Saturday, July 11, 2020

Newspeak

     "I may come down from my garret with a plan in view, intending the first move towards the 'liquidation of the bourgeoisie' about which I had read in my Marxist textbook.  But this plan will not survive the first exchange of words with my chosen victim, and the attempt to impose it or to speak the language that announces it will have the same effect as the wind in Aesop's fable, competing with the sun to remove the coat of a traveller.  Ordinary language warms and softens; Newspeak freezes and hardens."

     Roger Scruton, Fools, frauds and firebrands:  thinkers of the New Left (London:  Bloomsbury, 2015), 11.  The quotation marks around "liquidation of the bourgeoisie" appear with the first occurrence of the phrase in the previous paragraph, not here.

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