Louis de Saussure, Peter Schulz - Manipulation And Ideologies in the Twentieth Century; Discourse, Language, Mind (2005).jpg

One of the interesting developments in discourse analysis is its increasing interest in the explicit description and account of politically relevant text and talk and their relationships to various forms of social cognition. The collection of studies edited by Louis de Saussure and Peter Schulz is among those books that focus on this interface between political discourse and political cognition. It does so specifically by examining one of the most conspicuous forms of discursive power abuse – manipulation – as well as its relationship with ideologies, especially the totalitarian right-wing ideologies of the 20th century.

DANIEL WEISS follows the Moscow Semantic School in his comparison of
Fascism and Stalinism in ''Stalinist vs. fascist propaganda: How much do
they have in common?'' (251-274). In particular he investigates two aspects,
''the linguistic manifestation of the mechanisms of terror and of the cult
of personality'' (252). He finds that in contrast to Stalinist propaganda,
Nazi propaganda is an arbitrary discourse, e.g., at times valuing the old,
at other times despising it. On the other hand, ''Nazi terror appeared more
rational...since its victims were predictable. Stalinist terror, on the
contrary, seemed irrational in that it could target just about anyone''
(265). Weiss concludes that ''the essence of totalitarian speech does not
lie in its manipulative force; its main goal is rather to overwhelm the
audience by a permanent flow of emotionally loaded and often violent, but
highly repetitious speech'' (269).