Will America become a new `land of lies'?
On Sept. 1, 1939, in the early hours of the Second World War, Adolf Hitler addressed the Reichstag. It was a speech crackling with confidence, a volley of threats, cries and laments. Almost none of it was true.
William Shirer, the American radio correspondent in Berlin who wrote The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, said that the only honest thing Hitler said was that either he would win the war or he would not survive it.
Everything was a perversion of the truth — from the Polish “atrocities” to his “endless attempts” to make peace. All lies.
Hitler reported that the Poles had been firing “on our territory” since 5:45 a.m., after another night of provocations along the border. In fact, it was the Germans firing on the Poles. The elaborate “false flag” operation — including Germans dressed as Polish soldiers seizing a radio station in a German border town — was meant to create a pretext for Germany to conquer its troublesome neighbour.
In his lies, Hitler was practised, polished and shameless. He was a master of dissembling, an occupational conceit in strongmen such as Vladimir Putin.
“I will not war against women and children,” Hitler promised the Reichstag. “I have ordered my air force to restrict itself to attacks on military objectives.” This, as his soldiers were killing innocents everywhere in Poland.
On that day he started the war, Hitler had been chancellor since Jan. 30, 1933. He had given many speeches bristling with grievances. He told the greatest of falsehoods with the greatest of authority. He was a purveyor of untruths, and he had Josef Goebbels and his ministry of propaganda to make them seem real.
For months before Hitler came to power, Lion Feuchtwanger had been watching with horror. He was an eminent novelist, a Jew, living in Berlin in the maw of Nazism. In The Oppermanns, a classic of Jewish-German literature (published in 1933 and re-released in 2022), he follows four brothers, the Oppermanns, as their lives fall apart.
Writing between the autumn of 1932 (when the Nazis win national elections) to the summer of 1933 (when they consolidate their power), Feuchtwanger chronicles the creation of the authoritarian state.
We see, as he does, its insidious march into schools, hospitals, businesses and apartment houses. This will mean the end of the Oppermanns' furniture firm — and the family in Germany.
Feuchtwanger never calls Hitler or the Nazis by name, preferring to use “the leader” and “the nationalists.” But that autumn, winter and spring, as he records events contemporaneously, there is the slow, ruthless advance of authoritarianism. Its hallmarks: violence, intimidation, recrimination, disinformation, censorship, intolerance, indoctrination, xenophobia, the cult of personality.
In Germany, we see a blooming culture of falsehood and fabrication. Everything is turned on its head: as Feuchtwanger writes, the hungry are told they're fed, the oppressed are told they're free. Old assumptions of civilized Europe since the French Revolution no longer matter. What was certain is no longer certain. Arrest, detention, torture and killing are the norm. At the core are the lies.
“They got up with a lie, and they went to sleep with a lie,” he writes. “Their discipline was a lie, their code of laws a lie, their judgments a lie, their German a lie, their science a lie, their sense of justice and their faiths were lies. Their nationalism, their socialism, were lies ...
“Everything was a lie, only one thing about them was genuine: their hate!”
Say one thing about Donald Trump. Like Hitler, whom he now quotes (“vermin”) while denying it, Trump knows how to lie. There are so many lies, people count them. Daniel Dale of CNN makes recording Trump's lies — “fact-checking” — his mission.
It's easy to say that it can't happen here. But it can, as Feuchtwanger learns in Nazi Germany, though he doesn't know the horrors to come.
Today's America is not yet Feuchtwanger's “land of lies.”
But book-banning, character assassination, disinformation, cancellation, censorship, historical revisionism, nativism, racism and antisemitism ravage its democracy.
Donald Trump, the greatest liar of our time, understands them all.