The Basics of Political Fraud – PART 5 : Hannah Arendt on the lie in the totalitarian system. By Roger Berkowitz.
"This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore."
Foreword
by Suavek
Understanding current propaganda is more difficult than most people can imagine. Avoiding all the pitfalls that lead us directly into the indoctrination desired by the perpetrators and learning all their tricks takes a lot of time. It's been very helpful for me that I've been consuming alternative media for about 20 years and value it highly. But the choice of free media is vast, and time is limited. So what can you do? That's why I'm making you a recommendation.
We know that the free media often mixes facts with propaganda and is therefore not always reliable. In Germany, there's a great alternative channel, which is probably the best in the world. Although I've since become acquainted with all kinds of free media, I haven't found anything better anywhere else. It's a German journalists' group operating under the name APOLUT, formerly known as "KenFm." Here, too, independent thinking is essential, because not all of these journalists are sufficiently knowledgeable about every topic and occasionally make mistakes. However, I don't know of any other such media outlet that makes as few mistakes as APOLUT. At the time, I spoke with a kind of secretariat of this group and talked about the high quality of information we owe to Mike Yeadon. They were happy that I subsequently sent them the links to Dr. Mike Yeadon's and my Substack. The quality of APOLUT's always excellent reporting has improved even further since then. The automatic translation option allows you to read the articles in this group, which I highly recommend. Here are the three links to various topics in this journalistic group:
Latest news:
https://apolut.net/tag/tagesdosis/
Journalists’ opinions:
https://apolut.net/tag/standpunkte/
The History Series :
https://apolut.net/tag/history/
Best wishes,
Suavek
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This article was not written by APOLUT, but it explains the system of lies in a totalitarian system quite well :
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Original title:
On Fake Hannah Arendt Quotations
By Roger Berkowitz
08-04-2024
Source : https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/on-fake-hannah-arendt-quotations-2024-08-04
A quotation attributed to Hannah Arendt has been floating around various social media sites. The apparently altered quotation is:
"This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want." -Hannah Arendt
I’ve received numerous emails in the last month asking for the provenance of this quotation. At first, I looked, since to be honest, the spirit of the quote is very much in line with Arendt’s own thought. But as far as I can tell, Hannah Arendt never said this or wrote this. She did, however, say many similar things. Which raises the question: Why would someone create a fake quotation when so many real ones express a similar viewpoint? And, does such an altered quotation matter?
To answer this question, it is important to first look at the quotations that likely serve as the source for the fake aphorism.
The closest in spirit and content, and also the most easily available, is from an interview with Roger Errera in 1974, what turned out to be Hannah Arendt’s last public interview. Arendt spoke about the importance of a free press in an era of mass manipulation of truth and public lying: She said:
"The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please."
The key point in Arendt’s statement is that as lies multiply, the result is not that the lie is believed but that people lose faith in the truth and are increasingly susceptible to believe anything. When cynicism about truth reigns, lies operate not because they replace reality but because they make reality wobble–a phrase Arendt employs in her essay Truth and Politics. In that essay, Arendt argued that mass lying undermines our sense of reality by which we find our bearings in the real world:
The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.
The Arendtian point is that constant lying by a propaganda machine does not lead to the lie being believed but leads, instead, to cynicism. This is an argument that Arendt made, already, in her first published book The Origins of Totalitarianism. In that book, Arendt writes:
"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."
So why, given the surfeit of similar quotations, does the anonymous influencer responsible for the viral Arendt quotation change the quotation? On one level, who can know? But there is something to be said for the simplicity of language and clarity of purpose in the fabricated quotation. Arendt herself is profoundly quotable, but her sentences tend to be long and at times follow a meandering course. The impulse to clarify, simplify, and “market” Arendt to a public trained on easy social media quotations is real.
Which raises a second question: does the alteration matter? And here, the answer is yes. And it turns out that this is hardly the first time that Hannah Arendt’s words have been altered and simplified to ease their public consumption. One of the most notorious cases is in the Documentary about ARendt Vita Activa by Ada Ushpiz. Ushpiz uses over 30 block quotations that she projects on the screen in her documentary. Shockingly, nearly every one of these quotations is altered. Some of Ushpiz’s changes were major and deeply deceptive. But many were simply stylistic, as in the fake quotation floating around social media today. In writing about this documentary, I explained why such seemingly innocuous changes matter:
Why does Ushpiz reorder Arendt’s sentences without alerting us to the change? Why does she change “fortuitousness” to “random nature”? And why does she change Arendt’s phrase “totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency” — one of the most iconic and felicitous of Arendt’s many quotable aphorisms — to read “totalitarian movements conjure up a false ideological and consistent world”?
Ushpiz had an editor go over Arendt’s text to make it read better, to simplify it, to make it more accessible to a film audience. Doing so would be understandable in a fictional film, but it is dishonest in a documentary. Still, we might wish to excuse these changes as minor. Do they change the meaning of what Arendt says? Not materially. And, yet, we should worry about these changes for two reasons.
( … )
Full article :
https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/on-fake-hannah-arendt-quotations-2024-08-04
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Afterword :
Attention fellow Substackers!
Can we all just please stop talking about “Covid-19,” as though it were a “real thing!”
They never needed a “REAL virus!” It would have only complicated things and made it a hundred times harder for them to control the narrative!
All they ever needed, was “controlled propaganda,” a rigged testing method, and a whole stack of big scary numbers which were dutifully promoted by the mainstream media, round the clock 24/7!
Please! Just STOP IT!
By acknowledging their “bogus virus”… we’re just playing right into their hands! We’re speaking the exact language they want us to speak!
Best fully concentrate our efforts on exposing the heinous crimes they committed in the name of said virus!
Source : https://substack.com/@shoutinginspace/note/c-103570189
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Related articles :
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https://suavek1.substack.com/p/the-banality-of-evil-catalog-raisonne?utm_source=publication-search
The Banality of Evil. Catalog raisonné and quote collection by Hannah Arendt.
“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”
https://suavek1.substack.com/p/totalitarism-marches-in?utm_source=publication-search
https://suavek1.substack.com/p/the-basics-of-political-fraud-part-3a7?utm_source=publication-searc
https://suavek1.substack.com/p/totalitarianism-how-does-it-feel?utm_source=publication-search
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For the most reliable information about the "Covid" scam and deceptions of the system, read Dr. Mike Yeadon's daily statements.
Here you can find Dr. Mike Yeadon and his statements :
Substack by Dr. Mike Yeadon : https://drmikeyeadon.substack.com/
The Telegram channel of Dr. Mike Yeadon ( other Telegram channels with his name are fake ! ) :
https://t.me/DrMikeYeadonsolochannel
There is also a chat channel connected to the channel linked above, which is managed by his friends : https://t.me/DrMikeYeadonsolochannelChat
When searching for Dr. Yeadon's videos, only two browsers are recommended : Yandex and Mojeek. But you can also try other, smaller browsers, too.
Censorship is omnipresent on Google or Safari.
Many statements and videos from Dr. Mike Yeadon can also be found on Suavek's Substack, which is recommended by Dr. Yeadon on the main page of his Substack.
Both links lead to Suavek`s Substack :
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Great essay! You didn't mention it here, but I can definitely see artificial intelligence serving the interests of totalitarians in this way.
What a perfect quotation, managed or otherwise. I want to buy some of her books and start reading. Years ago I read a book by Thomas Sowell entitled "Intellectuals" which was highly critical of Arendt the left winger. But over the last 20 years, I have discovered that even thinkers I disagree with in a profound and fundamental way quite often produce brilliant insights I would never expect from a distorted mind. Life is full of surprises.