I used to think fonts were just about making things pretty.
Turns out—and this is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night, honestly—typography has been wielded as a weapon for centuries, maybe longer if you count proto-writing systems. The Nazis understood this better than most: when they came to power in 1933, they immediately embraced blackletter Fraktur typefaces as the “true German script,” positioning it against the “cosmopolitan” sans-serifs used by the Weimar Republic. Then, in a dizzying reversal in 1941, they banned Fraktur entirely, declaring it “Judenletters”—Jewish letters—claiming it had been corrupted by Jewish printers in the Middle Ages, which was historically nonsense but politically convenient. The shift happened almost overnight, and suddenly the Reich was all about Antiqua, the very typeface they’d condemned as foreign just years earlier.
Wait—maybe I should back up. Here’s the thing: control the letters, control the message. It’s not subtle.
When Revolution Literally Changed the Letterforms We Read
The French Revolution didn’t just guillotine aristocrats; it executed entire font families. Revolutionary printers abandoned ornate royal scripts for austere, rational typefaces that screamed Enlightenment values—Didot, with its stark contrasts and geometric precision, became the typographic embodiment of “liberté, égalité, fraternité.” I’ve seen specimens from 1790s Paris where you can practically feel the ideology radiating off the page. The old Civilité typefaces, which mimicked handwritten courtly scripts, were literally destroyed in some print shops, their metal letters melted down. This wasn’t accidental: the Committee of Public Safety understood that visual language shapes thought just as powerfully as spoken words, give or take some margin for individual resistance.
By 1794, you could measure political allegiance by someone’s choice of serifs.
The Bolsheviks ran a similar playbook two centuries later, though they had better technology and worse paper. In the 1920s, Soviet designers like El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko championed sans-serif Constructivist typography—clean, industrial, aggressively modern—as the visual vocabulary of the proletariat. Ornamental typefaces were “bourgeois decadence.” I guess it makes sense: if you’re trying to build a new society from scratch, you can’t very well do it in fonts that remind people of the Tsarist past. The state publishing house, Gosizdat, enforced strict typographic standards that equated geometric letterforms with political purity, which sounds absurd until you realize how effectively it worked.
The Alphabets That Empires Used to Erase Entire Cultures
Here’s where it gets darker, and honestly, harder to write about without getting angry. Colonial powers didn’t just impose languages—they imposed scripts. When Mustafa Kemal Atatürk replaced Arabic script with Latin alphabet in Turkey in 1928, it was framed as modernization, but it also severed an entire generation from their literary heritage overnight. Suddenly, everything written before 1928 became inaccessible unless you learned what was now effectively a foreign writing system. The same pattern played out across the former Ottoman territories and Soviet Central Asia, where Cyrillic replaced Arabic and sometimes Latin, sometimes both, depending on Moscow’s geopolitical calculations.
The violence was quiet but total.
Or consider Ireland, where the Gaelic type—those distinctive insular letterforms with their elaborate capitals—became a nationalist symbol against British rule. The Irish Free State’s 1922 constitution was printed in Gaelic script, a deliberate middle finger to centuries of Anglicization. But here’s the messy part: that same script later became impractical for modern printing and digital systems, so even as it symbolized independence, it also became a barrier to international communication. Politics and pragmatism don’t always align, turns out.
How Contemporary Authoritarian Regimes Still Manipulate Visual Language Today
This isn’t just history. In 2019, the Chinese government intensified efforts to eliminate Mongolian script in Inner Mongolia, replacing it with Mandarin characters in schools—a move that sparked rare public protests because people understood exactly what was at stake. When you change how a language looks, you change who can read it, who controls its interpretation, and ultimately whether it survives. I’ve watched this pattern repeat in Tibet, in Xinjiang with Uyghur Arabic script, in regions where the dominant power views linguistic diversity as a threat rather than richness.
Typography isn’t neutral, never has been. Every font carries ideology, whether we notice it or not—from the Corporate Memphis illustrations and sans-serif homogeneity that define tech company aesthetics (projecting approachability while obscuring immense power) to the ways authoritarian states still use typeface standardization as a tool of cultural control. The letters you’re reading right now? They’re making arguments about modernity, accessibility, authority. We’ve just stopped seeing them as political because they’ve won.
