Hannah Arendt
Friends of Padre Steve’s World,
The day after President Trump’s inauguration Presidential spokesperson Kellyanne Conway who defended a number of outright lies posited by then Press Secretary Sean Spicer in his first press conference as alternative truth. The statement was astounding and was met with much criticism and ridicule, but it reflected a key tenant of the administration that facts as they are, are unimportant, that truth itself is malleable.
In the year since the inauguration the nation has been subjected to a propaganda campaign by the administration, the right wing media led by Fox News, certain members of Congress, and a host of flacks including prominent pastors. This campaign, often led by the President’s early morning Twitter storms labels any opposing news or facts as “fake news” while often demonizing and sometimes threatening those making the reports or conducting investigations of the administration.
In the past year we have entered a world that our founders never expected to happen but warned us about. Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 1, that the fiercest enemies of the republic were those men who begin “by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.”
In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism Hannah Arendt wrote: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
The world that most of us grew up with is changing before our eyes and it is happening around the world and it is hard to say what is going to happen. I started re-reading Hannah Arendt’s book last night. It was one of my texts as an undergraduate when studying Hitler’s Germany. The book deals with both Naziism and Stalinism which makes it in some sense like Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. While the latter focuses more on how Hitler and Stalin used their power on their own people as well as the Poles, the Ukrainians, the Belorussians, and others who happened to find themselves swallowed up by the two totalitarian states; Arendt’s book more at the underlying social conditions. In a time when populist politicians around the world are speaking in the the language of authoritarians, and promising to deliver their people from various political, racial, and religious enemies, it is important to remember where such talk almost always ends, totalitarian states.
But the fact is based on numerous polls in this country and around the world going back two decades show a rise in people of all ages and ideologies who are willing to accept authoritarian government and to abandon democracy. Well before President Trump ever announced his run for the presidency in 2015 the stage was set for an authoritarian leader to arise in the United States just as many are doing in Europe. Whether President Trump actually ends up ruling as an authoritarian is not yet clear, but the signs keep pointing that he may be heading in that direction, and that his followers will have no problem with it. His inaugural address was marked by his distain for both political parties and the political establishment and linking himself with the people. It was loaded with populism and nationalism, as are the messages of Vladimir Putin, Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, and others in Europe.
William Shirer who served as a correspondent in Berlin from 1934 to 1941 wrote in his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich about the corrosive power of repeated lies by the leaders of the Third Reich and its propaganda organs on people who in every other way were completely ordinary.
“I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state. Though unlike most Germans I had daily access to foreign newspapers, especially those of London, Paris and Zurich, which arrived the day after publication, and though I listened regularly to the BBC and other foreign broadcasts, my job necessitated the spending of many hours a day in combing the German press, checking the German radio, conferring with Nazi officials and going to party meetings. It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.”
I have had similar experiences sitting and talking with people are much like the Germans that Shirer was speaking and I shake my head.
I often wonder how did we got to this point as I watch and read the President’s tweets, speeches, interviews, and the comments of members of the administration and his allies. I am perplexed about how we did got to the point that a presidential spokesperson, as well as once respectable Republican members of Congress, and former administrations can defend outright lies and refer to them as alternative facts.
I think that this incessant barrage of propaganda and demonization by the administration and their media supporters is designed designed to bypass the intellect and appeal to the raw passions of followers who have ceased to think critically. I have written about this trend for several years using different historical examples but today I am just going to leave you with one other thing that Arendt wrote:
“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 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.”
I will discuss that passage in depth at another time but I think it is good just to let it sink in.
Have a good day,
Peace,
Padre Steve+
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