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Uit Language in Thought and Action,
door S.I. Hayakawa. Chapter 13 The two-valued orientation The Two-Valued Orientation in Politics Under a two-party political system such as we have in the United States, there is abundant occasion for uttering two-valued pronouncements. The writer has of ten listened to political speeches carried by sound-trucks in crowded Chicago streets and he has been impressed with the thoroughness with which the Republicans (or Democrats) have been castigated and the Democrats (or Republicans) praised. Not a shadow of faint praise or even of extenuation is offered to the opposing party. When the writer asked a candidate for state representative why this was so, he was told, "Among our folks, it don't pay to be subtle." Fortunately, most voters regard this two-valuedness of political debate as "part of the game," especially around election time, so that it does not appear to have uniformly harmful consequences; overstatements on either side are at least partially canceled out by overstatements on the other. Nevertheless, there remains a portion of the electorate - and this portion is by no means confined to the uneducated - who take the two-valued orientation seriously. These are the people (and the newspapers) who speak of their opponents as if they were enemies of the nation rather than fellow-Americans with differing views as to what is good for the nation. On the whole, however, a two-valued orientation in polities is difficult to maintain in a two-party system of government. The parties have to cooperate with each other between elections and therefore have to assume that members of the opposition are something short of fiends in human form. The public, too, in a two-party system, sees that the dire predictions of Republicans regarding the probable results of Democratic rule, and the equally dire predictions of the Democrats regarding Republican rule, are never more than partially fulfilled. Furthermore, criticism of the administration is not only possible, it is energetically encouraged by the opposition. Hence the majority of people can never quite be convinced that one party is "wholly good" and the other "wholly bad." But when a nation's traditions (or its lack of traditions ) permit a political party to feel that it is so good for the country that no other party has any business existing - and such a party gets control - there is immediate silencing of opposition. In such a case the party dec1ares its philosophy to be the official philosophy of the nation and its interest to be the interests of the people as a whole. "Whoever is an enemy of the National Socialist party," as the Nazis said, "is an enemy of Germany." Even if you loved Germany greatly, but still didn't agree with the National Socialists as to what was good for Germany, you were liquidated. Under the one-party system, the two-valued orientation, in its most primitive form, becomes the official national outlook. Because the Nazis carried the two-valued orientation to extremes never before reached by apolitical party-extremes of ridiculousness as well as extremes of barbarity-it is worth while recalling, in the context of semantic study, some of the techniques they used. First of all, the two-valued assumption was explicitly stated over and over again:
Anyone or anything that stood in the way of Hitler's wishes was "Jewish," "degenerate," "corrupt," "democratic," "internationalist," and, as a crowning insult, "non-Aryan." On the other hand, everything that Hitler chose to call "Aryan" was by definition noble, virtuous, heroic, and altogether glorious. Courage, self-discipline, honor, beauty, health, and joy were "Aryan." Whatever he called upon people to do, he told them to do "to fulfill their Aryan heritage." . An incredible number of areas were examined in terms of this two-valued orientation: art, books, people, calisthenics, mathematics, physics, dogs, cats, architecture, morals, cookery, religion. If Hitler approved, it was "Aryan"; if he disapproved, it was "non-Aryan" or "Jewish-dominated."
Because the Japanese were, before and during World War II, on friendly terms with Hitler's Germany, they were classified as "Aryans." At one point in the war, when Germany was hoping for Mexico as an ally, the German ambassador in Mexico City announced that Mexicans were members of the Nordic race who had emigrated by way of the Bering Straits and come south! But the greatest error in c1assification that the Nazis made was when they labeled certain theories in physics as "non-Aryan," and deprived of his property, position, and citizenship the originator of those theories, Albert Einstein. Hitler could hardly have guessed then that those same theories would have military consequences beyond his wildest dreams. The connection between the two-valued orientation and combat is clearly apparent in the history of Nazism. From the moment Hitler achieved power, he told the German people that they were surrounded by enemies. Long before World War II started, the German people were called upon to act as if a war were already in progress. Everyone, including women and children, was pressed into "war" service of one kind or another. In order to keep the combative sense from fizzling out for want of tangible enemies before the start of actual warfare, the people were kept fighting at home against alleged enemies within the gates: principally the Jews, but also anyone else whom the Nazis happened to dislike. Education, too, was made to serve the purposes of war and to create a warlike spirit:
The official National Socialist orientation never permitted a relaxation of the two-valued conviction that nothing is too good for the "good," and nothing is too bad for the "bad," and that there is no middle ground. "Whoever is not for us is against us!" 1 The National Socialist pronouncements quoted in this chapter are from a collection of such utterances by Adolf Hitler and his associates, compiled by Clara Leiser and published under the title Lunacy Becomes Us (1939). Naar Hayakawa, contents 
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