totalitarian language

I’ve been reading Victor Klemperer’s journal (Tagebücher 1933–1941 and Tagebücher 1942–45). It has numerous philological discussions on the evolution of German (LTI: lingua tertii imperii, a book he published in 1947 on the basis of his notes). I don’t have Jean-Pierre Faye’s Les langages totalitaires at hand (1972; 2d ed. 2004) to see what use if any he made of Klemperer’s work. As Camus said in Poésie 44 (1944): “mal nommer un objet, c’est ajouter au malheur de ce monde.” American language is evolving under the kind of political pressures that existed under the nazis. Even without the kind of economic pressures that existed in Germany in the twenties and thirties, our president speaks of “great victories to come” very much like Hitler. Hitler talked about “meine Soldaten” while Trump mentions “his generals.” Two small items among dozens or hundreds of rhetorical and semantic changes. There is nothing surprising in the existence of cracks and shifts in our language. It becomes worrisome when they reveal it to be a dried, thin shell that we cannot trust to carry us and will let us fall at any given moment into the lava flow.