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eppur_se_muova

(36,227 posts)
Tue Jan 25, 2022, 08:40 AM Jan 2022

Trump keeps saying 'enemy of the people' -- but the phrase has a very ugly history (BizInsider)

Funny how the GOP, once so virulently, stridently anti-Communist, has adopted so much of the Communist playbook. Remember how, in "Animal Farm" the pigs eventually replaced the farmer ?



Trump keeps saying ‘enemy of the people’ — but the phrase has a very ugly history

Veronika Bondarenko
Feb 27, 2017, 1:25 PM

Over the last two weeks, President Donald Trump has repeatedly referred to media outlets that he dubbed the "fake news media" as "the enemy of the American People."

Trump repeated the attack at a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday, saying, "They are the enemy of the people."

The phrase "the enemy of the people" has a long history that Trump may or may not have known about. {SURPRISE!}

Over the couse of the last century, it has been used repeatedly by dictators and autocrats to delegitimize foreign governments, opposition parties, and dissenters.

Though the phrase dates back to Roman times and the reign of Emperor Nero (who was declared "an enemy of the people" by the Roman Senate), it came into use in the modern period during the French Revolution. Ennemi du peuple was used to refer to those who disagreed with the new French government during the "Reign of Terror," a period during which thousands of revolutionairies were executed by guillotine.

While it was featured as the name of a Henrik Ibsen play, its next prominent use was by the Nazis. During the Third Reich's rule in Germany, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels referred to Jews as "a sworn enemy of the German people" who posed a risk to Adolf Hitler's vision for the country, according to The Washington Post.

It gained its widest use by Joseph Stalin during the early years of the Soviet Union. In the nation's early years, Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin used the term vrag naroda (enemy of the nation/people) to refer to those who disagreed with the ideologies pushed forth by the Bolshevik government and, later, adopted by the newly-formed Soviet Union. This could include anyone from the clergy who did not want to adopt state-enforced atheism to writers to political opposition that questioned the ideologies of the new government. Later picked up by Stalin, such a designation could mean immediate imprisonment or removal to a labour camp.
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more: https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-president-trumps-phrase-an-enemy-of-the-people-2017-2
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Trump keeps saying 'enemy of the people' -- but the phrase has a very ugly history (BizInsider) (Original Post) eppur_se_muova Jan 2022 OP
Good information. sop Jan 2022 #1
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