Terror and Trumpian Propaganda. We Begin Anew

Timothy Snyder wrote: “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis to do so. If nothing is truth, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.”

Immediately after a former American soldier and convert to Islam attacked a crowd on New Orleans’s Bourbon Street, Donald Trump and his propaganda machine of Republican congressional members and ever devoted Fox Propaganda Network correspondents went to work.

Even before anything was known about the attacker they had labeled him as a Muslim terrorist who had come across the U.S. border from Mexico to commit the attack. Fox reported that unidentified U.S. law enforcement officers had said that the attacker did that. Eventually, they moved on, but the lies had been planted, lies too easily believed by terrified populace, especially Trump’s cult, and as we have seen for the last nine years, truth really doesn’t matter to most Americans.

Other terror stories like the active duty Green Beret Master Sergeant who blew up a Tesla “Elonmobile” Cyber Truck, and a 37 year old white man caught with more assembled improvised explosive devices than the FBI had ever discovered were barely mentioned by Fox and ignored by Trump.

Over the past decade 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.”

Sadly, that is the description of a majority of Americans, even non-Trump voters and it is not hard to understand if you actually bother to learn about history.

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 much like the Germans William Shirer wrote about and I shake my head.

The incessant barrage of propaganda and demonization by the administration and their media supporters is designed to bypass the intellect and appeal to the raw passions of followers, and others 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.”

So, until next time. Think for yourself and be safe. In seventeen days the Trump 2.0 experience officially begins.

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Thank you so much for reading and I hope that we can grow together in the looming peril of the new year.