As economic disaster threatened to trigger shooting wars so, as George Orwell said, useful lies were preferred to harmful truths. He went further, declaring that history stopped in ; after that there was only propaganda. This was a characteristic exaggeration but it points to the universality of state deception. The very term Depression aimed to mislead: Of course, to lie is human, and official mendacity had been practised throughout the ages. Particularly effective were his attacks on the Kaiser, who was portrayed in a leaflet dropped behind German lines as marching with his six sons, all in full military regalia, past a host of outstretched skeletal arms, the caption reading: Ultra-nationalists claimed that Germany had not been defeated by force of arms in , but stabbed in the back by political criminals after being fatally weakened by fiendish British propaganda.
The myth that the Fatherland had fallen victim to a Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy became a key element in the Nazi creed. Hitler determined to manufacture his own poison gas. But propaganda, like advertising, only strikes chords when the conditions are right. For all his ranting, Hitler could never have won widespread support if he had not been able to exploit the multiple miseries of the Depression. After , Germans were receptive to his assertion that their sufferings were the evil fruits of the rotten Weimar system.
The problem was not economic but political, he insisted, and it could only be solved by the restoration, under his leadership, of German might: Once in power, Hitler deployed all the resources of the state and of modern technology to control German minds. He used terror and theatre, Dachau and Nuremberg. And Hitler engaged Josef Goebbels to impose ideological uniformity on Germany. Every field of German life was to be ploughed and harrowed. The press was regulated. The church was intimidated. Academe succumbed to discipline.
Ecstatic From One Lie (Paperback)
Sharing this view, Goebbels presided over the immolation of national culture. Einstein and Freud were reviled. He, too, insisted that the truth was what he said it was, endorsing the bogus science of the agronomist Trofim Lysenko , denouncing the mathematician Nikolai Luzin as a wrecker, and killing astronomers for taking a non-Marxist line on sunspots.
Conjuring with the dialectic, Stalin maintained that the greatest saboteurs were those who committed no sabotage and that the monstrous apparatus of Soviet repression assisted the withering away of the state. This driver of the locomotive of history shunted backwards as well as forwards: He put on elaborate charades to fool foreign travellers and fellow travellers: Truth was further occluded by faith and fear.
In the Ukrainian city of Kharkov, Arthur Koestler observed some of the worst horrors of the famine but affirmed they were products of the capitalist past, whereas the few hopeful signs pointed to a communist utopia. Even in the gulag, Eugenia Ginzburg wrote, people refused to believe the evidence of their senses: In the shadow of the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the KGB, the most hardened sceptic paid lip service to the veracity of the newspaper Pravda Truth — lying, Russians joked, like an eyewitness.
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Universal mendacity, said Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn , was the only safe form of existence. Against a background of turmoil and stress, propaganda dissolved certainties and warped perceptions. Power created hallucinations, dreams of golden mountains. The Sweet Smell of Psychosis. My Idea of Fun.
Ecstatic from One Lie by Hadyn J. Adams on Apple Books
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