The Authoritarian Playbook, Part 1: Language as a Weapon

From “Untermensch” to “fake news” — words don’t just describe. They dehumanize and prepare the ground for violence.

“Every dictatorship begins with a dictionary.”

The Nazis had Untermensch. Stalin had “enemies of the people.” Rwanda’s hate radio called Tutsi inyenzi — “cockroaches.” Today, leaders recycle the trick with labels like “fake news” and “enemy of the people.”

Words are the dry wood. Violence is the match. Question is: who’s striking it — and when?

Table of Contents

The Nazi original

Untermensch (subhuman). Volksgemeinschaft (the “people’s community”). Lebensraum (room to expand at others’ expense). That vocabulary drew a hard line: an in-group that belonged, and an out-group that could be pushed out, worked to death, or worse.

Language set the legal table — the Nuremberg Race Laws (15 September 1935) — long before the mass shootings of 1941 or the killing centers that followed in 1941–42.

Stalinism and beyond

Moscow minted its own labels: “wreckers,” “kulaks,” “enemies of the people.” In Mao’s China, “black elements” and “capitalist roaders” did the same job. Once tagged, the verdict arrived first; the trial came after, as theater. The word did the real work.

Rwanda’s radio lesson

In April–July 1994, Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines repeated inyenzi until neighbors picked up machetes. Metaphor to massacre in roughly one hundred days. No footnotes on air; just names sharpened into knives.

The playbook today

Language is still the cheapest weapon on the shelf.

In the United States, Donald Trump repeatedly called the press “enemies of the people” — at least 36 times between 2017 and 2019 — and branded critical reporting “fake news.” That isn’t about information. It’s about reducing and dividing until distrust feels normal and repression feels… reasonable.

📌 The three rules of authoritarian language
Dehumanize — turn people into pests or problems.
Invert — call repression “security,” censorship “protection.”
Simplify — swap nuance for a slogan; repeat until it sounds like truth.

Verdict: If you hear the same word too often, it isn’t language — it’s programming.

Why it matters

Words write laws before lawmakers do.
Labels justify action: once a script sticks, violence looks logical.
Democracies rot from the mouth inward: borrow the enemy’s vocabulary and you import the infection.

Final word

Every authoritarian regime carries a dictionary in one hand and a weapon in the other. The order of use is what changes.

This is Part One of Citizen of Europe’s ongoing series, The Authoritarian Playbook — step by step, exposing how the tactics repeat. Next: how “temporary” emergencies become permanent rule.

Sources

Victor Klemperer, LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism.
UN/ICTR documentation on RTLM broadcasts during the 1994 Rwanda genocide.
Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and Reuters Institute reporting on “enemy of the people” rhetoric, 2017–2019.

Disclaimer: This article synthesizes historical and contemporary sources for analysis. It does not equate all movements directly; it highlights recurring authoritarian patterns in language.

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