***

### The importance of language

Language is a mechanism where symbols and words are exchanged between individuals to communicate and express what they feel and think. Language, throughout the years, has made it easier for our communities to evolve peacefully by using negotiations, and avoiding looting as well as violent reactions when there is a misunderstanding. However, language can also be corrupted with the goal of controlling individuals. Language is defined as: > The method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a structured and conventional way. | [Source](https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/language) Using language as an instrument for political control can end up dividing, deceiving and confusing a lot of people. It is common to see some governments with totalitarian tendencies with an emotional speech, trying to trigger the sensitive side of the people, creating an enemy to blame for anything that goes wrong and further exploiting these circumstance to manipulate historical facts for their benefit. These leaders always manage to position themselves above the law, gaining a sort of mystical aura for the naive followers.

For years Venezuelan politicians has been using a style of communication where they are constantly disrespecting and even insulting anyone who doesn’t support them, clearly dividing the country in two, and developing what looks like a strong bond with only one part of the country. This way, any action they take will always be justified by a significant proportion of the people, regarding if what they are doing is moral or not, so much so that it begins to degenerate into a modern totalitarian system, obtaining undemocratic results through “democratic” means. Since it surely must be difficult to use force and violence because there are many ways to expose the violent events when there is abuse coming from the government, they identify the need to resort to language as a method of controlling people’s perception (although this doesn’t completely stop them from using physical oppression). This is part of a long process where lies are abundant to change the history and explain facts in a distorted way in order to influence the present and the future. The goal of this is to confuse, making it difficult for people to understand the basics of what is affecting the country.

*** Dividing the people can easily increase the hostility and throwing insults can end up being a common occurrence, little by little, the people supporting the government start to dehumanize everyone who thinks different. It also serves to glorify the leaders, so that the whole country observes them as beings that are above any regular person, and that there is no doubt every single one of their ideas is justified because they believe it will bring general welfare and a lot of happiness for the society and even to the world. One example of this dehumanization came from a government official called Roy Chanderton, when he said that the heads of any member from the opposition were empty and therefore, a bullet wouldn’t make any sound when going through it. It sounds very harsh, but it really happened in a government sponsored TV show: > “The sound produced in a squalid head is like a click because the skull is empty. So it goes through fast,” he said with a smirk on a late-night state TV chat show. | [Source](https://www.reuters.com/article/venezuela-diplomat/venezuela-envoy-sorry-for-joke-about-bullets-striking-opponents-idINKBN0M900Z20150313) Notice the term “squalid”, this is a common way they have to refer to anyone who doesn’t support them. This hate is obviously transmitted and later on, adopted by the population. There is not a day when government people don’t try to dehumanize the opposition.

On the other hand, to solve the supposed economic war, help the people, save humanity from the "cruel capitalism", and bring joy and happiness to everyone, the leader cannot be a regular human anymore, it must be a kind of supreme being with superior capabilities, and just as the language is used to attack, insult and dehumanize anyone who doesn’t support the government, it is also used to glorify their leaders. Everything from paintings, statues, songs are employed as means to exaggerate the qualities of their leaders. In the case of Chavez they literally called him “supreme commander”, sort of like a cult, or perhaps, it is precisely like a cult. Therefore, it is clear there is a great challenge that consists in stopping this type of manipulative language because this is not something that is made with good intentions. This is a strategy designed to control the language of individuals and in that way, manipulate their perception of reality, because for example, when people talk about a “fair price” (which is a term used by the government to justify their intervention in the market, causing stores to go bankrupt), people don’t mention the reasoning behind that fair price, probably they don’t even understand it, all they care is that its purpose is to solve the economic disaster, and by adopting this interpretation then it certainly seems like a positive thing to implement, without really thinking about the implications a controlled price could have in the hypothetical store. It is important to remember that having a currency exchange control creates a lot of economic distortions that aren’t easy to handle, and businesses have end up in bankruptcy due to strictly controlled prices of certain products. There are even groups of government supporters that organize themselves using social media and especially twitter, and they join forces to report and sabotage any store selling products without a “fair price”, this will probably escalate in the coming days after the new economic measures announced recently are reflected in the market. In short words, these economic measures can be summarized like this: > In addition to lopping five zeros off of Venezuela’s unit of account, the sovereign bolivar is supposed to be linked to the petro, Venezuela’s cryptocurrency, which is supposed to be anchored to a barrel of oil. So, if the sovereign bolivar works as advertised, Venezuela would move from issuing an irredeemable fiat currency to issuing a commodity-backed redeemable currency. | [Source](https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevehanke/2018/08/18/venezuelas-great-bolivar-scam-nothing-but-a-face-lift/#2cdf3c044c23) The impact of this will begin in Monday 20 of August, and Tuesday 21 of August. So it is very likely major news about Venezuela are going to be released very soon.

### Conclusion

Totalitarian governments are always in search for any method they can use to keep the people under control, manipulating them through the use of language is a very effective way because it doesn’t require violence nor it requires many resources, it only requires practice when expressing certain ideas in a certain way to achieve a particular impact on people’s psyche, and obviously the only way to stop this is to be aware of it, and being capable of identifying these manipulations before they start to have any kind of influence.

#### Authored by: @dedicatedguy *** Images sources [1](https://www.pexels.com/photo/marketing-man-person-communication-362/) , [2](https://unsplash.com/photos/gLtxrJ8UQIY) , [3](https://unsplash.com/photos/HLA3TAFQuQs) ## Click on the coin to join our Discord Chat ##

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