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To: Mind-numbed Robot; kennedy
That is why Linguist like Noam Chomsky have become so prominent in the leftist movement. Words influence and guide thought. Slavery becomes freedom. Poverty is character building, at least when the poverty is caused by socialist.

Fortunately, more research and discussion have shown that the kind of systematic exclusion of uncontrolled thoughts and undesirable intellectual processes aimed at (no, really, they really have!) by 20th-century totalitarians is actually not achievable. As long as noun-subjects have verbs that take an object, constructions of the form "Big Brother eats [insert favorite scatological category]" will always be possible.

The Russian Communists, on the eve of the October Revolution, spent all night arguing about what to call the ministries they were about to take over. Having spent a generation demonizing them in Communist propaganda, the Bolsheviks had to find a way to force people to think of the selfsame "organs" in a positive way after the Reds took them over.

19 posted on 02/27/2005 7:43:20 PM PST by lentulusgracchus ("Whatever." -- sinkspur)
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To: lentulusgracchus
...systematic exclusion of uncontrolled thoughts and undesirable intellectual processes ...

As your last paragraph shows, the left uses linguistics to gain and keep power. Once that is achieved there is little need to go to the trouble of "systematic exclusion" through linguistics. Then it is done by force.

23 posted on 02/27/2005 8:14:47 PM PST by Mind-numbed Robot (Not all things that need to be done need to be done by the government.)
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