"Revolution begins from an act of falsification"

"the first concern of revolutionary movements on the left has been to capture the language, to change reality by changing the way we describe and therefore the way we perceive it.  Revolution begins from an act of falsification, exemplified equally in the French and the Russian Revolutions, as in the cultural revolutions of the contemporary campus."

"revolutions begin by encasing reality in Newspeak, and thereafter are haunted by the fear that reality will break out of its case and become visible as it truly is."

     Roger Scruton, Fools, frauds and firebrands:  thinkers of the New Left (London and New York:  Bloomsbury, 2015), 226, 228.  230:  "Behind [Perry] Anderson's polemic there advances a desperate attempt to save 'socialist truth' from the malicious encroachments of reality."  Cf. the "many a lapse into bourgeois truthfulness" of p. 229.