The rhetoric of an authoritarian state or leader always disappoints.

When the authoritarian speaks they drain words of colour and life; the meaning, channelling Lewis Carroll, is pressed into service according to authoritarian need:

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master—that’s all.’

And so we turn to examples, all of which use words in ways that confound common understanding and meaning.

China’s President Xi, influenced by a Marxist and Maoist tradition, prizes the objective, scientific and impartial. Speaking to the World Health Assembly in Geneva recently on COVID-19, President Xi was reported by the ABC as telling the world that investigations into COVID-19 should be:

conducted in an objective and impartial way … This works needs a scientific and professional attitude, and needs to be led by the WHO … And the principles of objectivity and fairness need to be upheld.

As rhetoric, it’s exhausting because the unstated premise is that if you doubt, question or disagree then, obviously you are not objective, not impartial, not scientific, not professional and not fair. It’s a thimble and pea trick, designed to establish a position that is not be challenged.

At the other end of the authoritarian spectrum, we have the blabbering populists for whom facts and science are utterly irrelevant.

To illustrate this, we turn to the last, the least and the worst, and look at a thread posted by the President of the United States on 31 May 2020. Commenting on protests that have racked his nation, President Trump apparently thought that what flames need is oil and fuel.