It's Fascism, Folks. Truth Doesn't Matter

 

It’s Fascism, Folks.  Truth Doesn’t Matter

January 8, 2025

There’s a truth about totalitarian and, perhaps, even somewhat less extreme authoritarian regimes, that few Americans understand. Those regimes are not grounded in provable facts. They are grounded in lies. They are always grounded in lies. The advocates of these regimes garner popular support, at least to the extent they ever do, by getting their people no longer to care about truth. Would-be dictators typically tell one big lie more constantly and more loudly than they tell smaller lies, though they rarely if ever speak the truth. The great theoretician of totalitarianism Hannah Arendt taught us that would-be dictators, especially fascists, lie far more than they ever tell the truth but not so much because they want people to believe their lies. They do it so that people give up on the truth. People may well know that these people are lying, but they come to the point where they don’t care that they’re being lied to. They begin to think that everyone lies all the time and that there actually is no truth. Truth ceases to matter to them. The two most horrific totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century are perfect examples of this aspect of totalitarianism.

I’ll start with the Soviet Communists. The big lie of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was that that party represented the interests of the people, especially the working people, and always acted in the people’s best interests. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. From the very beginning of the Bolshevik takeover of the Russian Empire in 1917, The Communist regime’s claim that the Party represented the interests of the people was a lie because from its very beginning the Soviet Communist regime came to power through and ruled by violence not by any actual truth. One of the first things Lenin did after his Bolsheviks pulled off a successful coup de état that the Party always called a glorious socialist revolution was to create an institution initially called the Cheka, that name being the first letters of the words of the institution’s name, Extraordinary Commission, in Russian. It is better known in the West by the last of its several names, the KGB. It was from the beginning a terrorist organization. It was formed to root out and, usually, to kill people perceived or at least claimed to be opponents of the Communist coup and the regime it created.

Lenin, Stalin, and the other Bolshevik leaders justified the creation and use of a terrorist organization by claiming that it was necessary to secure the victory of so-called people’s revolution, that revolution supposedly being a people’s movement for the betterment of the life of the proletariat, the working people of the country. It never did work for the betterment of anyone’s life, and in the years after the Bolshevik coup, especially but not exclusively under Josef Stalin, it wielded terrorism as a way of giving the Party and its General Secretary totalitarian power over the lives of the people. By the time Stalin died in 1953, the Cheka, by then called the NKVD, had killed millions of Soviet citizens and created the personal dictatorship of Stalin, something that was hardly beneficial to most of the Soviet people. The big lie became less that the Party was the great friend of the people as that Josef Stalin personally was a great friend of the people, never mind that he starved four million Ukrainians to death and otherwise killed or imprisoned millions of other Soviet people. Stalin sold the people that big lie. Many of them actually believed it. Many of them didn’t, but they knew that speaking out against it was likely to get them killed or, at best, imprisoned in the Gulag. The truth didn’t matter. It was the lies that kept the Soviet Communists in power for as long as they were.

Then there were the German Nazis. Hitler sold the German people on a big lie different from the one the Soviet Communists told but, if anything, even less true than big lie model Hitler probably learned from the Soviets. Hitler’s big lie was that all of Germany’s problems were the fault of the country’s Jews. Indeed, all of the world’s problems were, in the Nazi lie, the fault of the world’s Jews. That claim never was true. Jews were a very small percentage of the German population. There were more of them in Central Europe, but they ruled nowhere in Europe (or anywhere else at that time before the creation of the modern state of Israel). Yet Germany did indeed have massive problems after World War I. The country had just lost a horrific war that they never thought they could lose. The economy was a disaster, with rates of inflation we can’t even begin to imagine. The Treaty of Versailles had imposed enormous war reparations on the Germans, something that was grossly unfair and that kept the Germany economy hogtied. That treaty barred the German military from presence in part of the country’s territory. By the mid-1920s or so the country faced two powerful anti-democratic movements, the Social Democrats, i.e., the German Marxists, and the Nazis. Neither movement was the least bit averse to using violence to achieve its goals.

