A new collection of the writings of political philosopher Hannah Arendt has just been published. Arendt, who had first-hand experience with German fascism, wrote in 1973 about the effects of governments that lie. “What really makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that the people are not informed. If everyone always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but that no one believes anything at all anymore–and rightly so, because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, to be ‘re-lied,’ so to speak.”
She said that governments that lie must rewrite their own histories. People under such governments will lose “their capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”
The book is Hannah Arendt, Thinking without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953-1975, Jerome Kohn, ed. Schocken Books, 2018.
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