But words are not sufficient. One can avoid them, refuse to read the newspaper full of catchwords, ignore the radio, and not go to the cinema. Therefore it is necessary to impose upon the citizen at least those catchwords and symbols of the current power. Everywhere he goes, he stumbles upon an abundance of swastikas: on the sleeves of pedestrians, on flags hung everywhere the eye can see. As soon as he enters the door, he must cower before hammers and sickles. They will be hung above factory entrances, pasted on windows, sewn or printed on red banners. State banners with their symbols wave on all holidays; they are hung on every column. No structure will be spared the symbols of perverted power. They are engraved on the graves of functionaries and soldiers who fall in battle.
Whenever a person enters a room, he hears not “Good afternoon” but “Heil Hitler!” He hears the same thing when he leaves, if people do not say to him, “Honor to work, Comrade!” Stalin’s face, with its pockmarks smoothed over, stares down at his every step, and he will be forced to acclaim Stalin’s glory at every meeting of the gardening club or trade union. And he will applaud and stand in tribute to the great führer or the immortal generalissimo.
The fictive reality, day after day, month after month, with the help of all media, insinuates itself into the minds of the people and, in technical terminology, brainwashes them. At least in some cases it achieves its goal, and people succumb to the repeated lies and begin to wonder which of the realities is the real one. Most people accept bifurcation: In all intrinsically societal situations they accept the fictive world of propaganda as reality, while in private they move in the real world — they grow lettuce in their gardens and during the Christmas holidays stand in real lines for tangerines or bananas.
Propaganda protects the fictive world to the very end. When the broken Adolf Hitler, whose hand shook so much that he could sign his name only with difficulty, organized in his shadowy bunker his own theatrical wedding, he cursed the German people for their inability to be victorious. He then shot himself and his newlywed bride. The abating propaganda informed the people, who were thinking of nothing but escaping their own destruction, that their führer fell in heroic battle while defending the capital.
Totalitarian power cannot survive without its thoroughly mendacious propaganda, and propaganda cannot exist without a regime hell-bent on every iniquity. When the regime falls, its propaganda dies with it. For most people, the long-awaited moment of truth arrives, but there are plenty of those who are frightened of this moment, which will throw them from the fictive world back to into real life.
Dogmatists and Fanatics
The Encyclopedia of Politics defines the concept of dogmatism as: Dogmatism (from Greek dogma = opinion) — a persistence of views without regard to new findings. Dogmatism was used in the political sphere primarily in the 1960s in connection with the attempt to reform Marxist-Leninist theory and the political practices of the Communist Party.
The Academic Dictionary of Literary Czech provides a more precise definition: Dogma is an unproved assertion accepted on the basis of faith and considered incontrovertible, infallible, and eternal.
For example, the basic Christian dogmas as established in the Apostolic Confessions of Faith prescribe that Christians believe that Jesus is the Son of God, born of the Virgin Mary; he was crucified, died, descended to hell, and on the third day he rose from the dead and ascended to heaven. The Confessions also include faith in corporeal resurrection after death and eternal life. The dogma does not concern itself with how a person can die and come back to life, or how we will all, on some unspecified day, perhaps millions of years after death, be resurrected in our bodily form, or what eternity means. Dogmas can only be believed.
It is natural to want to live in truth. People desire that what they affirm and stand behind — what guides their life — be correct and that other people believe it to be correct as well. But who is entitled to judge what is correct? Certain norms are generally accepted, and laws must be based upon them or society will descend into chaos. But what about those areas that do not fit into these norms? How should society be organized so that a person is assured he is spending the time he has in the best way possible? How can he tell beauty from ugliness? Art from mere diversion? Does something suprapersonal exist? If so, where do we look for it? Which of the various offers put forth by different prophets do we choose?
Most people incline to some sort of canonized guidance or explanation, to commandments, to ideals against which they measure their own deeds and behavior. The stricter and more apodictic these ideals appear, the more people are attracted to them. Whoever accepts them as his own is protected by their uncontestable authority, and he can feel safe. He abdicates all responsibility and, if necessary, renounces his own conscience.
We have no conscience, announced Hans Frank at the beginning of Nazism. My conscience is Adolf Hitler.
Dogmatists are usually uncreative people, but because they cleave wholeheartedly to some incontrovertible, infallible, and eternal truth, they acquire the certainty — the conviction — that they have the right to judge and to condemn all who do not recognize their truth.
Dogmatism, therefore, becomes dangerous and destructive when it joins together with power or when it seeks to attain power.
At the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern era, dogmatism was triumphant in the Christian church. In order to spread the Christian faith, crusades were undertaken whose participants sometimes slaughtered adherents of Christian sects and at other times adherents of Islam. The rabble would organize pogroms against Jews. To defend its dogmas, the Roman Catholic church established the Inquisition, an institution that suppressed manifestations of independent thought and killed heretics and women accused and “convicted” of witchcraft.
The infamous Malleus Maleficarum is the fruit of such a perverted spirit which, by appealing to the church fathers and the Bible, proved the existence of witches and their nefarious deeds.
But there is no bodily infirmity, not even leprosy or epilepsy, which cannot be caused by witches, with God’s permission. And this is proved
[!]
by the fact that no sort of infirmity is excepted by the Doctors. For a careful consideration of what has already been written concerning the power of devils and the wickedness of witches will show that this statement offers no difficulty.