Press: At the 2018 Frankfurt Book Fair, Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was awarded the Special Prize, which is intended to reward writers who present "the truth of life and society" in their work. In her acceptance speech, she said: "Sometimes politics has to be discussed as politics. There is no more correct and urgent fact today — we must know what the truth is, and we must call lies lies. ”
The history of the Third Reich is perhaps the most comprehensive and profound picture of the boundaries and transformations between truth and lies. After all, Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels once said that repeating a lie into truth was at the heart of Nazism. Is the core of fascism deception? Do liars believe what they tell? Can they identify fakes? Or was it within the Nazi system of knowledge and belief that lies had convinced them as truth? Is this the effect of propaganda, or is it the role of myth? How did the transformation of personal beliefs into political identities happen? It is precisely these questions that the Argentine historian Federico Fencherstein attempted to explore and explore in his book A Brief History of Fascist Lies.
Lying is as old as politics, and the history of fascism gaining power is the history of lies in power. As Adich put it, "There is no more correct and urgent fact today than this — we must know what the truth is, and we must call a lie a lie." ”
Why Do Fascists Believe Their Lies Are the Truth? (Excerpt)
Written by | [Argentina] Federico Fenchelstein
Translate | Zhang Jianwei
Some people have noses and eyes, but they don't have a word of truth, so angry that I punch them in the face. The witnesses tasted my power and made up another set of lies. I didn't believe it, but I didn't dare ignore it.
--Jorge Luis Borges
Joseph Goebbels, the most prominent fascist propagandist and Nazi leader, said that repeating lies into truth was at the heart of Nazism. This phrase is often misquoted, leading to the emergence of a fascist image, as if the fascists were fully aware of the extent to which they had deliberately falsified it. Is the core of fascism deception? Do liars believe what they tell? Can they identify fakes? When Goebbels said that Hitler knew everything and was "destined to go", did he really have a concept of knowledge based on reality?
It's complicated. In fact, Goebbels forged and published news of his assassination, which he later "published" in his diary as fact. The diaries were not written for the public, but were published years after his death. He also mentions again and again the "success" of his speeches, which have been praised by the media he controls. Was Goebbels deluding himself, or did he really believe that there was a form of truth that transcended positivity? Is he trying to concoct a new reality? Of course, from a reality-based point of view, there is no difference between fabricating lies and believing in a magical concept of truth, and both are escaping from reality. Goebbels was clearly deceiving himself by inventing an alternative reality, but he and most transnational fascists disagreed.
For fascists like Goebbels, knowledge was a matter of faith, especially a conviction of the myth of fascist leaders. Just as manipulating or inventing facts is a key dimension of fascism, so is faith in truth that transcends facts. Fascists do not see a contradiction between truth and propaganda.
Goebbels defined propaganda as "an art, not how to lie or distort, but how to listen to the 'soul of the people' and 'to speak to him in a language that a man can understand.'" As the historian Richard Evans has commented, "the actions of the Nazis were based on the premise that they, and only they, through Hitler, had an intrinsic knowledge and understanding of the German soul." The idea that truth comes from the soul is the result of belief in unproven absolute certainty.
Whenever Adolf Hitler wanted to reverse right and wrong, as a symptom of symptoms, he would talk about right and wrong. In his understanding, facts that contradict his theories of racism are lies. His worldview is based on a concept of truth that does not require empirical evidence. In other words, what is true to most of us (the result of verifiable causality) may be false to him. Facts that most of us consider to be lies or fabrications seem to him to be a higher form of truth. As today's populist media claims, Hitler subverted reality by projecting his dishonesty of the truth onto his enemies. He lied that the liar was a Jew, not him. He lied as if he represented the truth. He accused Jews of "greatly distorting the truth." But Hitler equated this factual truth with the anti-Semitic myth he believed in and preached.
The leading connoisseurs have always been the Jews in exploiting lies and slander; after all, their entire existence is based on this great lie that they are a religious group, but in reality they are a race — a race! One of mankind's greatest minds (Schopenhauer) has pierced them to the point: he calls them "masters of lies"; Anyone who does not recognize or will not believe this will not be able to help the truth win in this world.
