Hannah Arendt saw it coming.

A Jewish intellectual born in pre-World War I Germany, she fled her country in 1933 when the Nazis came to power, crossing illegally into Czechoslovakia and eventually settling in Paris. And when the Nazis invaded France, she was interned, but escaped and made her way to Portugal, and finally to New York in 1941.

To her, as horrific as the brutality and wholesale slaughter inflicted by the Nazi regime had been, the even greater menace of totalitarian rule had been seeing the people — even before the advent of the extermination camps — gradually swallowing the incessant Nazi lies and propaganda until they stopped trying to determine what the truth really was, and accepted the inevitability of what was happening to them and their countries.

And she wrote about it in 1951, publishing an analysis of how Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia had destroyed freedom . . . how, before dictators can succeed in solidifying their power, they must first alter the minds of the people, overwhelming and exhausting them with an endless barrage of lies and half-truths until there is no fight left in them.

She summed it up in one sentence that is chillingly applicable to our world today, where artificial intelligence and seemingly authoritative social media posts are so convincing that reality and truth blur and eventually become amorphous:

“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.”

– Hannah Arendt, “The Origins of Totalitarianism”

We can’t pretend we haven’t been forewarned. What we do with the information is up to us.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
11/20/25