Thread by @TomLondon6

“What is more disturbing to our peace of mind…than the popular support of totalitarian regimes, is the unquestionable attraction these movements exert on the elite”
- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“It would be rash indeed to discount the terrifying roster of distinguished men whom totalitarianism can count among its sympathisers”
- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

'...the terrible, demoralizing fascination in the possibility that gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventually be established as unquestioned facts, that man may be free to change his own past at will, and the difference between truth and falsehood may cease

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to be objective and become a mere matter of power and cleverness, of pressure and infinite repetition"
- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

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“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
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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
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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
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all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness”
- Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
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#Trump
#Johnson
#Hitler
#Stalin