BTW (I'm not a huge friend of Barthes :-)
an excellent (and frightening) and short (!) book on this topic is Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Highly recommended.
Outlines the steps the Nazis (and other fascists) took to silence the opposition, get everyone slowly into line, undermine the "public sphere" and rational discourse, replace truth by obedience to power, etc. and then gives some hints what each of us can concretely do to stop these processes.
Outlines the steps the Nazis (and other fascists) took to silence the opposition, get everyone slowly into line, undermine the "public sphere" and rational discourse, replace truth by obedience to power, etc. and then gives some hints what each of us can concretely do to stop these processes.