“The moment we no longer have a free press, anything
can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship
to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are
not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you
believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is
because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government
has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not
only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get
a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows.
“And a people that no longer can believe anything
cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but
also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then
do what you please.”— German-born political philosopher Hannah
Arendt (1906-1975), to French writer Roger Errera in 1974, in “Hannah Arendt: From an Interview,” The New York Review of Books, Oct. 26,
1978
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