“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.”
― Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" #quotes#mediaStudies#commOdon#truth#agnotology#history
@nicholas_saunders Sure:
The essay #Totalitarianism was fisrt published in 1951 as the third volume of "The Origins of Totalitarianism".
In it, Hannah Arendt argues that totalitarianism was a "novel form of government," in that it applied terror to subjugate mass populations rather than just political adversaries. Further, Arendt states that, owing to the insertion of ideology into the apparatus of coercion, "totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within". She further contends that Jewry was not the operative factor in the genocide of European Jews, but merely a convenient proxy. That totalitarianism in Germany was, in the end, about terror and consistency, not eradicating Jews only.
Adapted from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origins_of_Totalitarianism