Against the background of these repulsive monsters looms the refulgent yet almost kitschy image of the leader. He is kind, polite, wise; he has an understanding of the needs of simple people; he is uncompromisingly fair, works tirelessly, defends honor and decency, loves children, the elderly, and war invalids. Magazines and newsreels are chock-full of photographs of the leader and scenes from his life. Lenin with Gorky, with his wife, with his nephews. Lenin skates, collects mushrooms, and has a dog named Aida that he plays with. Hitler has his blonde. The führer also loves the children of his friend Goebbels. He skis and goes on walks, and we see him smiling and down-to-earth mit der kleine Helga. Stalin holds in his arms a pioneer schoolgirl, who has just brought him a bouquet of flowers. During the war, on the other hand, he inclines over a map of the front to demonstrate to everyone that it is he who is calling the shots in the final victory of his armies.
As soon as it seizes power, every totalitarian regime proclaims plenty of magnificent and lofty goals along with pleasing slogans. Soon, however, it becomes obvious that few of them can be fulfilled.
Another task of propaganda is to create a fictive world and persuade the people that only this fictive world is real, while the real world is a fiction that has been thrust upon them by the enemy, who has still not been uncovered. Propaganda seeks to convince its citizens that almost everything that was promised has been fulfilled. You just have to be able to see it, or, more precisely: You have to know how to look. Propaganda thus emphasizes a point of view: Whoever does not see it is looking at events from the enemy’s point of view.
A new fictive reality full of zealous partisans swells to the deafening roar of the celebration of glorious and magnificent victories. The press abounds with enthusiastic speeches by shock workers, loyal party followers, vigilant citizens who uncover traitors and pen resolutions in which they announce their devotion to the government, demonstrators, sloganeers, voters who vote 99.18 percent for the candidates proposed by the government. (In Kim Il-sung’s North Korea, it is reported that all were chosen without a single exception.)
Entire apparatuses are delegated to the organization of enormous mass demonstrations and parades. Triumphant ride through the city. Hundreds of thousands rejoice. Fireworks rise into the heavens, celebratory salvos and the people rejoice. This is Berlin, Goebbels notes in his diary. Radio announcers describe the rejoicing May Day parades in Moscow, in Prague, in Warsaw, and in other Communist dictatorships. They read out the soul-destroying slogans borne on red banners. The mass media follow these orgies of assent in word and picture.
In order to substitute this fictive reality for real life, isolation is necessary. Propaganda must proclaim the entirety of the rest of the world as a degenerate, rotten place, in which a relentless battle, exploitation, poverty, nationalistic prejudice, irresponsibility, and sexual perversion reign, where representatives of a lower race or international imperialism made their way to power, endeavoring to subjugate the rest of humanity. On one day (January 5, 1953), Rudé právo published articles with the following headlines:
Barbaric Bombardment of Korean Cities and Villages
Strikes on the Rise in Canada This Year
Denmark’s Grave Financial Crisis
Latin American Hatred for American Imperialism Is Growing
Escalation of American-British Tensions
New Provocation by West Berlin Police
Boycott of Tito Banners by Yugoslav Workers
The Brave Opposition of French Sailors to American Gestapo Regulations
Italian Government Again Violates Peace Agreement
News reports are masterfully composed to confirm the fiction. The mayor of Detroit speaks out on the horrible poverty threatening the lives of the unemployed and their children in his city. This is accompanied by a photograph of Soviet Pioneers departing for vacation. These are children whose blissful lives are threatened by nothing because they live in a Socialist country.
Propaganda must assiduously lie about the democratic part of the world, but power must facilitate it: It must restrict the input of information, the exchange of individuals and ideas; it must strictly control everyone who leaves or enters its realm and declare foreign printed matter contraband. Finally it must build a wall and stretch barbed wire along its borders, obviously in order to keep diversionists out of the country. To overcome the recklessness of all its assignments, propaganda must fulfill yet another task, the confusion of language. George Orwell describes this ingeniously in his novel 1984.
Propaganda labels wrongful situations — in which the police investigate, condemn, and execute whomever they want — the highest justice. Concentration camps are referred to as reeducation institutions. Slavelike work under inhuman conditions is called the path to liberation. A system in which people cannot without permission leave their region is called the government of the people, bondage is called freedom, and poverty is prosperity. Their backwardness is an example for the rest of the world; their empire surrounded by barbed wire is the only place a person can live in happiness and contentment. Murder will be called an act of justice.
In 1934 Hitler had his former collaborators and friends murdered en masse so that he would not have to share power. When the citizens wondered at the bloodiness and gore of the purge, one of the official media (the Westdeutscher Beobachter) reported the following:
Never before has a leader suppressed his own personal feelings so completely; never before has any statesman taken such extreme care for the welfare of his nation as the Führer. Not even Alexander the Great, no other king or emperor of ancient history, not Bonaparte, not Frederick the Great, has done anything like this. . One must follow the Führer for years, as we have, to be able to appreciate the enormousness of his sacrifice and to understand what it meant for him to give the command to execute so many of his former friends.
When the Nazis installed a reign of terror against any kind of opposition after the occupation of Austria, Goebbels noted in his diary: The hour of freedom has arrived for this country as well.
At the end of 1918, when unforgivable massacres were taking place in the name of the proletarian revolution, Lenin wrote: Proletarian democracy is a million times more democratic than any bourgeois democracy. A few decades later, his student, the foremost Hungarian Marxist György Lukács, elaborated upon this lie: Our people’s democracy, after the victorious battle against bourgeois democracy, is fulfilling the function of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This of course is not logical nonsense, not even an outright confusion of concepts, Czech Marxists will explain thirty years later. One cannot identify the dictatorship of the proletariat with violence. It is a new method of democracy. Every totalitarian power requires strict discipline and the obedience of all, and thus propaganda militarizes everyday vocabulary. It announces a battle to fulfill the plan, a battle for peace or Socialist morality. To help the workers, it sends brigades; it talks about offenses to exceed the quota, of the necessity to ensure an effective defense against enemy propaganda. It talks about successes on the cultural front, about capitalist encirclement, about the almighty army of workers. It emphasizes vigilance and watchfulness. The dictator himself (Stalin) proclaims: The closest practical goal of the kolkhozes [collective farms] consists in the battle for sowing, in the battle for the spreading of the tracts of sowing, in the battle for the correct organization of sowing.