Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: U Up U Down who wrote (102043)	12/5/2000 11:16:28 AM
From: U Up U Down	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

In Nikolai Tolstoy's book Stalin's Secret War there is a story about the vozhd sitting around with his cronies one day plotting some new and sensationally outrageous piece of mischief when one of them — it was Litvinov, I think — piped up with: "But boss, think of the effect this will have on our followers in the West!" Stalin laughed. "Don't worry, they'll swallow it." Similarly with Hitler. Here is part of the character sketch given in Gordon Craig's Germany 1866-1945. The masses indulge in petty falsehoods every day, he once said cynically, but it would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths and they "are not able to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation in others." The bigger the lie, therefore, the more likely it was to be believed. It is, it seems to me, a very sad and shameful thing that these totalitarian principles have now been taken up by the politicians of this free republic. At the root of them, as can be seen from the words of Stalin and Hitler, is a contempt for the common mass of people and a belief that if the lie is big enough, and presented with enough conviction, then "they'll swallow it." It is a trading on the fundamental decency of "the masses," a cynical calculation that people who do not conduct their personal lives by lying, betraying, and intimidating their fellow men will find it difficult to grasp that the affairs of their nation are being carried on by just those means. nationalreview.com