Originally a comment by Francis Boyle on A new power.

Canada: government by da feelz. Canadians (and everyone really) could do with a crash course in the relationship between sentimentalism and fascism. Unfortunately our standard cultural template for totalitarianism is 1984 and while Orwell had a keen understanding of bureaucracy and the ways it can be perverted I don’t think he had any real understanding of the way propaganda works. (Of course he understood how it was used – he practised it after all – but he didn’t consider it important. In the novel it’s just AI generated mush for keeping the proles in their place. Neither it nor the proles themselves are considered particularly interesting, something I found puzzling when I first read 1984 and I still find puzzling many decades later. Maybe someone with a better understanding of Orwell’s politics can explain it for me.)

Anyway lengthy asides aside, what I came here to say is that had Orwell paid as much attention to Goebbels as he did Stalin and his cronies he might have replaced the “two minutes hate” with a “two minutes love”. Goebbels knew that hate justified by a sentimentalised love is far more powerful than hate alone. The truth may be “a boot stamping on a human face – forever” but the lie that sustains it is the the image of the boot of the monstrous other stamping on the face of our most vulnerable again and again.