Totalitarian lies gain force from organized collective backing, not from the art of lying

Evidence

To this aversion of the intellectual elite for official historiography, to its conviction that history, which was a forgery anyway, might as well be the playground of crackpots, must be added the terrible, demoralizing fascination in the possibility that gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventually be established as unquestioned facts, that man may be free to change his own past at will, and that the difference between truth and falsehood may cease to be objective and become a mere matter of power and cleverness, of pressure and infinite repetition. Not Stalin’s and Hitler’s skill in the art of lying but the fact that they were able to organize the masses into a collective unit to back up their lies with impressive magnificence, exerted the fascination. Simple forgeries from the viewpoint of scholarship appeared to receive the sanction of history itself when the whole marching reality of the movements stood behind them and pretended to draw from them the necessary inspiration for action. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 792

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s toolkit on representation and the construction of the ‘Other’ — the mechanism by which organized power converts forgery into ‘sanctioned’ truth anticipates later Islamophobia-field arguments about state-fabricated narratives.
• DEEPTHINKING: Dense claim about how mass organization converts lies into historically-sanctioned fact — a paradigm-shifting mechanism worth sitting with.