A revealing guide to how dictators manipulate the masses through words

'The handbook that humanity needs right now' – Terry Szuplat, former speechwriter for Barack Obama

'Shot straight from the rhetorical hip of honesty and humanity, this will probably be one of the most important books published this year.' – David Marx Book Reviews

In this captivating history of language and power, speechwriter Guy Doza sets out how dictators have seized and maintained control of states through their mastery of oratory.

He shows how, despite their fearsome reputation, strongmen such as Julius Caesar, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini were surprisingly subtle and skillful in their speeches. Less notorious female tyrants (Ranavalona I, the ‘Mad Queen of Madagascar’ killed half of her subjects and Chairman Mao’s wife Jiang Qing was a propagandising murderer) were differently but equally manipulative.

As well as revealing the wordplay of each of 18 despots, Doza analyses the rhetorical techniques they shared to exert control. Attila the Hun and Napoleon Bonaparte, for instance, showered flattery on their troops and deliberately aggrandised their enemies. Zaire’s President Mobuto and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein grandly portrayed themselves as the father of their respective nations to nurture their ethos.

Irrespective of time, geography and language, dictators and their allies consistently reuse the same methods of persuasion. In a ‘post-truth’ age where simplified messages overpower sophisticated ones, The Language of Evil equips readers to spot the same tricks and techniques being used today by tomorrow’s would-be dictators.

The book features (among others):

Julius Caesar

Attila the Hun

Elizabeth I

Mussolini

Adolf Hitler

Joseph Stalin

Eva Perón

Saddam Hussein

Reviews

'The handbook that humanity needs right now – not simply to understand the dangerous rhetoric of demagogues, but how to resist it.' – Terry Szuplat, former policy speechwriter for President Barack Obama and author of Say It Well.

‘Whatever happens in the street, the populist mobs have to be fired up first. That’s where words come in. Guy Doza’s Language of Evil is a fascinating analysis of the speechifying that empowers tyranny through the malign careers of eighteen dictators, from Julius Caesar to Saddam Hussein.’ – Jonathon Green, Lexicographer

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