Before World War I, a war Germany was no more responsible for starting than were several other European powers, Germany had been both the economic powerhouse of Europe and the home of one of the most advanced scientific and artistic cultures in the world. After that war, the victorious allies, especially the British and the French, made sure that it was a shadow of its former self, especially economically. Most Germans found it very hard to understand how such a calamity had happened to their beloved country.

Many Germans came to believe an explanation called the “stab in the back” theory. Germany had lost the war only because someone, some group of people, had stabbed the country in the back. It was internal treason not anything wrong with the country that had cost it a victory in the war. Hitler told the people who had committed the stab in the back. It was, he said, the Jews; and that, of course, was his big lie. It certainly wasn’t his only lie. He exaggerated the threat the Social Democrats posed to the country. He lied to the world about what his plans actually were. He lied to the people about them being racially superior to all other people. But that the Jews were responsible for all of the country’s problems was his biggest lie of all. And the people bought it. In 1958, only thirteen years after the end of the Second World War, I heard an ordinary German, whose late husband had been a real Nazi, say: “Yes, it is too bad what happened to the Jews, but, then, something had to be done.” She bought Hitler’s big lie. Millions upon millions of other ordinary Germans did too. Hitler’s totalitarian regime, that engaged in such horrendous atrocities across Europe, was grounded in those lies. Totalitarianism is always grounded in lies.

My country, the Unites States of America, has just, for the second time, elected a man, Donald Trump, as president who essentially never tells the truth about anything. He lies about himself. He lies about his political opponents. He lies about the things he intends to do to the American economy. He lies about what he intends to do to individual civil and human rights. He occasionally tells the truth about some of the horrendous things he intends to do, things like imposing tariffs on imported goods and deporting an enormous number of people without regard for whether they are here legally or not or what deporting them would do to the country’s economy.

That is his big lie. Immigrants are responsible for the country’s problems, he says. He says they’re rapists and murderers. He blames them for crimes committed by native-born Americans. He says they take jobs away from real Americans. It is quite obvious that he particularly hates immigrants who are people of color coming from poor countries with oppressive and violent governments. Except that Trump is a racist, all of those things are untrue.

The combination of Trump’s big lie about immigrants and his constant lying about so many other things clearly have convinced enough Americans either that there is no truth or that the truth doesn’t matter to get himself reelected president. He is a convicted felon who ought to be in jail, but instead this country has put him back in the White House. That would never have happened if a majority of American voters still believed that there is such a thing as truth and that truth matters.

I have been saying for years that Donald Trump is an American fascist. Yet just the other day a colleague/friend of mine said of Trump and his incoming administration “just wait and see. We don’t know yet.” She is just flat wrong about that. That Trump is an American fascist hellbent on destroying the country’s democracy and putting himself in power for life is obvious to anyone who will look at him with clear eyes and a concern for the truth.

And it is Trump’s big and constant lies that, more perhaps than anything else, should have tipped Americans off  to who Trump really is. But he and his right-wing propaganda machine have convinced a majority of Americans that what is true isn’t true. No, they believe, he didn’t instigate a seditious riot on January 6, 2021. Yes, they believe, maybe he has been convicted of thirty-four felonies, but all of the myriad legal claims against him are false and that it is a good thing that he has, so far at least, escaped legal responsibility for them. They believe immigrants cause our country’s problems, which they don’t. Many of them are Christian nationalists who are white supremacists  who want white Christians like them to rule the country, and all of that is grounded in lies.

No folks, the truth no longer matters in our national politics. Donald Trump has convinced at least millions of Americans that what is true is not true. Or, if some of those Americans know that what Trump says isn’t true, he has gotten them not to care. Trump has made 1984 come true. Lies are the truth, and truths are lies. That is a purely fascist, totalitarian thing for him to have done. Beginning thirteen days from today, we will be ruled by American fascists. Trump will swear to protect and defend the US Constitution, and neither understands nor give a damn about the US Constitution. We’re all in trouble. It’s fascism, folks, and truth doesn’t matter.