Hannah Arendt was a Jewish intellectual in Nazi Germany. Arrested by the Gestapo, she escaped on foot through Czechoslovakia and on to France, and finally to the United States.

She had experienced the early days of the living hell, later to become known as the Holocaust, created by the regime of a monster too evil to be considered a human being. And in 1951, she tried to warn the world that tyranny does not begin when people believe the lies they are told; it begins when people stop believing in anything at all. She wrote:

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction . . . no longer holds.”

– Hannah Arendt, Lessons for Our Times

She argued that our ability to resist totalitarianism lies in our capacity to think, to question, to listen, to demand evidence . . . because once we stop caring about what is real, we have surrendered our freedom.

Hannah Arendt died before the advent of the internet and social media. How much more urgently her words resonate in today’s cyber world . . . and how much more imperative it is that we heed them.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
1/3/26