from society and atomization within society. Commonalities are ignored, self-optimization becomes a (self-)imposed compulsion, and social differences appear to be natural.”
Following the trail laid down by identity politics, a picture slowly emerges of a social transformation that can be seen in connection with the banking and real estate crisis that began in the US in 2007 and spread into a global financial crisis. In response, “the state has abandoned its policy of social equality in favor of promoting symbolic identity politics.”
This identity politics is a veiled “policy of privileging a specific group of people who have a particular cultural, ethnic, religious, social, or sexual characteristic (identity), which usually also manifests itself in a specific lifestyle.” The declared political goal is “to grant members of these groups a higher level of social recognition, improve their social position, and strengthen their political influence.” It goes on to say:
“If the milieu-specific preferences of the economically better-off are given special consideration, this type of identity politics corresponds to the power principle of ‘divide and rule.’”
The political consequence can be easily deduced from these statements, if it has not already been perceived as obvious: within democracy, the rule of the minority over the majority takes shape—in other words, tyranny.
A barricade
Imperialism, fascism, National Socialism, two world wars, and industrial mass murder have caused lasting ethical, spiritual, and social damage to Europe.
The intellectual bloodletting of the 20th century was so massive that it was almost impossible to compensate for. In the abstract present, the horizon of understanding for political, economic, and social contexts is threatened with leveling to zero.
Unbridled neoliberalism, which a large part of the formerly anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist subcultures have embraced as their raison d’être since the 1980s, has neutralized even the hostile worldviews of revolutionaries such as Vladimir Lenin and Che Guevara by transforming their manifestos, ideas, and faces into commodities, has been perfected as a global dictatorship of profit in the 21st century and, in the first peak phase of the fourth industrial revolution, has completed its total work of art by destroying critical thinking.
The linguistic and increasingly intellectual conformity of the population manifests itself in the concentration of the so-called elites from politics, business, science, culture, and the media, who, despite their supposed diversity and political differences, present themselves as a united front.
Packaged as an expertocracy that rarely speaks without contradiction, but with a great deal of subjunctive, it seeks to lull any deeper examination of geopolitical and domestic developments to sleep through propagandistic simplification of complex relationships, the accentuation of marginal aspects, and the exaggeration of the smallest fragments.
Keywords drown out arguments, slogans stifle discourse, and defamation silences dissent. Cultivating ignorance and indifference toward the consequences of the ruling regime’s actions as the political norm among the population is an indispensable strategic goal in order to have a free hand in shaping a new totalitarian system.
The tactical element is to replace fundamental openness to debate controversial positions with a radical rejection of any reasoned objection, thereby inciting a fight against political vitality. Rudolph Bauer’s “Critical Dictionary of Colorful Totalitarianism” is a gold mine in this respect, as it allows unexplored terrain to be explored and forgotten things to be remembered.
On the other hand, his explanations of political keywords should be seen as necessary linguistic criticism that facilitates the construction of intellectual barricades to withstand the onslaught of totalitarianism against reason and humanity. It is obvious that Bauer will follow up his first two issues with more. After all, the alphabet only ends with Z for “Zeit zum Widerstand” (Time for Resistance).