VICTORY-IN-IRAQ DAY

VICTORY! The War Is Over!Now for a toastie postie about the size of the lie, brought to our attention by a tireless conscript:

The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, because the vast masses of a nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad.

The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them more easy victims of a big lie than a small one, because they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell big ones.

Such a form of lying would never enter their heads. They would never credit others with the possibility of such great impudence as the complete reversal of facts. Even explanations would long leave them in doubt and hesitation, and any trifling reason would dispose them to accept a thing as true.

Something therefore always remains and sticks from the most imprudent of lies, a fact which all bodies and individuals concerned in the art of lying in this world know only too well, and therefore they stop at nothing to achieve this end.

-- Adolf Hitler in "Mein Kampf"

Postscript: Adolf certainly stopped at nothing. His 'ganda machine was second to none, like his war 'ganda. Slogans were a specialité de maison:

The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.

These days the technique, not lost on Rover Boy, floats the Bullshitter's boat. Our self-righteous Ship of State, with the war prez on the poop deck, grandly steams along.

Touring the National Security Agency in 2002 with Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, then NSA director and now a full general and principal deputy director of all national intelligence. [Photo: Doug Mills/Associated Press]

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Postscript: A reader writes: "So what's next, ARBEIT MACHT FREI?"

Another writes: "This reminds me of a conversation I had recently with a friend of mine. I contended that, as a people, Americans are the most propagandized citizenry in the history of the planet. As bad as the Nazis lied, they didn't go nearly as far as the current administration. If we could somehow bring old Josef Goebels forward in time to late 2005 America, I think his response to the U.S. government propaganda machine would be the German equivalent of 'You are shitting me! You can really get away with this?'"

From another: "Do you think there is a permanent (undercover?) government that belies any apparent changes in administrations? Do we as a nation stand for anything humanitarian and life affirming? Does a nation even exist? Is it the embodiment of the constitution and the laws?"

And another: "Similar thoughts have been much on my mind. Ultimately these slogans represent a primitive but clever form of cultural conditioning and as such are a crude form of aesthetics -- the aesthetics of war."

December 16, 2005 12:53 PM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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This page contains a single entry by Straight Up | published on December 16, 2005 12:53 PM.

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