on truth and lie in a political sense : epigraphs.

"if [lying] is anyone's job, then, it's the job of the rulers of our community: they can lie for the good of the community, when either an external or an internal threat makes it necessary."
-plato, the republic (ca. 375 b.c.)

"the liar uses the valid designations, the words, to make the unreal appear as real ... when he does this in a self-serving way damaging to others, then society will no longer trust him but exclude him. thereby men do not flee from being deceived as much as from being damaged from deception: what they hate at this stage is basically not the deception but the bad, hostile consequences of certain kinds of deceptions. in a similarly limited way man wants the truth: he desires the agreeable life-preserving consequences of truth, but he is indifferent to pure knowledge, which has no consequences; he is even hostile to possibly damaging and destructive truths."
-friedrich nietzsche, "on truth and lie in an extra-moral sense" (1873)

"[people] more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. it would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. for the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. these people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes."
-adolf hitler, mein kampf (1925)

"never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."
-hitler's techniques, from a 1942 oss report.

"the masses find it all the more difficult to find a correct road on this question because bureaucratic apparatuses are raised over them, duping them incessantly and skilfully. thus, the matter is reduced to the following simple question: are we for our part duty-bound to tell them the truth? for a marxist, to pose this question is to answer it. The revolution has no need of blind friends, or allies whose eyes are bandaged."
-leon trotsky, "tell the workers the truth about stalin's hounding of revolutionists in the soviet union" (1936)

"[propaganda] is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. after all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history. ...

i know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. i am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully writen. ... nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as "the truth" exists. ... the implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. if the leaders says of such and such an event, "it never happened"--well, it never happened. if he says that two and two are five--well, two and two are five. the prospect frightens me much more than bombs--and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement."
-george orwell, "looking back on the spanish war" (1943)

"in our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible ... thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out in the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the hut set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. ... such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. ...

political language--and with variations this is true of all political parties, from conservatives to anarchists--is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
-orwell, "politics & the english language" (1946)

"there is a battle 'for truth,' or at least 'around truth.'"
-michel foucault, "truth & power" (1977)

posted by fred [link] 6:22 PM 0 comments -----