bs2Mar 19, 2022
> “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true… Mass #propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.” #HannahArendt
https://tomdispatch.com/rebecca-gordon-confronting-alternative-facts/
#RebeccaGordon #TomDispatch
A Twenty-First-Century Incredibility Chasm

In one of the Bible stories about the death of Jesus, local collaborators with the Roman Empire haul him before Pontius Pilate, the imperial governor of Palestine. Although the situation is dire for

TomDispatch.com
Show threadbs2
> We are used to thinking of propaganda (a word whose Latin roots mean “towards action”) as intended to move people to think or act in a particular way.. But there was a different quality to totalitarian propaganda. Its purpose was not just to create certainty (the enemy is evil incarnate), but a curious kind of doubt. “In fact,” as Russian émigrée and New Yorker writer #MashaGessen has put it, “the purpose of #totalitarian #propaganda is to take away your ability to perceive reality.”
Mar 19, 2022 at 2:03amWeb
Show threadbs2Mar 19, 2022
Not just #totalitarianism
> ... [#KarlRove's] words sketch out with breathtaking frankness a radical view in which power frankly determines reality, and rhetoric, the science of flounces and folderols, follows meekly and subserviently in its train. Those in the “reality-based community” — those such as we — are figures a mite pathetic, for we have failed to realize the singular new principle of the new age: #Power has made #reality its bitch.
https://tomdispatch.com/mark-danner-the-age-of-rhetoric/
#MarkDanner
Mark Danner, The Age of Rhetoric

A few weeks ago, I offered TomDispatch readers, "Close Your Eyes," my fantasy graduation speech for the class of 2007, given from the podium of some university of my mind. Mark Danner, however, recently stood

TomDispatch.com