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In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt looked at the essential role that propaganda played in gaslighting the populations of Nazi Germany a… - Michiko Kakutani
" "In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt looked at the essential role that propaganda played in gaslighting the populations of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, writing that “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,” she wrote, “discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
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About Michiko Kakutani
Michiko Kakutani (born January 9, 1955) is an American literary critic and former chief book critic for The New York Times. Her awards include a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
Biography information from Wikiquote
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Additional quotes by Michiko Kakutani
Truth is a cornerstone of our democracy. As the former acting attorney general Sally Yates has observed, truth is one of the things that separates us from an autocracy: “We can debate policies and issues, and we should. But those debates must be based on common facts rather than raw appeals to emotion and fear through polarizing rhetoric and fabrications. “Not only is there such a thing as objective truth, failing to tell the truth matters. We can’t control whether our public servants lie to us. But we can control whether we hold them accountable for those lies or whether, in either a state of exhaustion or to protect our own political objectives, we look the other way and normalize an indifference to truth.
Trump often seems like a one-man set of Aesop-like fables — with easy-to-decipher morals like “those who lie down with dogs will get up with fleas” or “when someone tells you who he is, believe him” — but because he is president of the United States, his actions do not simply end in a tagline moral; rather, they ripple outward like a toxic tsunami, creating havoc in the lives of millions. Once he has left office, the damage he has done to American institutions and the country’s foreign policy will take years to repair. And to the degree that his election was a reflection of larger dynamics in society — from the growing partisanship in politics, to the profusion of fake stories on social media, to our isolation in filter bubbles — his departure from the scene will not restore truth to health and well-being, at least not right away.
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