DURING THE EARLY months of the Trump administration, I was reminded of a George Orwell essay from 1943 about the civil war in Spain, four years after the fascists won. One subtle but profound effect of the fascist regimes in Spain and Italy and Germany, he wrote, was how their propaganda “often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history.” His contemporary Hannah Arendt escaped Germany as a young woman in 1933, when the Nazis took over, and emigrated to
DURING THE EARLY months of the Trump administration, I was reminded of a George Orwell essay from 1943 about the civil war in Spain, four years after the fascists won. One subtle but profound effect of the fascist regimes in Spain and Italy and Germany, he wrote, was how their propaganda “often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history.” His contemporary Hannah Arendt escaped Germany as a young woman in 1933, when the Nazis took over, and emigrated to America, where she became one of the most important political philosophers of the age. Her first big book, in 1951, was The Origins of Totalitarianism. I’d never read it until 2016, around the time Trump made “rigged elections” a recurring theme of his campaign. “The essential conviction shared by all ranks” in a totalitarian movement, Arendt wrote, “from fellow-traveler to leader, is that politics is a game of cheating.” When I read the next paragraph, I was staggered. I stopped and read it again. It gave me goosebumps. A mixture of gullibility and cynicism have been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true….Mass propaganda d...
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A chilling example of the past maybe looking far too much like fhe present or the future...maybe the most important take away from this book. Herd mentality does have its drawbacks as many blacks during the era between the end of Reconstruction and the Civil Rights movement can attest to.
