Hitler and Stalin shared a willful indifference to objective facts

Evidence

Konrad Heiden, Der Fuehrer: Hitler’s Rise to Power, Boston, 1944, underlines Hitler’s “phenomenal untruthfulness,” “the lack of demonstrable reality in nearly all his utterances,” his “indifference to facts which he does not regard as vitally important” (pp. 368, 374).—In almost identical terms, Khrushchev describes “Stalin’s reluctance to consider life’s realities” and his indifference to “the real state of affairs,” op. cit. Stalin’s opinion of the importance of facts is best expressed in his periodic revisions of Russian history. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2622

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the concept of ‘phenomenal untruthfulness’ as a defining trait of totalitarian leadership — a usable conceptual term for the toolkit.
• XREF: The shared fact-indifference of both leaders feeds the reader’s scaffolding on how totalitarian systems treat truth as subordinate to ideological reality. — connects to: Hitler’s propaganda doctrine deliberately targeted the least intelligent audience — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 389