One of the most effective thought-terminating clichés is “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” It is particularly effective because it works on both people who are, let’s say, not extraordinarily intelligent, and on more intelligent people, people who you wouldn’t expect to fall for such simplistic tricks.
It is especially effective in hyper-polarized sociocultural environments, like the one we’re in currently, where people feel like they need to be on one or the other side of whatever.
If you’re unfamiliar with thought-terminating clichés, the term was popularized by Robert Jay Lifton in his seminal book about “thought reform,” i.e., brainwashing.
“The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.” — Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: a Study of Brainwashing in China
Thought-terminating clichés you might be familiar with include, but are not limited to, “you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists,” “trust the science,” “trust the plan,” “it’s not perfect, but it’s better than the alternative,” “it’s just common sense,” “freedom isn’t free,” “that’s just the way it is,” and the list goes on.
Thought-terminating clichés are designed to do exactly what it sounds like they are designed to do … terminate thought, particularly critical thought. They are typically deployed against you when you are challenging some item of official propaganda, or dogma, or reprehensible action, associated with or perpetrated by whatever “party,” “side,” “team,” or “cult” people think you’re a member of, or are trying to get you to shut the fuck up about.
Let me give you a concrete example.
I assume you’ve heard the latest news out of Germany, where the Intelligence service has designated the Alternativ für Deutschland party a “confirmed right-wing extremist group.” This designation will enable the German authorities to ban the AfD, which is currently the most popular party in Germany.
Yes, these are same German authorities who have prosecuted me for a so-called “hate crime” for tweeting the cover art of one of my books, and who banned that book, and who had me censored, and damaged my income and reputation as an author, and who are similarly persecuting numerous other “Covid dissidents” and government critics.
Obviously, I’m not a big fan of these authorities.
So I’m expected to be a fan of the AfD, which was the only political party in Germany that opposed the so-called “Covid measures,” because “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
The enemy of my enemy is not my friend.
The enemy of my enemy is exactly what my enemy (i.e., the German authorities) claim they are in this Guardian article.
“According to the BfV [i.e., Germany’s domestic Intelligence service], the AfD’s xenophobic stances based on an ‘ethnic-ancestry-based understanding’ of German identity are ‘incompatible with the free democratic basic order’ as indicated by the country’s constitution.
The spy agency added that the AfD ‘aims to exclude certain population groups from equal participation in society, to subject them to unconstitutional unequal treatment and thus to assign them a legally devalued status’.
It also said: ‘This exclusionary understanding of the people is the starting point and ideological basis for ongoing agitation against certain individuals or groups of people, through which they are defamed and despised indiscriminately and irrational fears and rejection are stirred up.’”
The irony here is that the German authorities, in describing the aims of the AfD, are describing exactly the totalitarian behaviors that they themselves indulged in during 2020-2023. The only difference being that the “individuals or groups of people” who were “excluded from equal participation in society,” “subjected to unconstitutional treatment,” and “indiscriminately defamed and despised,” were “the Unvaccinated,” the “mask refusers,” the “Covid deniers,” and other “Covid dissidents.”
I have written two entire books of essays documenting the grossly unconstitutional and totalitarian policies of the German authorities, so I won’t go on and on about it here. The point is, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz’s description of the AfD, and their obliviousness to how it describes themselves, would be comical, were it not so psychotic.
And the other point is, just because the BfV and the other German authorities are a bunch of liars and fascists, that doesn’t mean that everything they say is a lie, and it doesn’t make me a fan of the AfD.
