SUPERB INTERVIEW With Boston College History Professor, Heather Cox Richardson: Bill Moyers Discusses What Trump Will Do Next As Biden's Victory Drives Him "Barking Mad"

Alan: Even if your belief system obliges you to value nonsensical delusion over demonstrable truth, I remain confident that "something in you" will resonate with at least some of the historical truths Professor Richardson sets forth.

LISTEN: Bill Moyers Discusses What Trump Will Do Next As Biden's Victory Drives Him "Barking Mad"

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/12/listen-bill-moyers-discusses-what-trump-will-do-next-as-bidens-victory-drives-him-barking-mad/

 

Alan: Lawyer-author Steven Harper is a third participant in this interview. At the 6:06 mark he references Hannah Arendt to whom ever more people turn to get a handle on populist-fascist groups around the world, especially the populist-fascism of Donald Trump.

Here is the specific Arendt passage to which Harper refers: 

"How did the minority party of Hitler and Goebbels take over and break the will of the German people so thoroughly that they would allow and participate in mass murder? Post-war scholars of totalitarianism like Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt asked that question over and over, for several decades afterward. Their earliest studies on the subject looked at two sides of the equation. Adorno contributed to a massive volume of social psychology called The Authoritarian Personality, which studied individuals predisposed to the appeals of totalitarianism. He invented what he called the F-Scale (“F” for “fascism”), one of several measures he used to theorize the Authoritarian Personality Type.

Arendt, on the other hand, looked closely at the regimes of Hitler and Stalin and their functionaries, at the ideology of scientific racism, and at the mechanism of propaganda in fostering “a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism with which each member… is expected to react to the changing lying statements of the leaders.” So she wrote in her 1951 Origins of Totalitarianism, going on to elaborate that this “mixture of gullibility and cynicism… is prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements”:

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 nothing was true… 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.

Why the constant, often blatant lying? 

For one thing, it functioned as a means of fully dominating subordinates, who would have to cast aside all their integrity to repeat outrageous falsehoods and would then be bound to the leader by shame and complicity. “The great analysts of truth and language in politics”—writes McGill University political philosophy professor Jacob T. Levy—including “George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Vaclav Havel—can help us recognize this kind of lie for what it is…. Saying something obviously untrue, and making your subordinates repeat it with a straight face in their own voice, is a particularly startling display of power over them. It’s something that was endemic to totalitarianism.”

Arendt and others recognized, writes Levy, that “being made to repeat an obvious lie makes it clear that you’re powerless.” She also recognized the function of an avalanche of lies to render a populace powerless to resist, the phenomenon we now refer to as “gaslighting”:

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 epistemological ground thus pulled out from under them, most would depend on whatever the leader said, no matter its relation to truth. “The essential conviction shared by all ranks,” Arendt concluded, “from fellow traveler to leader, is that politics is a game of cheating and that the ‘first commandment’ of the movement: ‘The Fuehrer is always right,’ is as necessary for the purposes of world politics, i.e., world-wide cheating, as the rules of military discipline are for the purposes of war.” https://www.openculture.com/2017/01/hannah-arendt-explains-how-propaganda-uses-lies-to-erode-all-truth-morality.html

The Death Of Epistemology: Update

https://newsfrombarbaria.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-death-of-epistemology-update.html 

Journalists Should Be In "Emergency" Mode

Journalistic Method Needs To Be Redefined To Deal With Trump's Re-Definition Of Bullshit As Normalcy ("On The Media")

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/journalists-should-be-emergency-mode-on-the-media 

The New (Ab)Normal: Flood Every Media Platform With A Fire Hose Of Falsehood... And The Need For A New Journalistic Method

https://newsfrombarbaria.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-new-abnormal-flood-every-media.html

Hannah Arendt: The Horror Of Normality

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/12/hannah-arendt-horror-of-normality.html

Hannah Arendt's Cogent Critique Of Forced School Integration

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2016/06/hannah-arendts-cogent-critique-of.html

Hannah Arendt: "The Banality Of Evil" And "Love Is The Only Way"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-banality-of-evil-hannah-arendt.html

Hannah Arendt: "What Has Come To An End"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/10/hannah-arendt-what-has-come-to-end.html

Hannah Arendt: The Horror Of Normality

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/12/hannah-arendt-horror-of-normality.html

The Hannah Arendt Papers At The Library Of Congress

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-hannah-arendt-papers-at-at-library.html

Hannah Arendt And The Paranoid Decline Of American Conservatism

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/10/hannah-arendt-and-paranoid-decline-of.html

Hannah Arendt On The Linchpin Importance Of Asking Unanswerable Questions

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/09/hannah-arendt-on-linchpin-importance-of.html

Hannah Arendt On The Difference Between Truth And Meaning

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/09/hannah-arendt-on-difference-between.html

Hannah Arendt On The Difference Between Being And Appearing And The Impulse For Self-Display

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/10/hannah-arendt-on-being-vs-appearing-and.html

Hannah Arendt On Time, Space And Where Our Thinking Ego Resides

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2015/12/hannah-arendt-on-time-space-and-where.html