In the 1930s and 1940s, not only Hitler, but many other fascists around the world saw the anti-Semitic myth as the embodiment of truth—what the German Jewish philosopher Ernst Cassirer called "the myth of the plan." Fascists fantasize about a new reality and then change the reality that exists. Thus, they redraw the boundary between myth and reality. The policy by which myth replaces reality is aimed at reshaping the world according to the lies that racist beliefs. While anti-Semitic lies claimed that Jews were inherently dirty and contagious and therefore deserved to be killed, the Nazis created conditions in ghetto and concentration camps to make filthy and widespread diseases a reality. Jewish prisoners, after starvation, torture, and complete inhumanity, became what the Nazis intended them to be, and could be justifiably killed. Fascists pursue truths that do not correspond to the empirical world by turning metaphors into reality. The ideological lies of fascism have nothing to be true, yet its followers want them to be true enough. So what they saw with their own eyes and what they didn't like was conceived as unreal. Mussolini believed that a core task of fascism was to deny the lies of democracy. He also opposed the truth of fascism to the "lies" of democracy. The principle of incarnation is at the heart of this mythical opposition of the leader (ilDuce). He believed in a truth that transcended democratic common sense because it was transcendental. "At some point in my life," he recalls, I risked not being favored by the masses by announcing to them what I considered to be a new truth, a holy truth (laveritàsanta). ”
For Mussolini, reality must follow the requirements of mythology. If people don't believe it in the first place, things are difficult; their doubts need to be questioned. The mythological framework of fascism is rooted in the national mythology of fascism. He declared, "We want to make [this myth] a reality entirely." Myths can change reality, but reality cannot get in the way. This sacred truth of fascism is likewise defined by the peculiar boundary between the truth of fascism and the hypocritical nature of the enemy. The enemy is on the opposite side of the truth, and some are just lies. In the European border regions, people fell into "obsession with Russian mythology" and were fascinated by Bolshevism, but Mussolini believed that these myths of competition with him were false because they opposed the absolute truth based on ultra-nationalism and, of course, his myth of leadership. "We put everything else under [this myth of leadership]." he said. ”
In modernizing mythology, fascists transformed myths from questions of personal belief into the dominant form of political identity. According to this rewrite, true politics is a projection of the ancient and violent inner self that, when applied to politics, overcomes the tricks of reason. In this way, the fascists can define everything that corresponds to their ideological goals, assumptions, and desires as real.
This mythical dimension of fascism is anti-democratic. Historically, democracy has been based on the concept of truth as opposed to lies, false beliefs, and information. In contrast, fascists have proposed a radical conception of truth about dictatorship. As historian Robert Paxton explains, for fascists,
"Whatever allows the new fascists to dominate others, who allows God's chosen people to triumph, is the truth. Fascism does not depend on the correctness of its creed, but on the mysterious union of the historical destiny of the leader and his people. This is reminiscent of the Romantics' notions of the prosperity of national history, of the artistic or spiritual genius of the individual, but fascism otherwise negates romanticism's promotion of unfettered individual creativity. ”
Fascists base their metaphorical unity of people, nations, and leaders on the ultimate form of myth as truth. But there is no shortage of precedent for their approach. The extraordinary place of truth and lies in fascism is but an aspect that has recurred in the long history of the relationship between truth and politics. For the philosopher Hannah Arendt, political history always presents tension with truth, and fascism's solution to this tension means the destruction of politics. One of the things that defines fascism is organized lying. Only facts (and lies) prescribed by leaders can be accepted as truth.
Distorting the truth in the name of propagating another reality is a phenomenon that has often occurred in the history of fascism. Spanish fascist dictator Francisco Franco denied that he had participated in the horrific bombing of Guernica, one of his biggest war crimes, which killed thousands of people. Although this action by the fascist government is well documented, Franco claimed that the "Red Army" "destroyed Guernica" in order to spread "propaganda" about him and discredit him. In doing so, Franco took the concept of truth into his hands, claiming that the liar was not him, but his political enemy.
Similarly, the Nazis did not distinguish between observable facts and ideology-driven "truths." When "the mass leaders seize the power to let reality match their lies," the most radical results of totalitarian dictatorships emerge. A few years later, in a controversial study of Adolf Eichmann, Arendt made an important inquiry into the reasoning process of the Holocaust mastermind. Eichmann is a microcosm of the phenomenon of "extreme contempt for facts themselves." Arendt equates Eichmann's approval of lies with the entire society's "shielding of reality and facts, in exactly the same way, with the same self-deception, lies, and stupidity—which are now ingrained in Eichmann's mind."
Why do fascists believe that their lies are the truth? As many anti-fascists pointed out at the time, the history of fascist dictatorship is based on lies. The mythical imagination that fascists have elected as reality can never be confirmed because it is based on the illusion of total control over the past and present.
Excerpts from the first chapter of A Brief History of Fascist Lies are excerpted from the first chapter of the Book of Fascist Lies, with notes omitted and abridged from the original text, and the title is the editor's own choice, which is published with the authorization of the publishing house.